Filtering Posts by Topic: SEO for Contractors

Let’s get real…

Not many folks want to replace their windows during the holidays.

Or renovate their bathrooms.

Or install new siding.

Or anything else that would mess with their crazy holiday schedule.

That’s why most contractors make like a bear and go into hibernation mode around the middle of November. They cut their marketing budgets because they think they won’t make any sales during the time of turkey and Kris Kringle.

But that’s not necessarily true.

If business is slow during the holidays, here are 5 ideas to “un-crapify” sales.

As with all marketing ideas, these should be evaluated against your current circumstances. Remember that not every idea may work for YOUR situation.

That said, I present you with my top 5 ideas to fill your stockings with sales this holiday.

Idea #1: Admit Sales Are Slow & Tell A Story

Being honest is a great way to disarm prospects and get them to warm up to you. So why not TELL them your sales are slow?

Here’s what you could do:

• Write a letter, email or ad explaining that the holidays are your slow months. Use specifics. If your sales slump 60%, say so. Specifics sell.
• Make a great offer for people to do business with you right now. I’m talking something really special and significant. (Remember—people are less likely to buy from you, so they need an extra-big push.)
• Be straight up and inform prospects that you’re willing to take a hit in your normal profits to keep your employees busy.
• Limit the offer to a small number of people. Then stick to it.

I once ran this type of promo for a sunroom company during the 2005 holiday.

Yes, selling sunrooms during the cold months seems about as smart as selling ice cubes to Eskimos. But you know what? The ad was an instant hit.

Here is the first page of the multi-page ad we ran:

This kind of ad campaign can work during any time of the year for services or products that are “seasonal.” Just ensure that what you say in the ad is true. I’ve witnessed businesses take this idea to falsely engineer “slow months” during the summer. It failed unequivocally.

Idea #2: Focus On Past Customers

This is first cousins with the above idea; however, this involves sending a letter to your past customers. This works because it’s believable that you’d give your existing customers a special offer.

Here’s an example:

Fun fact: A large window company altered this strategy to net a $3-million December—six times bigger than their typical Decembers.

They listed their customers from the previous three years on a spreadsheet. In one of the columns, they listed the amount of every customer’s transaction. The company then multiplied the amount of the transaction by 8%. They offered whatever this number came out to be to the customer in the form of a check mailer.

Example: If a customer spent $10,252, the company sent them a check mailer for an $820.16 discount. This strategy was effective because 1.) it was believable that the company would offer their past customers a discount, and 2.) the amount of the discount was such an odd number ($820.16 vs. $1,000, for example) that it made the offer more noticeable and credible.

Idea 3: Position Your Product As A Gift

Position your product or service as something that can be given as a Christmas gift. This will work better for “fun” remodels and renovations (kitchen remodels, bathroom remodels, pools, sunrooms, decks) than for “functional” renovations like windows, siding, and gutter protection. (No offense, window/siding/ gutter contractors!)

Listen to this ad for an example:

A key aspect of this strategy is to determine a way to actually wrap what you sell as a gift, so you can actually give it as a PRESENT. This could be something like a small toy model of a kitchen, a book about sunrooms, or even countertop tile.

Here are some ideas for stuff you could offer to wrap for your clients:

Get creative. Make it fun for your customers. Contrary to belief, “business” and “fun” are not diametric opposites!

Idea 4: Buy Your Customers’ Christmas Gifts FOR Them

If you want to be on the receiving end of some serious “good will toward men,” take some of the profit from a customer’s project and give it back to them in the form of a gift card they can use to purchase Christmas presents.

If they bought a $30,000 kitchen remodel from you, don’t give them a “discount”; instead, give them a $2,000 gift card to Amazon or Target or wherever. Your customer will actually believe you’re Santa Clause. But instead of giving you a glass of milk and plate of Chips Ahoy, they’ll reward you with something MUCH better: repeat business, referrals, and awesome word of mouth.

The key to making this work is how you position it. Here is a great way to angle it in an advertisement:

“Have you thought about remodeling your kitchen, but decided to put it off until after the holidays? BAD IDEA! Right now, XYZ Remodeling wants to pay for ALL YOUR CHRISTMAS GIFTS THIS YEAR. That’s right, Meet with us and sign a deal to remodel your kitchen or bathroom, and we’ll give you gift cards worth up to $2,000 to spend on Christmas at stores like Target, Amazon, Macy’s, and others….”

Idea 5: Keep Your Pay-Per-Click Budget Strong

It’s natural for contractors to want to cut back on their PPC budgets during the slow season. Fight those instincts. Keep your PPC budget healthy.

Here’s why. Your competitors will have smaller budgets than yours. This will create a big opportunity for you to get great placement and a huge chunk of the clicks. Remember, pay-per-click is a great way to capture “now buyers” who are in the market searching RIGHT NOW. Just because there are fewer customers during the holidays doesn’t mean there are NO customers during the holidays! If you keep your PPC going strong, you will find those folks who are in the market for immediate action.

Combine this PPC strategy with one of the ideas above, and you’ll have a holiday-marketing double-whammy!

Bonus Idea: Do SOMETHING Productive During Winter!

If none of the ideas above make sense for your situation, you still have plenty to keep you busy during the down time. Use the time to work on projects that you need for the spring.

Here’s a short list of things to consider getting done during the holidays:

Improve Your Website: It takes time—might as well be doing something while you’re doing nothing.

Beef-Up Your SEO: Write blog posts that you can unload during the busy months when you don’t have time to mess with it.

Home Show Prep: Do you need to revitalize your home show presentation? Winter’s a great time to get it done!

Other Stuff: Are you using a powerful CRM software like MarketSharp? If, not, invest some of your downtime into installing and learning how to use it. Do you want to close more jobs… while doing so for MUCH higher prices? Get set up with hyper-effective closing tools like GreenSky Financing on the double, so you can implement them into your sales presentation.

Don’t just sit around and let inertia be your guide. Getting a head start on projects will make a HUGE difference when your busy season rolls around.

In terms of ranking well on search engines, sometimes less is more.

Google used to base a large part of their ranking signals on update frequency. But that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

Now more than ever, the Google Gods place more value on QUALITY of content over QUANTITY.

This means one stellar piece of content has more search engine “oomph” than, say, four or five average-quality blog posts.

Once you know the reasons, it’s easy to see why. People will stay on a page with awesome content longer. They’re also more likely to share that content.

These are two things Google holds dear when determining rankings. Google wants to give users THE most relevant and engaging content on the web. And average time on a page and “share-ability” are very good metrics for that.

To accommodate Google’s former thirst for frequency, we used to create 15 blog posts a month for our SEO clients. We’d post this content on their blogs two or three times per week.

The posts themselves were well-written, but not earth-shaking. And they weren’t meant to be. Like I said, we were going with what would make clients rank the highest. And that involved creating new blog fodder constantly.

Until very recently, this strategy worked. The posts would rank well, and everything was peachy-keen.

Over the past eight months or so, however, we noticed our onslaught of “pretty good” blog posts were not ranking as well as they once were. Not even close.

Here’s why…

Google launched another algorithm update, as they’re so fond of doing. Emphasis on FREQUENCY went down; the importance of QUALITY went up.

Google now penalizes you for posting too many articles a month with too little content. For example, if you’re posting 20 articles a month—and they’re all 300 words or less, have obsessive amounts of keywords, and you’re not a news site—you’ll get dinged with a Spam/Keyword Stuffing penalty.

We’re always on our toes to keep up with Google’s constant algorithm changes. As soon as we saw what we WERE doing was no longer working, we immediately called an audible.

MYM COO Bryan Bauman and the entire SEO team got together to work on a new blog-content strategy for our upgraded SEO clients. We determined we needed to “beef up” the posts we were delivering to clients. This meant creating better, cornerstone content that is powerful, informative, interesting, sharable, and laced with all the SEO elements Google eats up.

To achieve this, we had to do three things:

1. Reduce the number of posts we provided from 15 to 4. Creating truly captivating content takes time; writing 15 A+ posts per month just isn’t possible.
2. Bring aboard some more high-caliber content writers. We hired a new, highly experienced content writer a few months ago. (And we’re looking to add two more in 2018.)
3. Set up one-on-one time with our content writers and upgraded SEO clients. We now have regular content-strategy calls with our upgraded SEO clients. We go over the clients’ goals for their blogs, see what products they want to push for that time frame, and how hard they want to hit particular keywords.

Here are a couple examples of the kind of meaty blog content we’re NOW producing:

1. How To Manage An Unhappy Home Remodeling Client
   
2. Does James Hardie Fiber Cement Cost More Than Vinyl Siding?

Read through these posts and think about what this type of content can do for your internet marketing.

It’s engaging. It’s shareable. It’s SEO-friendly. It ticks all the boxes for what a quality blog post is SUPPOSED to be.

Get more information about our SEO Services here. Then, get in touch with us if you want to take your blog—and search rankings—to new heights.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong… quantity IS still important for search rankings. Your website needs a steady stream of content to remain relevant in Google’s eyes. But that content must engage your audience. If it doesn’t, no one will read it… and your rankings will sink faster than a fishing boat made of Swiss cheese.

We’ve talked about an awesome new website we launched for Zen Windows Pennsylvania.

Here’s another website we launched for a client. This one is for Signature Exteriors, a roofing and siding contractor that has served Connecticut for 66 years.

Before I give you the link to their new website, let me tell you about some of its standout features:

1. Content and eye-catching design elements have a great synergy on the homepage.  From the big blue header to the main copy section to the service-area map, everything has a flow and progresses in a logical way that makes visitors to the site naturally scroll down the page.
2. Also on the homepage is a Project Counter. This client has performed over 20,000 projects, so we determined that it would be a great idea to showcase that number on the website.
3. The Jobsite Map page shows prospects exact addresses of past projects. This is a great credibility enhancer.
4. A clean Project Gallery showcases the client’s great work, as well as Before & After shots.
5. And as always, a powerful Identity permeates every page of the site (naturally).

Also…

This client is changing its name from Vinylume Home Improvement to Signature Exteriors. They’ve had the Vinylume name for decades, but it’s no longer reflects their company or services.

When rebranding, things can get messy online—prospects can get confused, business listings could get mixed up, and search results can suffer.

Here are some steps we’ve taken to ensure a smooth online transition…

• We added a redirect plan into their htaccess file. In layman’s terms, we alerted Google that all of the pages on their previous website (the one with their old company name) have now moved to the current website. This passes page ranking and authority over to the new website.
• We updated the client’s information on business listing website on which they are currently found (Houzz, Angie’s List, and BBB to name a few), and created accounts on listing sites they were not (Facebook, for instance).
• On the new website, we made it apparently clear that Signature Exteriors is the same trusted Vinylume that’s served the community for over 60 years… just with a cooler name.

Enough talk. Here’s the link: https://www.signatureexteriors.com/

Let us know if we can help with any of your internet marketing needs by calling (817) 416-4333.

In April, I told you about a new website we launched for Zen Windows Des Moines.

They are a newer company that started toward the end of 2016. Prior to working with MYM, they had no website. Their online presence consisted of a single biography page on the Zen Windows corporate website.

Since we the site launched the site in April 2017, we’ve been busy adding upgrades to make it even better.

Here’s a look at some of the new features we’ve added:

1.  A slick chat box prompt that instantly captures your eye and moves down the page as you scroll.

2.  An awesome animated video near the middle of the page that encapsulates the client’s Identity.

3.  A succinct Why Choose Zen Windows section that distills the company’s Identity into easy-to-digest bullets.

4.  A free guide (one that actually delivers value) to capture lead information.

I’ll keep you updated on Zen Windows Des Moines’ progress in a future email. For now, visit the MYM website if you need help producing marketing that gets results: https://mymonline.com/

P.S. Take a look at your website address real quick. Does it start with “http” or “https”? If it’s “http,” your website is vulnerable to hackers. Here’s why you need to move your website from http to https NOW.