Filtering Posts by Month: May, 2015

Take These Steps To Increase Website Conversion… And Automatically Juice SEO Results

The Not-So-Obvious Connection Between Website Conversion & SEO

Get Good At One… You’ll Automatically Improve The Other.

By Rich Harshaw

Want to juice your SEO rankings? Simple! Just create and post a ton of great content on your website.

Want your website to do a better job of converting lookers into buyers? Simple! Just create on post a ton of great content on your website.

Is it really THAT simple?

Well… yes and no.

No, because both disciplines—SEO and website conversion—are fairly complex and multi-faceted.

To maximize conversion on your website, you’ve got to have an attractive & aesthetically pleasing site, a rock-solid identity, plenty of evidence & social proof, and a few strategically engagement tools (forms, pop-ups, calls to action, etc.).

And to maximize SEO effectiveness, you’ve got to master on-page coding (or what I call nerd-coding), back linking, social media posting, keyword selection, and more.

But the bedrock foundation of both is great content.

Lots and lots of relevant, interesting, recent, case-building CONTENT.

Here are a few kinds of content you can produce that will push you speedily toward your destination in both categories:
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Who’s Fault Is It When Your Marketing Doesn’t Work?

You Still Probably Won’t Like The Answer.

By Rich Harshaw

Last week I told you how my wife hates losing her car keys, and how it’s human nature to blame others when we make mistakes. I covered five marketing mistakes, and the true source of the problems.

Today we continue with five more contractor marketing mistakes… and where to look to solve them (spoiler: the mirror).

What You Think Went Wrong: (New Marketing Idea) Is Too Hard To Execute (or Won’t Work)
The Truth: You’re Too Lazy
Explanation: Immutable law in life: everyone, including you, will always try to take the path of least resistance. Okay, maybe not EVERY single time, but darn near it. And that’s a shame in construction marketing because a lot of the things that will probably work the best for you are a little bit off the beaten path. Which is good because that means your competitors probably won’t be trying these things.

One of my clients sells sunrooms, and his most successful marketing activity is holding “sunroom tours” where he gathers 100 prospects, divides them into groups of four or five, and then has employees guide them on a tour of several of his customers’ homes for snacks, drinks, and a chance to see his handiwork. The tours take a tremendous amount of preparation—cleaning the sunrooms, arranging the food & beverages, organizing a starting place, using marketing to find the 100 people, etc. But it always works to bring in twenty-five to forty appointments and a high closing ratio. Guess how many other sunroom companies I’ve worked with (and there are a lot) who are willing to put that kind of effort into a tour? Yea, zero. It’s too hard, and it won’t work anyway, they tell me.
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Who’s Fault Is It When Your Marketing Doesn’t Work?

You Might Not Like The Answer.

By Rich Harshaw

My wife’s biggest pet peeve is losing things. (Stick with me for a second, and I’ll show you how this relates to marketing for contractors.)

More specifically, she hates it when other people lose things. In a thousand ways, she’s the nicest, sweetest person you’d ever want to meet. But if you can’t find a shoe, forget it. She’s got no sympathy for you.

Which is how I got in the crosshairs when her second set of car keys came up missing sometime around February or March last year. Since the keys were gone, and since she never loses anything, logic would dictate I must’ve been the one who lost them.

Then, every couple months, when she couldn’t quickly locate her main set of keys, she’d remind me how I’d been so lackadaisical in key-keeping. How could I be trusted with important things—like our six children—when I couldn’t even be trusted to keep track of a lousy set of spare keys?

So imagine my delight last Saturday when she came into the kitchen with a sheepish little grin on her face and admitted she’d found the lost keys—in one of HER jacket pockets while cleaning out the coat closet. Frankly, I was shocked; I had naturally assumed that if the keys ever did turn up and if it were her fault, she’d just toss them in the trash rather than admit she was the culprit. Bonus points to the wife for confessing.

The point is simple. When something goes wrong, our egos’ first defense is to blame somebody or something else for the failure. The same is true in business and in marketing. When something goes wrong, the tendency is to BLAME… and nine times out of ten, we tend to blame the WRONG thing.

With that in mind, I present to you, in no particular order, the top ten things you might WRONGLY blame for some of the most common general and roofing contractor marketing failures.
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Don’t Give Up On PPC… Learn How To Do It Right.

There Are Hundreds Of Eager Buyers Just Waiting To Buy From You.

By Rich Harshaw

I am shocked, amazed, and depressed by the number of contractors that don’t participate in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

If I had to guess based on informal surveys I take at seminars and by observing my own clients, I’d say that only 1/3 of contractors and construction companies utilize PPC at all. And that only takes into account “real” contractors with real businesses and real sales.

The other 2/3 either haven’t tried (small percentage) or have tried in the past and found that it didn’t work—so they quit.

If you’re in that group—the group that tried and quit—this message is for you.

I want to urge you to give it another shot. I am confident it can work for you.

Here are the facts:

• There are hundreds of thousands of searches a month for what you are selling—see below for absolute proof. This is assuming your company is in a decent-sized market.
• There are thousands and thousands of contractors all over the country that ARE making construction PPC work for them… month in, month out. They know something you don’t.
• I know of one contractor that spends $70,000 a month on PPC…. And another that spends $135,000 a month (YES, A MONTH!!!!) for this stuff. You know why? IT WORKS!!!
• I know other contractors who have to TURN IT OFF because they can’t handle the home improvement lead flow. Then they catch up and turn it back on.

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