The Biggest Marketing Mistake – Choosing Beauty Over Effectiveness
February 28, 2020
If you asked people what factor impacts a home’s price the most, many would tell you the size. They’d be wrong. The size of a house is an important factor, but not the most important. It’s all about location.
Consider this example: there are several places in the US that are desperate enough for new residents that they’ll pay you to move there. It turns out that rural Maine, Nebraska and Oklahoma aren’t popular places for new college graduates to start families. On the other hand, the average monthly rent in San Francisco is around $3,500, and the median house price is $1.3 million.
The same is true for online marketing. If you have money to spend, there are website developers that can make websites that look like a work of art. The visuals on these sites speak loudly, and they make your business look very professional. Unfortunately, these websites generally aren’t in the best part of town – and on the internet, the best part of town is somewhere on the first page of Google.
The reason these sites don’t search well is that Google looks at a site’s written content to figure out what the site is all about. When someone asks Google a question about painting contractors near them, Google wants to return websites that feature information about services the painting contractor provides in that person’s area. Typically, the most attractive websites don’t have much written content.
Even if customers do find these websites, they don’t necessarily lead to the most requests for service. You want to make it really clear what your phone number is and how to contact you – even if that means a small sacrifice in the site’s visual appeal.
None of this means that ugly websites perform well. Painting contractor websites still need to look good, and they need to use modern coding (Google doesn’t like ancient websites either). But you should always make sure that your web designer understands what you’re trying to do with your website. If your goal is to impress people who already know about your business, a cutting-edge visual design might be the way to go.
But if you’re using your website to attract new painting customers, you don’t need stunning visuals – you need plenty of pages worth of written content about your services. Make sure your web designer is focused just as much on leads as they are on layout.
To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your website bring more customers to your painting business, call us at 919-424-6121 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.
