Common Website Mistakes to Avoid.

Location, Location, Location
All search is local. In both the real and online world, consumers visit the central places that provide goods and services that they need, making these decisions to minimize travel distance. That’s why it is extremely important to include your physical location on your website on every page. Where you are located is part of your brand because people search by location. Your customers are no different from you. There is a maximum distance that homeowners in your service territory will travel to buy a new kitchen or bath.

Showcase the Best
Avoid the temptation to showcase your latest projects. Instead post examples of your best work. Website visitors don’t care if you did the project last week or five years ago. Showcase projects that reflect your brand and serve to differentiate your skill sets from competitors whose competency is limited to taking orders.

Speed Wins
Website visitors don’t have the patience to wait for pages to load. You can check your website’s speed on Google’s PageSpeed platform. You want a score from 90-100. If your speed is 50 or lower, speak to your web master or other expert to determine what needs to be done to load pages more quickly.

Less is Better
What do you want your web site to do? For many, it is to provide reasons for potential customers to come to your showroom. As Robb Best explains, when you give customers too many choices their brains shut down and people walk away because the brain does not have the capacity to process multiple inputs. That’s why Robb recommends offering customers a choice of A or B instead of A-F. The same thinking should apply to your website. Carefully curate images to provide a representation of projects and styles. One or two contemporary, transitional, traditional, eclectic or other types of projects that reflect your best work should be featured, not multiple images of the same type of project.

Look Through the Lens of Your Prospective Client
What do prospective clients who visit your website want and need to see? Marcus Sheriden advised DPHA members to answer the questions that your clients and prospects ask most often. These might include: How much does a new bath cost? Why is there a vast range of prices for different products? How long does a renovation take? What should I expect from the showroom? Are you providing information that clients can use to make their customer journey easier, or does the focus of your website tout how wonderful your showroom is?

Making Your Website More Effective
Every week DPHA produces a blog that you can use as your own. We recommend that you select the images that reflect your brand instead of the generic images that accompany the blog. Blogging weekly will increase your search engine optimization, and many showrooms that blog regularly show up on first pages of Google searches without having to pay for ad words or incur other costs.