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What Is My Website Missing? Key Elements for Service Business Websites

FieldPulse | July 14, 2016

The right website provides your service business with a powerful tool to get new customers. Simply having a website is not enough to attract new business. Learn how to provide the right information to potential customers so that they can feel confident that your business can address their problem.

What info needs to be available on my business’s website?

Think about how you might go about hiring a contractor. You might ask friends and family for recommendations. You might keep an eye out for companies that are active in your neighborhood, and maybe even follow up with homeowners who have used a certain contractor to see if they were satisfied with the work. You would probably also check to see if they had a website where you could browse through photos of their completed projects to get a sense of their specialties and see if they were right for your project.

There are a lot of ways to think about your business’s website, but what we laid out above can be instructive. Does your website clearly list what areas you service? Can a visitor on your site quickly and easily get a feel for what services you offer? Do you have testimonials from satisfied customers, and photo galleries of some of your best work? Is your contact info clear, accurate, and readily available?

For each of those questions, the answers must be a resounding “Yes.” Let’s take a look at each of those elements in more detail.

What goes into a well-designed service business website?

Like we laid out above, a good website for your service business needs to include the following:

Areas you service

This can be either a single page listing the towns and areas your business reaches or separate pages for each town. The latter approach is especially effective if the size of your team or the size of the area you service limits how often you can be present in a given area – for instance, a tree removal service, given the time and expense associated with staging its equipment, might prefer to limit miles traveled on any given day.

Services you offer

As with the “Areas you service” category, you can either list out your services on a single page or describe each service on its own page. The latter approach is appropriate if your services are unique, or if your potential customers might expect additional information to ensure that you are the correct service provider for their needs – for instance, a plumber might want to describe their emergency, 24/7 services separately from their rough-in services.

Customer testimonials

“Social proof” is incredibly important to include on your website. While there certainly is no shortage of third-party sites where you can (and should!) ask your customers to review and rate your services, including a “Testimonials” page on your website allows you to curate and highlight your satisfied customers in their own words.

Photo gallery

Showcasing your best projects can be tricky depending on the nature of your business. What helps, especially for service businesses where the end product is hidden from view – such as electricians and plumbers – is to think ahead and document how you and your team succeed despite difficult circumstances and tricky installations. That also can allow for lighthearted photos – for instance, your team of licensed electricians fishing conduit through a tight crawl space or your licensed plumbers sitting around the now-heated pool with a satisfied customer after a job well done. However, if you install equipment or replace broken items, you can show photos demonstrating the tidiness of your installation and how you supply warranty and product information for your customer. Customers want to see that the area you serviced will not be left dirty and messy.

Contact information

In addition to a phone number that is monitored during your clearly stated business hours, many service businesses also find it helpful to provide an email address. That allows potential customers to reach out with preliminary questions and also allows your business to remain reachable outside of traditional business hours.

They may seem obvious, but those five elements are the keys to a clear and effective service business website. The information you provide to your potential customers by including each element is enough for them to determine if you are active in their location, if you can perform the work they need done, if your past and current customers are satisfied with your work, and to see examples that showcase the quality of your work.

Of course, the single most important item on that list is the last one – your contact information. Check, double-check, and triple-check that your phone number, email address, and hours of operation are clearly displayed. Many service businesses find it best to include their contact information in the header or navigation bar of their website so that it’s always available to potential customers – once someone decides they’re interested and wants to give you a call, you want it to be as easy as possible for them to get in touch with you.

An effective service business website should do one thing above all else for your business: Provide the information a potential customer needs to convince them that you can solve their immediate problem.

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