Your roofing website is the first thing most of your customers see. Built right, it will generate a huge volume of leads, many of which will turn into sales. A good roofing website delivers these leads week after week, month after month, repaying back your investment many times over.
To achieve that dream, you need to start by building your website right. In today’s business climate, you simply cannot afford to have a bad website, even for just a year or two. During that time, you could be losing hundreds of thousands, or even millions, in precious revenue – an opportunity cost that will slow your growth, hamstring your marketing, and allow your competitors to steal your market share.
We don’t want that to happen, and you don’t want that to happen. To help avoid this, we’ve prepared this article to guide you along the path of choosing the right roofing website for your business.
You’ve got three main options:
Hire Bob, (your friend) to build it
Hire an agency
Use a website builder
Let’s take a look at each in detail:
Your have a friend called Bob and he’s “really good with computers.” What’s more, he’ll build you a website for only a few hundred dollars. Sound too good to be true? It probably is.
Bob, or any other friend of a friend who’ll do it on the cheap, isn’t experienced at building websites. If they were, they’d be charging a lot more. You don’t know what quality product you’re going to receive, you have no promises that it’ll be on time (he might dump the project if something better turns up), and Bob probably doesn’t have a clue about the roofing business. If you are serious about your business, it’s probably a smarter option to not use Bob.
An agency is the most expensive of of all website options (more on the costs of the different website options later in this article). The most important element to remember about agencies, is they are not all cut from the same cloth, so to speak. They all may be professionals in website design (they can build your website and build it correctly), but many online marketing agencies are not well versed in maximizing the return on investment from your marketing.
So they may have slick salespeople, but you will hit road bumps down the track, when you come to face off with your competitors on Google Adwords for example.
Generally agencies come in two main types. You have the computer guy who started to build websites, but doesn’t really understand marketing at a fundamental level. These include local agencies who might have a nice sales pitch. But when push comes to shove, you find out later that you aren’t getting the return on investment you need from your online marketing campaigns.
Then you have the larger international institutions, that may be similar to the old Yellow Pages etc. Typically these companies haven’t adjusted to the internet well. They have been forced to charge higher margins for their face to face salesforces, which you as the small business owner has to pay for. For companies with face to face sales teams, we would say….be wary. Face to face sales teams are expensive and inefficient in today’s environment.
On the positive side with the above options the website is built by professionals, exactly how you want it. Usually they take longer to build. Taking this route gives you the advantage of working with professional designers who are experienced at creating premium websites. Assuming you choose your agency well, you will get a nice looking website. As mentioned previously though, there is a big difference between a website that looks nice and one that generates lots of inquiries. It’s an important distinction to make.
The only downside? You could be spending tens of thousands of dollars. If you’re like most local roofers, your cash flow won’t accommodate that.
A website builder is a piece of software that gives you easy to use tools to build your own website. Instead of learning to code, you simply click the different elements into place. This takes a little more of your time (although you might be surprised how little) but has the great advantage of being far cheaper than an agency website and far more likely to be completed to a high-quality than getting Bob to do it.
Web builders are a highly popular option and one which a lot of local businesses choose. There are so many different web builders out there that the biggest problem you’ll face is choosing the right one.
We would encourage you, to test a few out, and see how easy each one for you to use.
You’re not building a website for fun – you’ve got a business to run. We believe that these seven factors strongly correlate with business success; keep these points in mind when considering your options:
Stop thinking about price and start thinking about return on investment. A website that costs twice as much but delivers ten times the return is great value. Always consider how much value you’re going to get from each option. One more roofing job could be worth $20,000+ per month in revenue, so an extra $30 per month should not bother you. Consider the marketing functionality of the website builder you choose carefully.
In most cases, the day-to-day running of the website will be down to you and your team. The ease with which you can learn the system, make changes, and train others to help will have a considerable impact on your website’s success. Remember: time spent managing your website is time you aren’t adding value elsewhere. Do yourself a favor and pick an option that is easy to run.
More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile and tablet devices. A responsive website automatically adjusts how it looks to suit the visitor’s screen size and resolution.
You’re an expert in roofing, not in websites, and that means sometimes you’ll need help. When you do, is there an appropriate support structure in place? Or will you have to pay an agencies high hourly rates just to solve a simple problem? Or can you simply adjust it quickly yourself?
It’s important that you display your brand in the most appropriate manner. But, it shouldn’t be your only concern; a common mistake business owners make is that they care more about the beauty than their customer’s requirements. As the famous advertising strategist David Ogilvy once said, “if it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
You don’t just need to build a website, you need to market it. The solution you choose should come with online marketing services. If it doesn’t, you’re going to have to learn another separate tool (or maybe several) to achieve your marketing. You should choose a website builder with in-built SEO functionality, and one that helps your pay per click campaigns work to the maximum level.
How are you going to report on the success of your website? You need to be tracking and measuring the success of your online marketing so that you can improve it.
You’re honest, hardworking, and always do right by your customers. But your visitors don’t know that for certain (yet). Your website can either help build that image – or destroy it. A great website builds trust in multiple ways:
Accreditations you’ve achieved.
Associations you’ve joined.
Testimonials from happy customers.
Guarantees and warranties that assure value.
Years in business. (the amount of time your company has been around).
The number of customers you have served.
Quality of brands used in production.
Brand logos of major customers.
Family owned and operated.
It’s a simple rule of life that when you provide people with value, they feel like they owe you and want to give something back. In business, we call this reciprocity – and it’s easy to use. Simply put, you need to give away value in order to receive it.
What does that mean? The simplest way to achieve this is to take some of your expertise, package it up, and give it away as a report for free to your customers. All they’ve got to do is give you their name and email address, and the information is all theirs. Doing this adds value, builds trust, and gets you a potential lead.
Generating business takes much more than just putting a website online. The style, layout, and content will all affect how many visitors will convert into leads. A great website optimizes every element on the page to build the brand, persuade visitors, and create leads.
Most importantly, you need to add calls to action that promise unique, powerful benefits for choosing your company. For example, can you offer a free onsite quote within 24 hours? Or what about a competition for customers who purchase within a particular 3-month period?
Unless your company runs entirely on word-of-mouth advertising (great news if it does!), then you’ll want to get a steady stream of new customers. Generating new customers from your online marketing is beyond the scope of this article, but the main elements you should consider are Google AdWords, Search Engine Optimization, and Remarketing.
How you build your website will have a significant impact on the ease with which you can take advantage of these strategies.
Understanding how many visitors are coming to your website, and how they are interacting with it, is very important for growing your business. A website is never really “complete” – there are always changes that can be made to improve it.
The best way to improve your business is to measure customer behavior using an analytics platform and then make changes based on real data. For example, you might notice one service page is getting much less traffic than your others. You know there’s high demand for the service – so perhaps the page needs improving?
Some website builders also come with in built reporting and phone tracking, so you can see every customer coming in from the internet, so it’s worth checking this feature out in website buiders too.
We’ve already mentioned your three choices above – use an agency, get a family friend to do it, or use a web builder. But how much does each one cost?
| Agency | Your Family Friend | Use A Builder |
|---|---|---|
| $3,000 - $10,000 | $800 - $2000 | FREE and Up To $100 per month |
In most cases, your goal will be lead generation. If so, the most important factor is not cost, but return on investment (ROI). If a website costs twice as much but delivers ten times as much business, it is far better value than the cheaper website.
It’s also not enough to just pay for clicks on Google and think that you are going to generate lots of income. You can burn money really fast on Google if you don’t have the right strategy in place.
Again, the answer to this question depends on your method you use to build it. Typically, you can expect to experience the following times:
Agency – 4 weeks to 6 months
Family Friend – Anywhere up to 12 months
Website Builder – 1 hours to 24 hours
The time it takes to create your website also comes at a cost. Every day that your website isn’t built is a day where you are losing leads that you might otherwise have received – if you’d only started sooner. This is also a key reason why the best time to update your website is right now!
One of the most time-consuming elements of building a new website is generating the content. Here are our best tips for getting photos and content for your website.
Use your own images where possible.
Hire a photographer to take great shots of you, your business, and your products.
If you don’t have your own images, use stock images (you can find these online).
No one knows your business like you do, although writing is a skill that takes time and practice to perfect. You can either create your content yourself or get someone else to do it for you.
If you want content created by a team that understands your industry, Pedestal can create content on your behalf.
Alternatively, you can hire a professional from an online jobs site.
It’s important to consider how you will update your website. A lot of online marketing agencies build sites using WordPress. Although this is a popular option, it isn’t entirely intuitive, and the level of complexity may make it too time-consuming for small business owners.
A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web builder may be a better option.
Choosing a website builder is a big decision. There are several good options (and many poor options) with each having its own advantages and disadvantages. Pedestal, for example, is specifically designed to help you generate more inquiries from your online marketing – we’ve designed it for people just like you, so we hope you’ll give it a try.
If you’d like to read more about choosing a web builder, we’ve written an entire article on the topic.
You should use Google AdWords, Search Engine Optimization, and Remarketing to market your website. We’ve created Pedestal to help make each of these options as simple and as convenient as possible.
Unlike most web builders, which are general, Pedestal has been specifically designed for small businesses to help them get more inquiries from online marketing. There are specific trust-building elements and “conversion cues” built in to help your business generate more return on investment.
Pedestal also has an inbuilt reporting platform which helps you calculate how much money you are making from your online marketing.
In this day and age, it is vital that your website caters for all devices. Otherwise, you risk alienating a large portion of visitors. Pedestal builds responsive sites that will look great no matter how your visitor is browsing.
Absolutely. We promise to respond to every inquiry as fast as possible, usually in less than 4 hours.
Yes. Pedestal also offers online marketing services, including pay-per-click (Google AdWords), search engine optimization, remarketing, and more.
No. We believe in results. So, if at any time you don’t feel like you are getting results, you can simply cancel.
Pedestal has less flexibility in the design than some other web builders. You can still change colors, images, and text, but the positioning of elements has been carefully selected and restricted by our experts to help you generate the most leads. If you like a set and forget strategy, Pedestal is perfect for you.
Not sure what to do next? You’ve got a few options.
If you’d like to learn more about growing your roofing business, we’ve got a free eBook for you. You can download it here.
If you’d like to get stuck right in you can start building a high-conversion website for free today. Click here to signup for your free trial. for your free trial.
Alternatively, you can see how the Pedestal team can build you a customized marketing strategy. Click here to book a strategy call and demonstration with a member of our team.
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