Maximize Your Conversions with Expert Website Feedback - Master Locators Review

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to be doing another one of my Fiverr gigs where I review a website for somebody and give them my feedback. So today's one comes from Brian, and he's got a website called masterlocators.com. And he was particularly concerned about conversions and the site's call to action. So let's go check out the site and see what we can do. When we're looking at conversions, really you want to think about, do I understand what you do? Do I understand how it can help me? And do I understand what the next step is? And is that very clear? So let's look at this website. So look at, company's called Master Locators, specializing in GPR and utility locating. I'm not sure what that is. I don't know what GPR stands for, or utility locating, but it may be something that people who are in your industry would know a little bit more about. You want to be careful about putting short terms like GPR instead of what it actually means, but you're also not really showing the value to your customers. You probably want to work a little bit on that slogan. In looking at your— you got 3 buckets and you've got this thing that switches over here. So ground penetrating radar, okay, so that's what I guess GPR is. Utility locating, vacuum excavation. Ground penetrating radar can be used to identify underground tanks, utilities, voids, and other commodities beneath the surface of the earth. So this is actually a little bit confusing to me because what I would assume somebody coming to the site, they would know what GPR and utility locating is if you're going to explain it up here. And then you say what it is down here. So instead of just putting the explanation, what I would do is talk about the benefits that people get. So why would I use your services? When would this be helpful to me or not? I'm assuming you're dealing with, I guess, some kind of commercial or industrial types of companies. So you're very features-oriented instead of benefits-oriented. So Why should I use you versus other guys for doing the same thing? Looking underneath, we locate underground utilities. A call to Master Locator should be the first critical safety step before design, excavation, and construction projects begin. Now this is actually interesting. This explains a little bit more about what it is that you do, but it's buried further down on the page. So as an example, I built my own house and we had to excavate. And I'm not sure what we had to do to look underground, but this makes a little bit more sense to me now as to what you do. So even somebody like me who built his own house and had to use probably somebody like you, I didn't even think this was a service for me by looking at the top of this page. So if I were to land on this page, I'd be off somewhere else because I wouldn't think it's for me. Explaining it better down here is something that you definitely want to do a little bit higher up. So this makes a little bit more sense for somebody coming to the site. They can understand what you do and is it for them or not. Okay, so that's going to be critical. The next thing is going to be your call to action. So this helps me explain, helps me understand what is it you do. I can get a little bit of a better sense of how it benefits me. The next step would be to call, I'm assuming. So call our offices for free consultation. So it's great that you have this number down here. What I would probably do is put it higher. I don't know if it's anywhere else. Put it everywhere. Put it right here. You got all this extra space here. Put your phone number, put your email address. You want to make that super convenient and easy. If you're giving them a free estimate, I think you said free consultation or estimate, perfect. Put that up here, make it really visible, make it easy for them to see how they can get in touch with you as the next step. So if I'm clicking through on these programs and I don't click down to that bottom, I want to make sure that I can pick up the phone and call you anytime. Some guys, if they come and land on your site and they see a clear benefit statement here, you're talking about underground locations, looking at underground utilities, sorry, and you talk about design, excavation, and construction projects. If that's clearly explained up here, I may just hit this website to the phone number and call you. Great for you, potential lead coming in the door. Somebody doesn't want to waste their time a little bit longer because they know that they want to get in touch with you. So you want to make that super easy to understand. What you do and put your phone number and email really, um, visible for them to see. Uh, next thing, I would try to have something that's a little bit more visual. So if you talk about design, excavation, construction projects, put a picture in here about what it is that you do beyond just these buckets. There's a lot of text on this page and not enough of a visual representation, at least for me. So show you guys in action or show them, show different design projects, conservation, or construction. So somebody who is hitting this website who doesn't want to read a lot of text can also quickly get a sense of what it is that you do. I like that you have satisfied clients here. This is great. You have some social proof to show that people are really excited about what you do, but you don't show their testimonials here. I'm assuming if I click here I'll be able to see it. You've been around for 20 years, that's great. I would have a picture of your client and their testimonial right here on the homepage and then make this more testimonials so that somebody can quickly see right on the homepage that you've got people who really like what you're doing. So that again will help improve your conversions because you have proof that what you're doing works. So let's see what's next. So if I, you know, I'm on this homepage, I think it's interesting, I'm going to click on Request. See what we got here. Request underground utility locating services. Master Locator is the largest underground utility locating firm on the East Coast with offices— this is great too. So you've been around for 20 years, you're the largest underground utility locating firm on the East Coast. This should be on the homepage too. This explains a lot more about what you do than those 3 buckets that just confuse me. I'd put this on the homepage. So this is great. You have a contact form. Most people probably won't fill out a contact form, but they'd rather call or email in. So you want to make sure that your email is really visible here as well, which I don't see an email address for you anywhere on here. Maybe if I click Contact Us, but again, you want to make it super easy for them to contact you. So fill that in. You know, most people probably won't go through this form, but they'll call you or they'll send you an email. Here I see you have a 1-800 number, which is awesome too. If someone doesn't have to pay long distance, then, you know, better for them. I'm pretty sure on the homepage you don't show it. Let's see, let's go back. Yeah, so here you have the local number, and then on this page you have the 1-800 number. If you have a 1-800 number, put that everywhere. That's on your homepage, that should be in your top bar here. Call us, 1-800 number, easy for someone to pick up the phone and give you a call. Definitely make sure we're including that everywhere. Next, we want to learn a little bit more about your company. Let's look at your company, company history. See what we got. Established in 2003, acquisition. Okay, so you bought— it's known as Hanby Associates before. What I want to do here is probably show a little bit more so that you don't have enough content on here. I'd probably show pictures of the people if you can. Smiling faces, people who have some experience, a little bit more about them. You know, the construction industry, very shady, a lot of characters that are hard to deal with. So if you're professional and you show your pictures and you show all the background that you have, and I see a smiling guy that I think I can trust by looking at his picture, that will help you with your conversions as well. So more content on here. Better explain your history and your dedication to quality service, which it sounds like you're all about. And then also show the people behind it, why they started it, what they're doing now, and smiling pictures of them ideally. So definitely improve this page a little bit more. Let's go look at the testimonials because we saw that from the homepage. How else can I get to it? I don't see it, so let's go back to the homepage and look for some testimonials. So again, this will help you do conversions. If I see that people are happy with you and you've been doing it for a long time, so this is, this is good. We have some testimonials here. We've got an external link to the website. This is pretty good. So we've got 3, you know, not a lot, but okay. I would definitely put a picture of these people if you can. I don't know if you can find Carl, the Osfag Pidge, or Ryan Jones, or these guys. Try to find a picture if you can. I'd also try to break this up. It's a lot of text, and it's bolded and italics. Italics is okay for quotes. What I would probably do is bold the key points that you want to highlight. Whatever the biggest challenges you find that people are, people have in these projects, and why they end up hiring you. So, like, this is great. They arrive on time, provide expert interaction with site contracts, and work hard to stick to the timeframe and budget. This is huge. You know, a lot of the guys in the construction industry are not on time. They don't stick to the timeframe. They don't stick to the budget. So I'd probably unbold all of this and bold this because this is the most important sentence in this whole paragraph and it's buried in the middle and somebody probably won't read it. So, you know, this part is as important. You've worked with them on nuclear stations, critical system areas. Unbold all of that, bold the key points, and then repeat that again for all of these. Take the one sentence that means the most, bold that, unbold everything else. And again, if you can, put a picture of the person that you're dealing with. Let's see what else we've got up here. So we've got a blog. Let's check out the blog. What is a utility tolerance zone? How to avoid Philadelphia stormwater charges? So let's look at one of these blogs here. Blogs are often a great way to drive search engine traffic and keep the website fresh and updated. So what is utility tolerance zones? You've got a super short article here. So if you're going to write blog content, I definitely recommend having at least 500 words for it to get picked up in the search engine. You will have a hard time getting a page like this ranked unless it's super, super non-competitive. The other thing you want to think about is, is blogging really the best strategy for you? If I'm hiring a company to see if I have any utilities underground, do I really want to read their blog? I know when I was building my house, when we're in that excavation phase, you care a lot about it, but afterwards you don't care at all about it, right? You're focused on the next part of your project. So I probably wouldn't subscribe to your blog, you know, it's not something that would be something that I want to care about afterwards, right? I don't really care too much about what a utility tolerance zone is as long as you can help me solve my problem at the time. Now some of your other customers may be different, they may really care about what you have to say, but My sense is people would not care too much about your blog, and especially if you're writing such short content, you're going to have a hard time getting this ranked. So what I would do instead of trying to create blog posts is create landing pages. So try to think about the different keywords that people would search for and keywords that would help drive traffic to your website. You know, I'm looking here, you have master locators as well in your title tag. Which you want to take that out because you're probably going to rank for master locators and try to put in the keywords that make the most sense for driving targeted traffic. Again, instead of this blog, create targeted landing pages, each around different keywords that you're trying to rank for. Put in some great content, at least 500 words of content. Try to get those pages ranked. If you find that you're having a hard time getting those individual pages ranked, then what I would do is try to do some guest blogging. So find somebody who has a related blog that covers this industry in general, offer to write a post for them, and then link back to your landing pages to try to drive some traffic for. So it looks like you may already have some here. These might be some individual landing pages. Take a quick look. So concrete scanning and imaging. So somebody is doing a search for concrete scanning and imaging, then hopefully your page is showing up. So this is a good start. Again, not enough contact here, sorry, content. You want at least 500 words. I don't know if this is geared enough towards your client and the benefits that they're going to get, so maybe just examine the content a little bit more to make it more benefits-oriented. A little more content here. It's great that you have the call to action. Again, I'd make this the 1-800 number. Instead of the local number. And if you find that this page still isn't ranking after you add more content, then you could do a guest blog post on a different blog and drive traffic back to this page here with the link. So that'll help boost your SEO rankings. So hopefully that helps, uh, the quick breakdown of this website. I think it overall looks very professional. Um, you know, you've done a good job with the design. Again, in this industry, at least in the construction industry that I've dealt with and built in my house, It's not very professional, the websites are really bad, so you're already ahead of the game here. But you can get even further ahead by improving the benefit statement, especially on this homepage, making sure you lock up this slogan a little bit better, totally change all this to talk more about the benefits and clearly explain what it is that you do, and then also have your 1-800 number and your contact email very quick and easily accessible for people. And that should hopefully help with your conversions. So thanks for the post there, Brian. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give a thumbs up below. Makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have any comments about masterlocators.com, or if you have a question about your own website or business, I'd love to hear from you if you want to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and they make my day when I see them come in. So thank you. And we'll see you on the next episode.