How to Make a Website Your Best Marketing!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business course podcast. Today we are going to be talking about what you need to be doing on your website to make sure it's ready for the spring rush. So for most of you, if you're listening to this in February, March, you're kind of coming into when you're going to get really, really busy, you need to make sure this is the time you work on your website, get it nailed down. It sometimes takes between, you know, three, four, five weeks to really rank well on Google, even if you have a good site. And so you want to start working on these things now. So I'm going to go through a list of things that we've seen as some of the biggest indicators and things that you really need to be working on on your website. So if you go to the landscape Business course Facebook group, you probably have seen when people start talking about marketing, best roi, things like that. So many of the times a website is brought up, and the reason for that is because your website continually can send you leads and while you're sleeping, people can be vetting you. They can be looking at your pictures, your videos, your reviews of that on your website. So here's some of the things that I wanted to highlight today. I know this is not a comprehensive list. There's a lot of different things that we look at when we're building websites out for the franchisees and when we built Augusta Lawn care. So this is not an exhaustive list, but this is some of the things that I see most commonly missed or overlooked and things that you might want to just think about when it comes to lawn care and your website. Number one thing you gotta be really wary of and thinking a lot about on your website is site title and description. So this is the thing that's going to be the best SEO, that where you really need to have keywords, you need to have demographic, like which cities are you serving? Don't put in your state because then you're gonna start ranking your state and getting leads from all over the place or your province. You wanna be focused on the places you're actually serving. So site title and description as well as your page title and description. So a couple things on that page, names should be in your URL. So for example, augustalawncareservices.com whatcom is our local shop. And then we got all our other franchisees like AugustaLawCareServices.com theirarea and that area name is in the title or in the URL, because it is their territory, that's their main area. But then in the description we use their secondary names, the other surrounding little towns or neighborhoods or areas that they wanna focus on. But in terms of your services, you want that slash to be your service type or your keywords. So when people start searching your area, they might say mowing services instead of lawn care. So if you put Augusta Lawn Care services, yes, you might rank. But if you do augustalawncareservices.commowing, then you have a good chance. When someone types in mowing services and it's also ranking against your title, description and title size, site title of their demographic, it's gonna rank very well. So your services, you always want to have a separate page for them and with a slash ending in that term. Landscaping, lawn care, mowing, excavation, hardscaping, whatever you do, whatever search engine optimization term, whatever keyword, sorry, whatever keyword is being used in a search engine is what you want to be having as a page title. And then you're able to then put keywords around that specific service in that page description. Okay, I know that's a little bit in the weeds, but we're gonna move along here. The big balance on your website is speed versus design. Cause speed is very, very important. But then on the other side there's certain design elements like JavaScript you might wanna run to make a really nice looking background. So for example, on Augusta Lawn Care Services we have a video running in the background that slows the site down considerably. But we are willing to take that hit and compensate in other areas because the of value it adds to having that video playing in the background. What we also have though is it is going to detect what the.

Signal, how much web service, Internet connectivity it has because if it's low, we do not want it taking a whole bunch of bandwidth trying to load up the video in the background. So we're going to switch it to our mobile site, which is going to have more pictures, more pictorial, because we want the site to be fast, it needs to be able to load quickly. And so the design is very, very important. How your logo integrates, the colors, the schemes, the graphics, how they move, the dynamics of it can make it look very professional. And so we look at this a lot because there's a balance between having really fast site that's trash or having a really, really dense design. Lots of videos, lots of pictures that are really high quality, that aren't compressed, but then losing out on speed because Google More and more is ranking People and penalizing them if they do not have a fast site. So you can test that by just, if you just go to Google, put in test my site Google. There's a website they've created where you can type in your URL and it runs take like a minute and it scans your site and sees how fast things load, gives you a list of things that you can improve to make your site more responsive. On mobile and desktop versions, if your pages are taking more than three seconds and they're taking four or five seconds to load, you are losing traffic, you are losing customers. You might be paying for people to come to your website and you pay when they click, for example, on Facebook or Google or something. But if your website takes a whole long time to load just to load up information, you are losing out on traffic that you've paid for, you're losing out on leads and you're losing out on revenue. So making a fast, mobile friendly, very responsive website is what is very, very important. And you can test that on, on that test my site google.com so there's that balance between speed, making a very fast site that loads quickly, but then having the nice design elements of like things moving across and sliding in and having a video in the background, things like that. So there's that balance you want to truly watch. We have certain elements where based upon the connectivity of the Internet is whether or not we show videos, whether or not we have graphic images sliding versus just appearing, things like that. Alright, mobile compatibility, I kind of mentioned it there, but you really want to make sure that your site is mobile compatible. A massive, massive amount of your web traffic is coming from mobile devices, cell phones, tablets, et cetera, and no longer desktops. Yes, our industry does skew to where a higher percentage of people than average are on their desktops because we have an older demographic. That is true, but it does not take away from the fact that more than half of our traffic is still coming from mobile mobile devices. And so making sure your site is mobile friendly because your website on desktop and mobile do not look the same. To be always editing your site on a desktop and never looking what it actually looks like on a cell phone, you're making a big mistake to just have your website where they have to like, you know, use their fingers to get closer and you know, see your phone number or see the text that is not going to be looked on well by Google. Google is looking for, for websites that have two different layouts, one for mobile, one for desktop. And you need to have both. It Needs to be mobile friendly. That means things like menus have a tab instead of having where it has all the words out and they gotta click from the desktop version. All right, so mobile compatibility, very important. And it's important that you have different images. So for example, on mobile, you're gonna have usually less Internet connectivity, less power, less bandwidth. Cause you're on a mobile signal, you're on data for 3G, 4G. And so when you're out on those signals, you need to have smaller images that are compressed. You're going to want to take out videos that are automatically playing in the background. Another thing that I see commonly, estimate request forms, we call them ERFs at Augusta. You want to make sure that that estimate request form is above the fold. What that means is that when you come to your webpage, do you see an estimate request form? If you have to scroll to the bottom.

You'Ve lost a lot of your customers. You want to get them right from the beginning. And this is on mobile as well as desktop. I see a lot of people doing well on desktop because there's so much space. But then on the mobile version, you cannot see an area to start filling in information because you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to give you their information for an estimate. You do not want to make it hidden. You don't want to make them have to click contact us and then select a bunch of things. Make it as simple as possible. Just so then when they come to the site, they can easily fill in that information. And when it comes to your website in general, I see so many people trying to make this all encompassing, incredible website when they forget that the reason they're making their website is to drive sales and drive revenue. A couple of videos ago, I talked about direct marketing versus branding. Your website is a great way to do branding, but you gotta keep your eye on the prize of direct marketing. And that is you wanna drive sales. You wanna actually people to submit estimate request forms, pick up the phone and call. You tap your phone number and give you a call. So if you are not having a clear call to action and you're not pushing them to take a certain action on your website, you're losing out on money. All right, you can have a nice professional website all you want, but if it's not driving people towards calling you or submitting an estimate request form, you're losing out on traffic and you're losing out on leads. Calling you, picking up the phone, submitting an estimate request form, and you making money. Make sure the estimate request form is above the fold. And think direct marketing and driving the person, the user to a certain action. Instead of having a bunch of of before and after pictures and videos and 20,000 different service pages and your social media, this and all these other things, focus on the thing you want them to do, focus on the action you want them to take. And that is to submit an estimate request form or pick up the phone and call you. That's why there should be tabs at the top of your mobile devices for phones and getting an estimate. That's why your estimate request form should be the fold. That's why on every single page it needs to be, the constant theme is contact us. And that's driving them to fill out information for an estimate. And when it comes to your website, less is more. Okay, when you have a massive website that might look really nice, but it has too much information, too much data, too much content, too many videos, too many pictures. These pictures are bloated in size. You're gonna slow down the speed of your website. But more importantly, the customer isn't necessarily gonna read all of that. Yes, you're gonna get the occasional customer that does, but in general they're coming to your website cause they wanna contact you and ask for service. Do not make it complicated, do not make it hard to do, not make it where they have to wade through information to just try to find how they can pick up the phone and do business with you. Make it easy to do business with you by making sure you have a clear call to action and that you keep the mantra of your site design being less is more. You do not need tons of pages, you do not need tons and tons of services. You do not need a bunch of different types of like, what are they called, carousel images and then videos and then before and after videos and then tiles moving in. You're gonna slow your site down, you're gonna confuse the customer and you're gonna keep them from doing the thing you want them to do, which is to call you or submit an estimate request form. All right, last thing with your website, I know this, I can go on for hours. But one of the things that we see time and time again is keep your website updated. All right, so this is constantly, even if it's once a month or every couple, even twice a year, is more than most landscaping businesses do, is update the pictures, update the videos, create new blog posts, or even make specific time oriented posts or pictures. So for example, around Christmas or in the wintertime, change your front page to Be more about winter services and snow plowing and the things that you do during the winter instead of mowing and spring cleanups. So, like, these are the things you want to be focused on. These are the things that I see time and time again. People failing on their website and people paying an exorbitant amount of money to get websites buying built. Then they stay static for 10, 15 years, and before you know it, they're taking 10 seconds to load because their back end data and their back end code is expired and there's broken links and there's too much Java and all goes on and on and on. All right, so there's a whole bunch of stuff I could talk about there. Lastly, though, I wanted to say that we are launching a new service for your websites. This is something that I've mentioned in a couple of private forums. A couple people have taken advantage of it already, but lawn carewebdesign.com, so this is kind of like the announcement. Lawn carewebdesign.com I am now being able to build your website, manage your website. And we've taken some time on building this, and it's been in the works for about eight months now. Because really the reason is because I wanted to make sure it was right for the beginner as well as someone that's down the road a little bit from a pricing perspective and from what you want out of your website, this is the deal. So lawncarewebdesign.com, check it out. I'll put a link below and you'll be able to get another video that explains exactly what happens. Let me give you, like, the Cliff Notes version of it. All right? Number one, no upfront costs. You're not gonna pay us $10,000 for us to build your site. There's no upfront cost. You just pay a monthly subscription fee. There's no contract to that monthly subscription fee. I'm not gonna tie you into a year or two years or more. It's month to month. If you do not think that your website is worth the 3.99 that we charge every single month, then you should leave. I'm that confident that the amount of leads you're gonna be getting in is gonna make that $400 look like a bargain. And, and so that's why we're doing this. There is no upfront fee. You're gonna start paying 3.99 per month. There's no contract, and there's no upfront big fee. If you go out and build your site Your own by yourself. It's gonna be a lot cheaper. Yes, 100%. But are you gonna be able to get a site that's ranking really well, has a great design? It's less likely. Like, we're landscapers. I'm a landscaper. I'm not a coder, I'm not a designer. And so we have a team in place that has built Augusta's website and we're using them to build your websites custom for you. Okay, so a lot more information on lawncarewebdesign.com I want to be completely open and transparent about why I'm doing this. Number one reason, we need to make money so that we can design P4P system version 2 for the franchisees, which is a very complicated and fully integrated payroll system that uses P4P. And so that way they don't have to double entry. And it's going to be very simple to learn and. And the mobile app and all this stuff for the franchisees. So I need money for that because it's going to cost us a lot of money. And so we're building this out for that purpose to generate revenue to support and maintain that software going forward. There's email support 247 with this, so you can always be adding things, updating things. So just check out Lawn Care Web design if you're interested. Last thing is, we only have 20 spots available. We're not going to open this to everyone. So there's only 20 spots. We're doing 20 spots before spring 2020. So if you need your. We built before the spring rush. This is the time to do it. It takes about four to six weeks for us to build your site. And again, there's no contract. You could literally have us build your site and two or three months later be like, don't want it. There would be no contract. That's how confident we are that after two or three months, you're gonna be ranking well, you're gonna love the results, and so it'll be worth every penny. We believe that. And so that's why we're not doing any contract on it. Okay. So if you have an existing website, we can absolutely use that URL. We can absolutely use your existing hosting. It's just a very, very seamless process. Your involvement is really giving us information. If you have blog posts, we need the text. If there's certain pictures or video you want, you can give us that. We do that all via email. You just transfer all that data to us. We build that site usually takes four to six weeks. These first 20 people, we're gonna try to get through a little bit faster to make sure you get before the spring rush. But it is only these 20 spots before spring 2020. All right? So this will not last for a long time. This will fill up. And I know already this morning I sent out text messages to everyone on the texting platform that has texted that number, and they. I know several people have already taken advantage of it. So make sure you go to lawncarewebdesign.com, fill out the form, get some information. At the very least, you can learn a little bit more about your site. And that video there gives some content on SEO and things like that. And at the very worst, I hope this video is helpful in terms of your website making it better, making it more search engine optimized, and making sure it's fast, mobile friendly. And make sure at the end of the day, you drive more leads and you make more money. So check out lawn carewebdesign.com see if it's right for you. And I promise you that after three or four months, you will not regret it. Thank you so much. You've been listening to the landscape business course. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pays.