8 Easy Ways to Enhance Your Business’ Boring Website

Are you happy with your business’ website?

Seriously, is it good? Or is it just like your competitors, just different words, pictures and fonts but essentially the same old boring information?

If you feel like your website could be better, this article is written specifically for you. Although my small business’ web site isn’t perfect, it’s pretty darn good and if I’m speaking frankly (which I find is always the best form of communication), it is in a class by itself in the swimming pool industry.

Your web visitors need a reason to stay....or they'll click away.

Now granted, my industry is not a difficult one to dominate in many ways. Why? Because it’s driven by thousands of businesses across the country that are being lead, as Michael Gerber of The E-Myth would say, by Technicians (if you haven’t read The E-Myth yet, you really, really need to). In other words, in the swimming pool industry, most pool company owners are so busy working ‘in’ their business that they never spend time working ‘on’ their business. And what’s that mean for their company website? Well the majority stink, plain and simple. 90% are glorified business cards. And I’m including here companies that use an outside source to handle their web design.

The reality is that many, many industries are the exact same. Too many technicians, too many uninspiring, uneducational websites.

That’s what this article is all about. I want to give you 8 features you should add to your website today to make yourself appear more professional, more unique, and certainly different from the rest of the crowd. The ideas I’m going to give you here aren’t the web version of rocket science. They are meant to be practical, yet effective. I’ve also made it so every example I use here refers back to my company website, that way you can see this stuff in real-time. Here goes:

Owner Bio Pages

Would someone please tell me why most company websites don’t even talk about the company owner/ownership group? What is the deal here? We all are well aware, as it has been drilled in our heads 1,000 times by this point, that people buy from other people/companies that they LIKE. Well if a website has no personal touch to it, if it doesn’t talk about the people that the customer is giving their money to, how in the world would you expect a customer to get that ‘warm fuzzy’ we are all after as marketers and branders? Giving unique and personal information/photos can go a very long way in establishing relationships of trust with a customer before they even start to deal with the company. For example, I find that about 40% of the prospects I see on my sales appointments have already looked at my personal bio page.

On your mark, get set, Blog!

I’ve talked about this quite a few times but the whole reason my website kicks butt is because of the blog. Blogging has transformed us from a rinky-dink pool company in central Virginia to an industry recognized name installing pools throughout all of Virginia and Maryland and with subscribers all over the WORLD. Blogging is the future of information. If you haven’t embraced it, get on board now and stop losing daylight. I’m serious about this and will be writing a lot more about blogging for dummies in the future because it’s as important as anything else you’ll do in business. You must be seen as a mover, shaker, and innovator in your industry. Blogging, bar-none, is the easiest and most effective way to achieve this task.

Lead Capture Forms

In today’s world of business, it’s all about lead capture. In other words, youre website’s ability to have a visitor enter their information so that they are now in your pool of potential clients. If you study the greatest websites in the world, they all have this common characteristic. In fact, on most you’ll notice some type of lead capture form on EVERY page of their website. Like blogging, I’ll be writing a lot more about the power of lead capture in the future and how it can literally save your business in these competitive times.

Find a Customer Near You

Almost no small business website that I have seen uses this tool but it’s awesome, effective, and best of all, it’s FREE. All you need to do is go to Zipwise and set up a dealer locator form, except in your case, you’ll call it a customer locator form(or whatever fits your biz). For example, on my website, when anyone goes to this page and enters their zip code, they’ll immediately receive a list of the nearest 20 swimming pools we’ve installed near them. Setting up this account is extremely easy and for Zipwise to get your customer information all you’ll need to do is upload and excel spreadsheet with said information. Once you’ve done that, they will give you a snippet of code to put on your webpage and Voilà! Your prospects can now see just how much work you’ve done near them and they’ll be extremely impressed with such a tool. If you want to see how this works, just go to my website and enter the zip code 22572. That’s a Virginia zip code and you’ll see exactly what a customer sees. One word of advice though. On the excel spread sheet, do not put the customer’s name nor their house number. In other words, I give every job the name of ‘Homeowner’ and only show the street name, city, and zip. That way, I’m not giving out private information but I’m at least giving the prospect a feel as to where our pools are located, and if they want further information, they can call me and I can give it to them personally. Zipwise can be customized in many different ways and you can literally tailor it to fit whatever business and product you offer.

See the Site’s Last 100 Visitors

Another really cool, free tool created by my beloved Zipwise. By simply adding this small icon to your website(see right side of page on my site), visitors can click on the icon and they’ll immediately see where in the entire world the last 100 visitors to your site came from. Now you might be asking yourself why this is effective. Well in my case, it shows just how much scope and influence the blog has. I once told someone that our website gets visits from over 10 different countries a day. The person laughed at me and thought I was full of it until they used this tool on our site, after which they were blown-away. Your customers will also be very impressed.

Video, Video, Video

I’ve talk quite a bit about this important medium lately and plan to continue to stress its importance. As we all know too well, TV dominates our society. It is the means by which most people keep up with the world and learn about what is happening around them. Sadly, this visual form of communicating, teaching, and entertaining is more prominent than the written word, which is why every website should be chock-full of video to go along with text. This is also why it is a good idea to integrate video and text into blog articles as much as possible, as they will reach a broader audience that way. Currently, our company has created more educational and how-to videos (via YouTube) than any other swimming pool company in the world….and our lead gets bigger every day.

Testimonials

Just like lead capture should be on just about every page of your website, so should testimonials. As we have all seen from every cheesy infomercial ever created, social proofs are a powerful buying motivator. But just having a ‘Testimonial’ page on your website is not enough. Who’s to say that a visitor will even stop by that page? The likelihood is they won’t, which is why you should have testimonials, written and video, on every page of the site.

Talk about Product Cost, Pricing, etc

I’m amazed at how many businesses refrain from mentioning anything about product cost before they’ve actually spoken with a prospect/customer. The question “How much does it cost?” is one of the first statements a consumer will make when researching a product, and if your website doesn’t include such information, they’ll likely look and find it elsewhere. Before I even became an SEO nut, our website started receiving visitors from all over the country because it addressed openly and in depth the question of: “How much does a fiberglass pool cost”. This is why our website is ranked #1 on Google for this phrase and many just like it. I am not suggesting here that you give exact pricing and numbers for every product your company offers on your website. But giving a customer a solid range and price expectation is a very good idea.

Well those are just a few ways in which you can add value and authority to your company’s website today. I could literally list another 20 or so but because this article has already crossed the 1500 word threshold, we’ll call it a day for now, although it would be awesome if some you readers listed your suggestions under the comments section.

If you have any questions as to how to implement any of these suggestions on your website, please don’t hesitate to comment below or just email me directly.

Thoughts? Join in the conversation!

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