As we went over in our previous post, “Marketing an HVAC Business in the 2020 Off-Seasons", customer response from marketing is no longer limited to calls, and store visits. Customers who hear or see your ads and other marketing efforts will also be looking you up online.
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Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
How you present your business online can make or break your contracting business. Do you have a well-formatted website that is user-friendly? And what about your social media presence? Learn more about social media for HVAC companies by reading "Social Media Marketing for an HVAC Business".
Potential customers will judge your website within .05 seconds of viewing it, so it is crucial that your business website is up to par.
There are several aspects to creating the best HVAC business website, but you can start with these simple tips.
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Most visitors to your website will be using their mobile device. According to a report by Statista.com, the percentage of web pages that were visited by mobile phones has been rising since 2009, and is now at a whopping 52.2%!
This means over half of your website’s visitors will be on a mobile device.
Whether this is a smartphone or a tablet, formatting is crucial. Nothing is worse than visiting a website on your phone that clearly is only formatted for desktop computers or laptops. Visitors encountering this will click away immediately.
Location, Location, Location!
Placement of your contact info is very important, so make sure all of your contact info is easily accesible.
Place all of your contact info (business phone number, address, emails, social media) in the header of your website. These will now be the first thing that your visitors see.
Keeping this in mind, you shouldn’t only place your contact info in one area of your website. According to AGConsult, customers will look for your contact information in varying places other than your header. Some visitors expect to see contact information in the footer as well. Others may even go to your About Us page to find contact information.
Include Reviews on Your Website
According to a study by Northwestern, displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%! This is a practice that you must take advantage of by showcasing your reviews on your website to help convert website visitors into customers.
Customers are more likely to trust your brand and then purchase your services if they see reviews from other consumers. You can place reviews in several places around your website:
- Place 10 of your best ones in a carousel on your home page.
- List a couple on your website sidebar.
- Give them their own page on your menu.
Our customer reviews can be found on their own page titled "Happy Dexcomm Customers".
Create a Chatbot
Providing contact info on your website is very beneficial to customers, but it won’t satisfy everyone who lands on your webpage.
Some visitors to your website will see all of that contact info and groan. Others will visit your site at 1 am during some late night browsing. Both of these customers want to know more about your services or company, but can’t reach out to you. A chatbot can fix this by serving as guidance on your website 24/7.
Don't Limit Yourself With Text
In order to make your website aesthetically pleasing and entertaining to visitors, you must incorporate videos and photos. People are scared of big blocks of text, and if that's all they see on your site, they'll immediately click off.
Add in photos and videos to make your site more appealing to customers. This will cause them to stay on your site longer and learn more about your brand.
Never Use Stock Photos
Using stock photos will hurt your company brand. Customers can easily tell a stock photo of an employee from a real employee.
Stock photos tend to be very popular, and may be used by other websites. A customer who recognizes a stock photo on your website from a previous one will not be impressed, and may assume that your business is not genuine.
While it may be more of an upfront cost, hiring a professional photographer to take photos of you and your staff will prove very beneficial in the long run. Not only will it allow for you to accurately represent your brand, but it also will make your company stick out from the competition.
*Using stock photos for a blog post's featured image won't hurt your brand.Use CTAs
Your website can be beautiful and full of information, but if you are not including call to actions, your conversion rate of visitors to customers will most likely be low. As Hubspot explains “A call-to-action (CTA) is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a "call" to take an "action."
Here is an example of a CTA that we use on some of our web pages and blog posts.
Asses Your Webpage Load Time
This is honestly the most important factor to focus on when creating your HVAC business website. Customers will not wait for your website to load. In fact, 47% of web users expect a website to load in just 2 seconds. If your average speed index is not low enough, visitors will quickly bounce from your website.
Having a slow loading site isn't only noticed by visitors. Google also notes this when ranking your site.
“We do say we have a small factor in there for pages that are really slow to load where we take that into account.”
John Mueller, Google, 2015
Be sure to educate yourself on website speed and optimization to ensure that your visitors are making it to your site!
