If you’re getting found and getting clicks, here’s how to get phone calls
Hello again. Michael Byrd with Home Services Digital. This is video number 15 in our unending series on search.
I talked last time about a scenario in which you might already be enjoying good search results and getting lots of impressions. That’s when somebody sees that results page and you happen to be on it. And you’re getting lots of clicks which you only know because you look at your Analytics and you see that you’re getting lots of clicks. You have to look because you weren’t getting any phone calls. This is one of those situations where in some way or another your website either really sucks or you’re just not doing some of the fundamentals.
What’s a conversion and why do you want one?
So we’re gonna talk about those today and what it takes to get a conversion. Just think about it in terms of how you would do something if you’re a customer. You’re looking for something. You’re looking for services. You’re looking for a product. You do a little searching on the web, if you do that. And a lot of people do, obviously. Not everybody, but a lot of people do — maybe most people do a little bit of research before making a purchase. You go on and you look at some web pages and you might be an analytical buyer like me who wades in, takes months and months and looks at lots of data and lots of pictures and lots of impressions. Well, you may look at two or three.
In a case of somebody looking for plumbing services, for example, or heating and air services or roofers or painters or some of the things that we’ve talked about recently, you might have an emergency. You might have a situation, so you might not look at too many. But somebody goes and does a search and for some reason, out of those impressions, those 10 that are being made on that first search results page, they’re clicking one of them. If they’re clicking one of them, now they’re getting another impression and an impression is being made. One or another of the options is going to convince them to take action and that action is the conversion that you’re looking for. Most simply you want them to see your information and you want them to call you.
If you get the call then you should make the sale
Once they call you then it’s up to you to convert them into a paying customer. If you’re getting the phone calls then that’s as far as your marketing goes. Once you’ve gotten the call then it’s about selling and conversion and getting the business. So what does it take to convert? Well I’m going to go through what I think the elements are and I’m going to introduce the concept today of a landing page. A landing page is just a term we use in the industry (and outside of the industry) for the page that someone lands on. In many cases, if not most cases, in an organic search that’s going to be the home page.
And so the home page has to do do a few things. I’m just going to talk about what those things are and I am going to give acouple of examples. So let’s switch over here to the screen. This is the page here we talked about. You’re getting good position and you go and you look and you see that you’re getting clicks but you’re not getting conversions. So we want to see what the heck is happening. I mentioned that the landing page in these types of searches is typically the home page. And we’ve talked a little bit about URLs. That’s also known as a web address. And so you can just see with the web address that it is the home page. It is in this case painter Wilmington NC residential painting services the painter guy. This person or this company is doing a good job getting search results. And if you read the URL, which is what I tend to look at, even almost before the headline, I want to see who it is. And I see Wilmington painter guy.com and there’s nothing past the slash. So that is the home page that we’re going to but it doesn’t have to be. And we’ll more often see the instances where it’s not the home page when you’re talking about Google AdWords but there are cases where it’ll be not the home page. It doesn’t matter, but you do need to pay attention to it so you get a sense of what the customer is experiencing, whether it’s the home page or a sub page more particular to what they search for.
Job 1: Look professional!
Let’s say air conditioning repair and they end up in a sub page of your website that just is talking about air conditioning repair and not everything in the company that you do. The first thing that we want to have happen is that we want there to be a professional impression. I’m going to give an example of a really good site that is one of our customers. We actually didn’t design the website, but I’m just going to show you what the person sees initially. And we have this idea here of above-the-fold which comes from the newspaper days when the newspaper that’s in the box and you had to see the stuff that’s above the fold of the newspaper to decide whether you wanted to buy the newspaper and read the rest of the newspaper. You’ve got to get them here. There’s some debate about whether that matters but I don’t think you can do a bad job here and have the customer expect that you’re gonna do a good job below the fold.
All right, this looks nice. We have a picture. You want to create a feeling. There needs to be a feeling here. And you need information but you also need something that people can identify with and these people are sitting here in cool comfort. They’re happy. It’s a family, and it wouldn’t that be nice? You’re sitting in your house. You’re sweating. You’re trying to find somebody to fix your air conditioner. The other thing that this website is doing very well is putting some propositions in front of the customers — not just, “OK, we’re an air conditioning company, OK, heating and air company.”
Say something. Offer value!
We’ve got some deals here. We’ve got some things that are going to entice the person to to make the phone call. And if you click these little buttons here it’ll do it automatically. But if you click these we can go through some of the things that you might find interesting enough to call this company. Here’s a deal: 57 bucks; not a lot of money. Here’s some big savings and coupons. All right, so let’s go down past that now. We’re talking about some specifics, some bullet points. My eye just jumps to bullet points — also known as selling points — here are some calls to action. Let’s find out some more. Back up here — look, the phone number’s right here. You could call. You can probably fill out a form. Well, there’s not a form on this one. That’s okay. And here we have some of what some people call social proof. Social proof: other people like them, so that means maybe I can like them, too. Or I can trust them. And we drop the name here: Angie’s List has some credibility in terms of being well-regarded. If you’re good on Angie’s List maybe you’re good. If your customers say good things about you on Facebook maybe you’re good.
Here are some more credibility factors. I don’t know what this is, ACCA, but it’s probably a good thing. Do you remember that, Energy Star? We’ve sort of heard of that. Rheem, there’s a name brand. Duke Energy that’s the power company. It’s here, etc. etc. So these people look legit. I’m gonna call them ‘cause I’m sitting here sweating. I don’t have the time to look at a bunch of a bunch of other air conditioning companies. They seem good so I’m gonna call.
OK, that’s the conversion. That’s all you’re after. If you’re Reeves Heating and Air Conditioning, that is what you’re after — the phone call or the form.
Don’t let them bounce, and don’t ask for another click
Now, here is a a sort of a dummy landing page that we created. This we used in an AdWords campaign. The principles are the same. That’s why I’m lumping the two together. It doesn’t matter; the page has got to convert. You don’t want to ask somebody to make another click and you don’t want to lose them. You don’t want them to to bounce — the so-called “bounce rate.” That means “I’m outta here. I’m gonna go look for something else. Something here turned me off. Here we have a form. That’s the only other thing I really want to show you on this page other than, well, I didn’t want to show you some of the other things you can do. And we showed it on the other page, on the Reeves page: credibility, brand names, we can do all the stuff, we have a warranty, why work with us, etc, etc. So, more social proof. Here’s a quote, somebody else’s review, some more name-dropping, credibility some big names: GE, Lennox, Rheem, Trane, American Standard, and so on and so forth. So this is a page that’s designed to convert and the Reeves page and the entire website is designed to convert.
This is important because usually, with an older website, we didn’t really have to worry about that. We just put up a website. We told who we are, about us, etcetera, etcetera. People might not have time. We’re increasingly impatient. We have more options. So the point here is that if you’re getting good results, getting good search results, getting impressions, and then you’re getting clicks, and you’re not getting conversions, the problem is with your website or the landing page. We can fix that. I say “we.” I’m not pitching. YOU can fix the landing page with a web developer or yourself or you could call us.
That’s our video for today. Michael Byrd with Home Services Digital. Make sure your website and your landing pages don’t suck. Make sure you convert. Subscribe. Tell a friend. Thank you.
