As the title says, how good is your website for getting you new business.
I am talking about business that has come through search engines alone.
I am setting up my website at the moment, will do the seo to try and get it on the first page for my key words.
How much business or new enquires should I get. (There is a couple of thousand searches for the key words per month)
I get 90% of my new customers from referrals and my website in that order. About 65-70% are referrals.
I get about 8-10% of all my work from the website.
Its more or less for credibility.
Normally someone will see my truck or yard sign and get on the website for more information.
My Google analytics shows around 200-250 hits a month and I wish my phone rang that much!
Hey Tony, what do you do to get all those referrals? Anything besides doing really good work?
Quality work and developing good relationships w/ our customers.
I get about 80% from my site. Before it used to be 100%, its all I had. BBB Yellow pages has got me just a few (not worth the extra money for a bold ad). Referrals would be the remainder. I have everything set up for a direct mail campaign, I was going to go ahead with it a few months ago but I wanted to print up 3 variations of each piece I have and enough money to send them out to the same homes every 3 weeks. That should beef things up a bit.
On a side note, the search’s are not that accurate. Out of that number (which may be low) are other window cleaners checking their positions, or competition’s positions, phony SEO companies trying to cold call you and jack you for your cash and others that may not be actual prospects.
We get maybe 5 jobs a day from our website…
That is high responses, higher than I thought. I would assume it is mostly larger jobs, both in value and size. (Only a guess) That is the market I am going for with the site.
One thing that surprises me is a lot of the window websites show their prices. Do you think thats important.
I would be afraid of my competitors seen and under cutting the prices.
Concentrate on providing the best service in your area and don’t worry about competition. Price shoppers aren’t who I target. Plus, if you get to know the other wcers in your area you’ll find most are decent people who are doing the same thing you are - making a living. I find that not every wcing company targets the same type or size jobs. If you work w/ these companies and refer each other everybody wins.
I’d say around 70% of new customers come from my web site and the rest come from referrals. The only time I flier is during late fall when my calendar starts to thin out.
A website is nothing more than a selling tool. Therefore, it is really hard to ask “how many leads come from your website” because a lot of my flyer or valpak customers go to our website first. I funnel all of my internet lead generating sources to my website of course. That may be craigslist, facebook, one of many referral websites, google search, yahoo search and of course bing. I also try to point everyone in the real world to my website as well because it will sell them before they even speak to me. Rather it be my web address on my truck, a flyer, a valpak coupon, a yard sign…whatever, I always point the prospect to our website. I found that if a prospect see’s our website before calling us, that prospect is easier to close than a prospect who has not seen our website. We get around 15 to 20 jobs a month from google or yahoo search engines including window cleaning, gutter cleaning and maid service leads. It all depends on what kind of company you are looking to become. If you want to grow fast and get employees under your belt, google or yahoo search engines will not be enough. You need many avenues of marketing. You will need to do some form of direct mail or a heck of a lot of flyering. If you don’t mind doing the cleaning for a couple years, you will probably be alright with your main source of leads coming from search engines.
Do you change your keywords much to reflect where you are getting the most impressions? How about your analytics on other search engines?
HI Kurt,
I am looking to get the larger houses. I am a one man show (Unless a big job comes) and want to stay that way. I have a lot of houses in estates in my area, because of door to door selling, but I want the larger house market, hence the question, will I get them through the website. One or two large houses would do me a week.
Thanks for all the replys so far.
It takes more than good work to get referrals. How many businesses have you referred to someone lately?
If you’re proactive doing it you will greatly increase the amount of referrals you get. Don’t wait for them, go get them.
Man Chris that is awesome. I say on average I get around 15 to 20 requests per week during Spring and Fall. Winter hardly any (100% Residential here).
Steve
I don’t have the exact numbers directly in front of me but I’m working on that with my quick books reports. Can’t seem to filter out when new customers were added into the database. But this year I did not advertise at all because I did not know what direction my business was going to move due to a military activation back in March. All my new customers this year came from the internet. So far I know there are over 100 because in my google calendar we use a code (NC) to mark a new customer. I filtered that and there are over 100 for this year. Some cancelled and were not completed so again I do not have a 100% acurate list for you. I do know that I have been very happy in the amount of calls I received this year with no advertising. About 3 per day and that was good for me as again I did not want to get overloaded and not be able to handle the work load. 3 per day and I landed 1/3 99% of the time with over the phone estimates. My game is not as strong as it would be with out the activation because there are sometimes I can not answer the phone. Or I have very little time to talk to a potential. If I did not have the activation I would be advertising and landing more. This was a good thing for me as it forced me to become a business owner and not a worker/owner. I learned what needed to change in my company very fast. This comming season it’s all out, balls to the wall. Advertising will be in full swing and I will be putting up 2 more websites.
I think it depends on your area and the actual wording you have on your website. In my experience, I get all kinds of different types of customers that come in through search engines. I’m not real sure where your getting that only larger houses would be coming in through the website. Do you mind explaining your thinking on that? I do not discriminate on house size personally but I have employees so it really doesn’t matter much. I do have a minimum of 115 dollars per job though.
Kurt,
I am well covered in the housing estates because of selling door to door. The larger houses I do not sell door to door as it would take to long. Hence I am trying to get sales to larger houses through the website.
Juggernaut
Thanks info. The two new websites you are going to be putting up, what are these for. Different business / services?
Just curious as to how you are tracking this? I know for us it’s hard to find out what truely came from a search engine. We have google analytics installed and can see teh traffic and how it got to our site, either from a search engine or from typing in the url address (because they saw it our advertisements) but once the traffice gets to our site we have no way to tell which caller came from typing a search into google and which caller came from a post card we put on their door and they decided to go to our website and call?? Do you have a way to track this?
If someone doesn’t tell us up front (most do) how they found us we ask so we can see how effective our marketing is. Then it’s a simple matter of making note of it.
