Is your website performing well? Questions for your web people.
Is your website doing what it’s supposed to? Is it serving your business? Is it generating enquiries for you or reassuring people who found out about you somewhere else that you are what they thought, or what they heard, or what they were told?
I think that’s its purpose. If it’s not doing those things, you’ve wasted your money. Or you’re missing an opportunity to have it do those things for you and help you grow your business and to help you attract and convert more customers.
Now, my experience as a coach, is that for many people, their website isn’t doing those things and isn’t doing them properly. Now, this is a slightly longer video than some other weeks. And I apologize for that. If it’s useful to you, watch till the end. If it’s not, go and do something else, (look at cats).
I’m Jon from Small Fish Business Coaching. I coach trades business owners who want to grow and scale. It’s my strong opinion that you should be investing in a proper website that serves your business and helps you grow more and more. These are important. And I speak to people who’ve got a website, but if I say, “Is it any good?”, I find it’s not producing enquiries or it doesn’t really represent you very well. Then you waste your money and it’s not doing what you want. And of course, you didn’t do it right.
As usual, in this world, the buck stops with you. And what I find people have done often, is get somebody nice to do it or get somebody they’re related to to do it. They’re only cheap, and spend a $1,000 to do it.
I’m going to draw a building analogy for you.
Think of a house. You wouldn’t get a plumber, or a carpenter to build your house. Building a house requires a whole raft of people with different skills.
- You need a carpenter.
- You need a bricklayer.
- You need a concreter.
- You need project manager.
- You need an electrician.
- You need a plumber.
- You need an insulation guy.
- You need gyprocker.
You need a whole heap of people with different specialist and technical skills. And the same is true for a website. This is the danger that happens, right? Somebody says, “I can build a website.” And if somebody said, “I can build a house,” and they throw up 4 walls and a roof and said, “There you go,” you’d be very disappointed. And it wouldn’t really be fit for purpose or it wouldn’t be fit to live in.
Same is true with a website. Someone could throw up a website and it could look quite pretty and have shiny photographs. They can use WordPress and Wix and things like that, or you can just bolt them together and it looks quite nice. But if no one goes, or Google doesn’t know about it, or if it doesn’t tell people what they need to know and all those other things, it doesn’t help you in your business and that’s what I’m going to try and explain to you.
So how to build a website properly?
A website has a number of components and the message I’m sending to you today is you need to decide what your website’s purpose is and design it accordingly. You need to do a couple of other things. You need to get people to it.
Now, I’ve got a set of clients and builders who even if you type their business name into search, you don’t find their website because they haven’t done some of the important work of letting Google know, or their web designers didn’t do that important work of letting Google know that here’s a website attached to this name. That s**t is easy to miss out on, so you need to do the work involved in getting people to your website. They also need to learn when they get there, what they came for.
And I believe that is:
- “Do you do what I want?”
- “Do you do it for people like me in my area where I like me live with my amount of money to spend?” All that kind of thing.
- “Are you any good?”
- “Are you a safe choice for me to make?”
So your website needs to answer those questions really quickly.
Recommended Reading: Is your website doing you justice?
The problem I find is that often people who build websites don’t do all that stuff. They do some of it. A web designer is often a designer who will make it look pretty. But often, when you pay your $1200 for a website:
- They expect you to write the copy, to tell them what to write on it.
- They expect you to produce images of work you’ve done.
You know what I’m going to suggest you do in a minute is ask questions.
Here are the building blocks of a good website that’s going to do what you need.
- It needs IT. It needs to have the security patches and software upgrades applied regularly. It needs to be hosted well and backed up so that if there is a problem you back up again. You’re not off the air for a week while you go, “I’m sorry.” It needs to load up fast. It needs to be quick because people get bored really quickly, don’t they? I don’t wait for websites to load. If they’re slow I’ve gone back to Google.
- It needs to have design. It needs to look pretty. And it needs to have intelligent design that works for people.
- It needs to be built well – that’s the coding. An often, those two skills don’t go together. That’s a tech guy doing software coding. That’s an artistic person who makes things beautiful.
- It needs to have copy – that’s the writing. It needs to have compelling copy that explains what you do and uses the keywords, and makes people want to click on the ‘Enquire Now’ button or phone you.
- It needs to have nice images taken properly with a decent camera.
- It needs to have flow. It needs to be easy to navigate. You need to be real clear where you need to go next because we don’t give it long before we get bored and change our minds.
- It needs to have the on-site SEO. Aren’t these technical things? You need to do things. You need to name the pages properly so that Google knows what each one’s for. You need to fill out a meta description on each page. There’s a whole technical heap of things to do on your website to make it SEO prepared.
- And you need to do the off-site SEO, the things that direct people to it. That’s if you’re going to use SEO as your way of getting there. We might put AdWords there. We might put Facebook Ads there. We might put newspaper ads there or whatever. You need ways of directing people to it. But you know, even if you’re not using internet advertising or SEO as a way of getting people to your site, Google needs to know. If you search Small Fish Business Coaching, you need to find my website and that’s a job in itself.
People need to find the answers to those questions easily and they need to be reassured easily.
If you just get someone to design and build your website, you might be missing out on all that other stuff unnecessarily. But my experience is that unless you ask the questions, you’re likely to be missing out on some of that stuff. And I’ve seen a lot of trades businesses be disappointed with the websites they’ve been built.
So what should you do?
Well, in my coaching, if we decide that your website is a priority, we’ll go through a process of answering those questions and writing some of the copy. We’ll do some of that marketing groundwork. And then we’ll go and find a decent web person. I’ll introduce you to a decent web person who’s got those skills covered so that with my support as your business coach and their support as a web designer, builder, and IT person, you’re covered. (Not a member of my team, a person who looks after my website I’ll refer you to.)
I like to make sure my clients have got it covered if I can persuade them to spend the extra money and do it properly. And like building a house, you need to spend the extra money to get it done properly. If you don’t want to do that, if you don’t want to be my client, or you don’t want to talk to my guy in Australia, you know what you can do is ask questions of your people.
- How’s the IT being handled? Are you applying the software updates and the security patches?
- What’s going on with the hosting? Is it backed up properly? Is it loading quick enough? How can we make it load faster?
You could think about the copy with them. You can think about the flow with them. You can think about how you could ask them.
- Are you doing the on-site SEO?
- Have you done the title tags and meta descriptions?
Let’s think about SEO.
How much traffic do we get?
Start by asking yourself,
Start by asking yourself,
- “Do I get leads from it?”
- “What’s the purpose of my website? Is it for leads? Is it just to reassure people who go there through word-of-mouth and referrals or from my advertising?”
- “What do I want for it and from it?”
And then ask those other questions about these building blocks.
I hope I’m not overwhelming you. I said this was a long one right? A website should be a really fantastic tool for you. It should be bringing you work. Mine brings me work, brings me enquiries and customers. Yours should be doing the same for you. And if it’s not, you’ve got a real opportunity to make it perform for you and make you money.
I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you. If I have and you’d like some help, give me a call or book a 10-minute chat. And I’ll spend a few minutes running through your website with you. We can share a screen and I’ll give you a bit of free help of course.
If you want the full package, the business coaching, book a 10-minute chat and say, “I’m interested in coaching Jon.”
And before I go let me remind you that I’m running a workshop in Byron Bay where I’ll spend 2 days teaching you not just websites and not just marketing but also,
- How to do your sales properly
- How to set up systems properly for the work of your business
- How to do your admin
- How to grow and scale your trades business until it becomes that beautiful thing that you’re proud of.
I’m sure there’s a button somewhere where you can book yourself onto the workshop. If there isn’t, put a comment in and we’ll help you out.
See you later!
There are four ways you can engage with me:
1. Subscribe to these emails and get them once a week in your inbox so you never miss a video from me.
2. Join the Trades Business Toolshed Facebook Group where you can watch these videos, ask me questions or talk to your peers.
3. Attend my next Tradie Profit Webinar.
4. Book yourself a 10-minute chat with me. We’ll talk about whether coaching is right for you now and if it is, we’ll go further into the process before you have to make your mind up.
See you later.