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Website Workbook

Your Website Optimization Workbook

This 8-page workbook will help you optimize your website for maximum conversions and sales. 

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Full Website Optimization Video Transcript

Hello! Everyone, welcome to today’s webinar on how to optimize your website for maximum conversions and sales. Now, what you want to do, you want to download this workbook on this website here on our Kabms.com/website-workbook, and it’s an eight page workbook that’s going to have a lot of the slides and everything we go over so you can actually implement some of this stuff and jot down and take notes from what we’ll talk about today. So what we’re going to cover, we’re going to talk about why website conversions are important. We’re going to pinpoint what are the website fundamentals that you need to have and identify the critical elements needed to enhance conversions on your website. OK, so who am I? I’m Jason Lockhart, the owner of Kitchen & Bath Marketing Solutions and also the author of The Complete to Internet Marketing for the Kitchen and bath remodel Industry. We are an industry partner of the NKB. I am in NKBA sales and marketing specialist. This is a CEU and we are CEU providers and we have a number of CEUs on our website and on the NKBA website as well. I have spoken at the NKBA, the AIA American Institute of Architects, NKBA National Kitchen and Bath Association, ASID the American Society of Interior Designers and other industry events like the NCARB, and others like that. So in the US and also Europe, I have over 20 years practical experience as in an architecture firm. I’m also the part owner of an architectural firm here within the Dallas area. So this is not only marketing information, but we have the practical knowledge behind it as well. And I’ve taught at the School of Architecture and at the School of Interior Design, and so the university and at LSU, Louisiana State University. And I had also talked about being a partner in an architecture firm. All right. So if you have not already downloaded your book, it’s on this site right here. You can click there and download the book. If you’re watching this on the replay, you’ll actually have the video that is happening right now right next to the download. So that link will actually direct you to the video of this replay and the downloads will work. OK, so we’re going to start with why website conversions are important. So first of all, a Web site is necessary. You need to have a Web site and it is usually a big at the start, is usually an investment of time and money. Now, I’ve dealt with a lot of clients in the design and remodel industry. Some of them, one in particular, didn’t even have a website. They just had a Facebook business page and they were operating their whole business off of their Facebook business page. They were running ads. They were doing offers. They were posting any updates, anything. They did all of the marketing they did off of the Facebook. Facebook is a good platform, but you don’t want to put all your eggs in that basket because you do not own Facebook. So whether it ends up happening is that this client had one of their employees run ads, run Facebook ads, offer their Facebook profile, they use certain terminology that got the business page blocked. And so they didn’t have access to their Facebook business page for a couple of weeks and they lost a lot of business because they were not able to drive that same amount of traffic or refer people to that page. So owning your own website is important because you own the website and it’s your website, not like Facebook or Houzz or Instagram or Pinterest, where you can have business profiles, but you don’t own that platform. You own the website and like I said, it is usually a big investment to start up. Time and money and to maintain the website, it could be a pain but what happens is, that is a platform that you can draw people to your website. You can draw them to your website and you can convert them, and that happens a lot. Check out our SEO CEU as well, which is also on our website. But SEO is a great way to draw them to your website. But if you don’t really have a way to convert them, you are actually losing money. You’re not getting the most out of your return on investment on the website design. So the point of this session right here is to help you optimize your website so you can gain the best return on investment for that website design that you did. So this is why conversion is important. I’m going to give a little example, a real world example of a client we had, what happened when they optimized their website. So below is an example of a real world client, that we optimized their site, they came to us, they had a regular site, it was not optimized and what happened once we optimized site. So it is an area. They were averaging about five hundred visitors a month. And it was not quite five hundred, it was almost around 500, but bear with me. So they had a five percent conversion on the website, so that averaged out to around twenty five calls. And at a 20 percent conversion rate, that’s the average, the average is anywhere between twenty to twenty five percent. But we’re going to go on the conservative side and say 20 percent that turned out to about five booked projects a month at a seventy five hundred average project cost. That’s how much the designer that we work with, that’s how much their average project was. So that was seventy five hundred in transactional value. So that was on average thirty seven thousand five hundred monthly rent. That’s what happened from their website. Scenario two, once they brought us back. Or not, even if bringing us all, but once you optimize your website. So that’s saying five hundred, we took a snapshot of about 500 so we could compare. And from all the conversions and optimization, it turned into a 15 percent conversion. So that’s seventy five calls. And at that same 20 percent, that turned into 15 booked projects at the same seventy five hundred dollar transaction value. That was one hundred and twelve thousand five hundred monthly revenue. So at this conservative, very conservative scenario, the results tripled their leads and their revenue by getting the same transaction amount. We did SEO, we did increase the business, but we just compare it, just if we did the same amount of visitors they had before us once we optimize our website. That’s what happened. So this is what we’re going to talk about today. By optimizing your website, you can gain a lot of traction. You can gain more leads and more revenue from the same amount of traffic that you are getting without SEO just by optimizing your website. So let’s talk about the fundamentals. All right, so website fundamentals. Your website is your hub and that’s where everybody comes to where they should, as I had talked about, because you want to own the property. And you want to optimize your website so you can convert visitors, prospects into buyers. OK, so this is just an example of how you want to set up your website. So you want to have your primary contact details, so someplace and preferably you want to have a lot of this stuff above the phone. Above the phone means when someone enters into your website. This is the area they see without having to scroll. So you want to have a lot of this information that I’m talking about here. You want to have this information above the phone. So as soon as they come into your website, they can see your contact information, name and phone number. You know, you want to have the company name and logo someplace up here. And you can see this is right here. This is where we have this where we have the logo. This is where we have the contact information. Main navigation is information, so that’s the basics you want to have your home page, you want to have the about us, services, you want to have a gallery or a portfolio, you want to have testimonials. Now, you may not have a tab for that. You may have that on your home, but you need to have the testimonials, case studies like how you, how other clients, how you have dealt with them and what was the outcome and did the contacts, at a minimum. OK, so that’s what the navigation is. Authentic images. Now you want to have images that you’ve done, not images that you’ve got from another provider or you got from another designer or you got online, especially in, I’m going to talk about that a little later. A clear description of who you are and what you do, you want to have a clear description. So when people enter your website, they know why they come to your website and they know they’ve come to the right location. So you want to talk about who you are, what your company is all about, what your mission statement is and what you do. So if you focus on modern design or if you focus on Mediterranean or whatever type of style or design makes you focus on, do you only do? Bathroom design, you only do kitchen design, do you do a whole remodel design? What all that you do, you do from the ground up? You only do renovations, remodels. Explain that so the prospect can know immediately if they’re in the right spot because you don’t want somebody asking you for information, come to find out that you didn’t really explain yourself. And that’s really not a good lead because you don’t do exactly what they’re looking. They may be looking for Gothic design or a certain type of historic or contemporary design they might be looking for. And you need to be able to focus and have a specialization in that and not waste each other’s time. OK, so clear description, A ‘ Call at’ some place on the website, preferably like I see it in the above the phone area. You want to have a call to action where you can collect information and you want to tell people exactly what you want them to do. We’re going to talk about this a little later. But this is just basic foundational information, social media links. You want to have those someplace where you have Facebook, Instagram. If you have Twitter, Pinterest, Houzz whatever, you want to have those links. So end user, our prospect can immediately gain access to that. And the site needs to be mobile optimized. Over 80 percent of search today starts on a mobile device. So you want to make sure how your site looks on a desktop. It looks just as good, if not better, on a mobile device. Now we’re going to identify the critical elements needed to enhance conversions. First, you want to start with knowing who your client is, who is your client avatar? So you want to conduct an exercise and really understand your ideal client or your client avatar, what their traits are so you can speak to them. Now, if you did not watch, we did exercise on this in the CEU session in January on developing your marketing plan 2021. That’s a webinar that’s on our website, Free of Charge CEU, and we actually handed out workbook that went over a lot of this information. I dragged a lot of this information directly from that workbook. So I’m not going to go over this in detail because like I said, we did a webinar on this. So look at that. You can go over there and do that exercise, but you really got to know who your client avatar is because you got to know who you’re speaking to. And there was a worksheet that we had in there that you want to make several copies of this. So if you do different services, so you may do a virtual design, you may do a full remodel interior design, you may do home remodeling, you may do ground up. So for the different services that you do, you may or may not have different clients, but you can make a copy of these worksheets and develop who your client avatar is, because when you know who you’re talking to, you’re able to craft a message that speaks to them because there’s a lot of noise out. And when you’re able to craft a message that speaks to your end user, that speaks to your client avatar, to that prospect, they are more likely to engage with what you have to say. OK, so do this exercise. All right. Next, you want to be ready. Now, what I mean by ‘be ready’. Use authentic images of your team and of some of the work that you do. So like, for instance, you want to use information, you want to use imagery that you’ve done . Now, we’ve had some clients that are new in the design or the remodel field, and they don’t have any projects of their own. There’s a couple of options that you can do more than likely before you went out on your own. You worked at another design firm. So you can see and you can access your past employer if you can use some of their images and have a disclaimer on their saying that you were the project manager or whatever your role is and you led this project. While you worked at XYZ firm. So that has worked before. If you have an employee that does not want you to do that, which has happened before, what we told others to do is do a stage your own house, stage your house or one of your neighbor’s house, stage a room in their house and take photos so you can show the type of work that you would do. So this way you have authentic images of what you would do, not what of another designer and so this helps because what may attract prospects or end users to your site or to your properties or your platform. Social media is the image. And if the imagery was not done by you, then they may say, why am I hiring you if you are not the one who originally did this? So be real. Use your real image, your real authentic images of bathroom, kitchen design, home remodeling and have imagery of your thing. So let people know, get to know, like they trust you, because once prospects get to know ‘I can trust you’, that’s when they will buy. So let’s roll up your sleeves and let people get to know you and your team, show the images of your work, show the images of beauty that will attract others to you and to your website. Use video and multimedia. All right, so you want to develop a welcome video that explains your services to the prospect and what differentiates you from the competition. So what is your unique selling proposition, your USP? All right, what differentiates you from the competition? OK, these are just some examples of some of the clients we have Marlin’s Step by Step Design and Remodeling in Houston. And he did a welcome video that shows what he does. He has a background in architecture and he’s a home remodeler and he is in the Houston area, like I said, so he explains a little here on the job site. So he’s able to show what he does in real time. And he was also showing authentic images of him and his team working on a project in the background while this is another client of ours, she is in Chicago. It’s interesting because they are realtor. So they are commercial realtors, but they also have interior design. So they originally came to us to have us help them out with their realtor website. But then they went to the design realm where they also have interior designers as well. So we help them out there and so they did a welcome video. And so that’s just a little start to you. You just want to explain who you are and what differentiates you. And that also gives the end user, the prospect, a chance to get to know who you are because they want to know, like and trust you, because what has happened over the last year with the coronavirus. And we have to do a lot more of the virtual and not a lot of the in-person. Developing videos allows a person to really get to know you without having that personal contact. Now you want to get that personal contact, but you want them to know, like to trust you. And video is a great way. And this is one of the best ways to get your name out there. Get your business out there, prospects, marketing. OK, so use video and multimedia, OK? Leverage your social proof. OK. So what you wanted to do here. You want to showcase your online reviews prominently, someplace on your homepage. Now, there’s a number of tools out there. Birdeye, ReviewBuzz, but there’s others out there, they also have some free options or they have 30 day options where you can use their software for free. I usually only recommend options that are free or that have 30 day option that you can use and try it out. If we suggest paid options, I’m not going to really recommend those. I have clients that use a lot of the paid option but if you want to know more, reach out to us and we’ll be happy to share. But what I’m going to share here is more of the free options or if they have a 30 day free trial, that you can demo the product. But what happens is if you use either of these two products is that they put a widget on your website where once a client fills out a form whether that is on Google or Facebook or Houzz or any of the other sites that it automatically shows up on your website as well. So this is just an example right here, so you can see here they filled out the review on Google and it automatically shows up. So what these platforms also do, which help you, which we also talk about review management, because you want to keep a keen eye on what others are saying about your business and you want to understand what is being said, how is being portrayed in the marketplace. So these also have good review management tools. So you can search the Internet and the Web to see what others are saying out there about your business and you can’t address it immediately because when people write your review within twenty four hours, you want to try to respond. I know that’s not always possible, but if you can’t, you want to try to respond within twenty four hours. Now, some of these review platforms, while we also recommend them because they have automatic response. I’m not going to get too much into this, but depending on the level, that is the type of answer that you could say a generic message. Thank you for your review, we welcome. If they have a five star, more than likely they’re going to say something nice. Four star will have something else, at the three star and below what actually happened with a lot of these platforms, they’ll refer them to a form where they can fill out what happened and why as opposed to having them write a review and that helps you because you want to try to minimize the negative reviews. Now they will have and I’m going to talk about this in just a second, but negative reviews will happen but you want to try to minimize those and if you have a system whereby which if you see a three star below that, it automatically directs them to where they can fill out a form and explain why the review is the way it is now. You can address as opposed to having them have a review and you may be able to turn that three star into a five star. But even if you get the three or the two or the one star, you want to reply to that review immediately as fast as you can, because what happens is other prospects will see that no business is perfect but how you address that concern, how you address that issue can go a long way into others trusting what you do, that you take accountability for the work that you do. We actually had a client that had a one star review. They responded immediately. They work with the client that they had, they turned it around. They end up a few months later writing another review, a five star review, explaining how they helped and handled their issue. And they actually got other prospects because of that particular review, not because of the five stars but because of the one star that turned into a five star. And one of the prospects said that they went with that designer because they saw how they handled the situation. And they know all businesses will not get all five star reviews. That’s just not possible, because the longer you’re in this business, you’re not going to make everybody happy. So how they handle this, how they handled that situation was the reason that they got that other client. So being able to respond to reviews is important. Like I said, within twenty four hours, it’s ideal. I know that’s not always possible, but by using some of these platforms, it allows you to automate a lot of that process and helps you do a lot of things that you would have to do. So make sure to leverage your social proof by having some type of widget or even if you don’t have widget, somehow have the reviews that you get in other places, whether they be Facebook or Google, have those on your website someplace. Get the basics in order. Now, this was a little bit about what we had talked about with the foundational piece, but you want to make sure at a minimum that you have the phone number. Somewhere in the above the phone area, like I said, the above the phone area is the top before you have to scroll up and down. So you want to make sure that the phone number is at the top of your website somewhere, usually most websites have it in the upper right hand corner. And you want to make sure it’s clickable, because when people come to your website from a mobile device, you want them to be able to click on that number and call. OK, that is a small tweak that we’ve seen, jump the number of conversions, because sometimes people may really like what you have on your site and want to call and talk to you. And they may not want to scroll down. They’ll have to find your number and if it’s easily accessible right at the top and it’s clickable and that may be the call that you may have missed out o. If it’s not clickable. OK. Have a web form for people to fill out. OK, now this is as we talk about this is the call to action that we had talked about. And what you would also do, add credibility, so you want to have authority symbols for if you’re a member of the ASID, the AIA, the NKBA, if you won any Houzz awards, NKBA awards, any ASID or AIA Awards, if you have a BBB recommendation or badge, you want to have that on. So any type of awards are authority symbols. You want to have those prominently on your Web site because that helps to differentiate you from others. That helps to show that you are a credible designer, you’re a credible remodeler and that you are somebody that can be trusted because remember, people want to know, like and trust you before they work with you and that and having those symbols can help. So this is one of our clients here in Chicago. This is one of the ones that did the video that I had mentioned. And you can see here that they have the clickable number at the top. They have the Web form where people can fill out information and make comments or whatever, and they have a call to action here, which did not show up on this slide. I mean, on this because it’s a movable aspect, but it encouraged and engaged the user to have them fill out that form. And it was a call to action to have them do something. And that’s what you want to make sure that you have people have a form where they can do something. You want to tell people what you want them to do. Because most people, if they like what you have, if they like what you’re showing, they like the imagery, but if you don’t tell them what you want them to do, they’re not going to do it. I can’t tell you how many videos I’ve seen where at the end, great video, awesome information. But at the end, they didn’t have anything about if you like this information, subscribe if you like this, whatever. Just tell people what you want them to do. OK. Speaking of that, we’re talking about the call-to-action. Each page that speaks to your prospect and client avatar should have a clear call-to-action and tell people exactly what you want them to do. So whether it is to download a guide or download whatever offer that you have, and we’re going to talk about that, because that’s one of the things you should have. You should have some type of special offer to talk about that. Where do you want them to visit your website? So if they’re on YouTube or if they’re on Facebook or if they’re on LinkedIn and you have an article or blog and just something you should do, too, if you have a long form blog, you could put a snippet of that as one of your social media posts and if you have five ways that you can make your space large, five ways to enhance your remodel or five things to look for in a design, or what are the top colors to look for in, you know, in 2021, whatever it is, whatever that blog is, if you take a snippet of it where you have intrigued saying we talked about the top design tips to do X, Y, Z, but if you want to know more go to our website. So that’s a way to have information or post on someplace else, on some other platform and draw them back to your website, but you want to tell them what you want them to do. That’s your call action. If you want to know more visit our website. If you want to know more, download this guide, contact us like and share if you’re on social media, like and share this post if you want to learn more, watch a video. Subscribe to our newsletter. So tell people what you want them to do, because a lot of times that is where a lot of people that we’ve seen drop the ball. If they have good information, they have good offers, good imagery, but then they drop the ball in the call action, telling people what they want them to do. So just remember, have that call to action and what do you want them to do? Download this, contact us here, like , share here, learn more, visit, watch, subscribe. What do you want them to do? Right. Showcase special offers. Now, what we were just talking about on the other side use special offers and coupons so you can match services or products because you may sell furniture or products to your ideal client or client avatar. And what is the need for what? So you can match it up to what their need is or what they’re looking for. So if you are a designer that has a showroom, you may be having a special sale on a certain type of furniture or a certain type of lighting that you may want to promote either on your website or on your newsletter. So that’s where, that’s the special one. Now we work with designers that don’t have their own showroom, what they do is they work with other showrooms or they work with their manufacturers. So what happens in that case is they may reach out to the manufacturers that they work with or the showrooms that they work with and see what type of offers they are having that month. And then those offers that you could put on your website to encourage people to work with you because you may have a special type of lighting that are in use or a prospect was looking at that draws them to your website or draws them to you as the designer or somebody else because you work with a certain type of manufacturer or furniture designer or what have you that one of the other designers does not work with. So that may put you ahead of other designers and other remodelers. So having those special offers can help to draw people to your site. So, like I said, if you do not have your own showroom, get with another showroom or get with manufacturers to see what type of special offers they have that you may be able to offer on your site. OK. Mobile optimized website. I address this in the foundational piece and the fundamentals, but I can’t stress this enough. Over 80 percent of search starts on a mobile device. So you want to make sure that your website is mobile optimized with easy to click call function. So that is having a website and having a phone number somewhere at the top, preferably, like I said, upper right hand corner, because that’s where most people see it, or upper left or wherever. But make sure it’s clickable because over 80 percent of search starts on a mobile device. So this is just an example here. So you see how the site looks on the desktop. OK, but you want to make sure on a mobile device it looks that way or if not better. Because like I say, over 80 percent of search starts on a mobile device, so you want to make sure that your website looks just as good, if not better, on that mobile device. So test it out when you’re optimizing your website, make sure to test out how your website looks on a mobile device, because that is one of the key factors which we’ll talk about in the second chapter. And like I said, we also have SEO CEU, which is on our website. But how your Web site performs on mobile devices is a ranking factor because the client experience is important to the search engines. And if they are having a hard time finding things on your website, it’s clunky, loads slow, which we’re going to talk about, too. Low speed, that hurts your rankings. So being a mobile optimized is good for SEO, but it’s also good for the end user because you want to make sure that client and user experience is top notch. It is a plus. And mobile optimization is everywhere nowadays. Honestly, a lot of the sites we designed, we designed mobile first, then desktop, because we know most of the search will start on a mobile device. So if we know that we designed the site for a mobile device first and then see how it looks on a desktop. Second, we have our bases covered. So make sure your site is mobile optimized. I cannot stress this enough. This is a ranking factor. This will lose you prospects because if people come to your site and it’s clunky on the mobile device, which 80 percent search start with, you just lost a potential prospect. Use a live chat feature. Now, there’s a lot of them out there, and live chat, you want to make sure that you have some way to communicate with your prospect even when you’re not there. So you may have people search for your website after hours. They may be working all day long. They haven’t had a chance to look at the designer. This is an example, husband and wife are talking about doing a kitchen remodel. And then the husband asks the wife. See if you could search for some designers that we can interview. The day goes by, nobody does the research, but then after hours, the husband comes home and asks the wife. Did you have a chance to look at any of the designs or the wife come home and ask the husband. Have you had a chance to look at any of designs? And they are like, no, we’ve been working, busy day, had to pick up the kids, whatever. And so now they look after hours. So that was after 5:00 that time you may not be in office. Your team may not be in office, but they’re looking for websites and they’re searching in their local area for designers. They see several websites, they see a website that they like. In your website that has a chatbot or that has some type of chat feature where they can ask questions and now they can get immediate answers, because even though you’re not there or your team is not there, you have a system, an automated system, acting on the backend to answer questions, and so with chat bot and from chatbox, are not new. They’ve been out for a while, but a lot of designers and remodelers do not used it, which I don’t understand why, but because the advancements of the features and how they operate has completely grown from over a year ago. They do a lot more now than they used to. And so now you can put a feature on your site and you can have ready made answers based on what people type. So if they ask what is your hours of operation, automatic type, you know, eight to five on Central Time or eight to five East Coast time, or this is and afterwards say, is there anything else we can help? This is our number. Check out our portfolio for or check out the testimonials from other users so you can have videos where as people are typing in, you can have the chat, say, well, if you’re interested in this, see what other past clients have said about us. And you can have video pop up and have them play. So just that right there without them having to scroll through. Just because I may not scroll to see every page, they may only look at the home page. And if you have that out there, you may be able to pool some of the other information that’s relevant, like the testimonials, like the welcome video and for that are on other pages, Internet chat box feature. So there’s a lot of things that you can do with a chatbot that helps you communicate with the prospect that can help you convert on the backend. And like I said, there’s a lot of chat automated systems out there. And we didn’t want to recommend any because there’s a lot of them out there. But if you reach out to us, we have some recommendations that we have offered to our own clients. But believe me, there’s a lot. There’s a few out there that actually have 30 day demos as well. But honestly, with a chatbot I would air on that, because to really get the most out of the chat, but you really got to put in a lot of effort. So you got to you have to actually write in the answers, the typical answers, like, what’s the time of day? Or I mean, what? I mean, what’s your office hours are are what are your services or what are your specializations? Who are you? So you got to actually put in a lot of this information to get the most benefit out of the chatbot. So to use one of the 30 day trials and put all that front end information. And if you don’t use it, I mean, you can still take that same information and apply it to another. But I would suggest if you’re going to put that time in first, find the right chatbot that’s right for you. Or if you’re going to do the 30 day trial, see if they have a way that you can try it out on either another system or another way you can try it out to see which one you like the best and then go that way. But having a chat feature on your website is vital because you are not going to always be there or your team will not always be there. People will reach out to you after hours and you want to make sure that if they do, they could get the information they need so they can make an informed decision about if you’re the designer or the home remodeler that they want to go. That helps to differentiate you from others in the field, because, like I said, not a lot of designers are remodelers have chatbots on their website. So this can help you. This can help differentiate you from others that have an online booking option. So you want to have prospects be able to book appointments, which you all like we talked about with Chatbot, because you may be reached after hours so you can integrate this with your chatbot as well. But you want to have an option where if they reach you after hours, whether it’s a prospect or a client, they can see your schedule and book on your schedule without having to interact with either your office manager, one of your team members, or one of your other designers or you. So have some type of online booking option. And there’s a lot of options out there. Calendly is one that has a great free option. There’s other options out there and if you want to know some of the options that we recommend, because there is one specifically that we recommend for designers that if you want to know, just let us know and we’ll be happy to answer. But having a way to book an appointment with you online is important because like I said, after hours they can reach out to you and can book whether you’re in the office or whether your team is in office. These two systems integrate with one another and they are automated systems, which we’re going to talk about a little later that do all of this that can help you. Those are a little more pricey. But at the end of the day, tomorrow, I may be working. If you can convert one or two more people, it may be working. Remember, site speed matters now, we talked about this earlier on how fast your website loads affects ranking and user experience. A slow loading website makes prospects more likely to leak and look for someone else. So you want to take a look at some of these tools that we talk about here. So GTmatrix.com is a website that you can use. All of these are free options. Everything here is for GTmetrics.com is what we use a lot. GTmetrics.com shows you the speed of your site and it gives you an overall grade for your website, not just sites, but it looks at the images. It looks at how fast they load. It looks at the size of the images. It looks at the back end of your website, the code, which I’m not going to get too technical, but it is the schema data, right, in terms of SEO. So it helps and gives you a grade A through F. A is obviously excellent. F is obviously bad, but it gives you a grade on your website on how well your site performs, not just in speed but overall operation. This GTmetrics.com is a free website. This is what we use. Developers.Google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ so this is the site by Google, the largest search engine out there tell you how fast you are, your site now, GTmetrics and google, honestly, is almost the same. It has happened, but I’ve rarely seen where they were off, but there they are right within each other. So you can use either. Some people like to use Google because they are the number one search engine. So this is their site you could put in there. Now, this is only sites. This is just showing you sites. They have other tools for other things that GTmetric measures. But this is only site speed for Google and then you have SiteChecker.pro/speed-test/, another just for speed to show how fast your website loads. Now SiteChecker.pro also like GTmetrics, has other avenues that they grade, but preferably we like GTmetrics the best and it has a great free option, has a good paying option as well, but as a great free option where you can see an overall grade of how your site performs. And it also tells you what you need to fix and what you need to work as well. Engage with your prospects. So now this is marketing automation, so using SMS and phone in your marketing automation software to engage with your prospects. There are a number of solutions out there. But like I say, conduct your own research so you can find the tool that is right for you. And like, there’s not a lot of free options for marketing automation, to be honest. There are some demos, very few I’ve seen that are over a few days a week at the most. There is one I saw that was a month. I don’t know if they still have that, but marketing automation is excellent and something that you want to try to incorporate into your site. Now, this is a paid feature that you may want to look at this at the long term, because this will cost you, but you should receive ROI while if you choose the right marketing automation software, like I said, if you do your research and you’re confused because there was a lot out there, you don’t know which one to go. Let us know. We’ll be happy to help you with this because we have a few that we recommend. We actually have tool that we recommend to our clients depending on what their needs are. And each of them costs a different amount. But they have seen a great ROI from the usage because it helps to automate a lot of the things that we just talked about, like what we talked about when I mentioned reviews, there’s with good marketing automation software, reviews automated, where as soon as a review happens, you can have an automated message that heads out or when a review happens and alerts you. So you can reply to that message. With good marketing automation, you can reach out to prospects if they input their information, which are call-to-action, which you should have it automatically email or text message to them. Thank you for filling out this form. If you want more information, visit here. If you join our newsletter, more information. So you’re staying on top of the prospect because remember, at marketing, you have to touch the person several times or more for them to really engage with you. For them to really want to do business, which you have to touch a person multiple times, rarely is the case that a prospect will see your offer, see what you do and call it. It happens but that is the exception to the rule. OK, that is not the norm. Normally, you’re going to have to touch the person over and over again. And the best cost effective way to do that, as opposed to using your team members or you do it, is to use some type of marketing automation, too, so you can consistently be in front of prospects and potential clients. So, like I said, marketing, automation, we use this on our own and a lot of our clients do as well. So if when you do your research, if you’re confused, there are so many options. There are a lot of options. But reach out to us. We’ll be happy to help you make the right informed decision for your particular situation. OK. So let’s review what we talked about, website optimization. So you want to ensure that you are speaking to your target avatar, to your target audience, so you want to do the exercise like we talked about. If you have not seen the webinar, we dis, this is also a CEU about developing your 2021 marketing plan. Check our website, and we also have if you head back to one of the slides here and also in your workbook, we actually have the Avatar workshop that you should do for each of your services so you can develop an avatar. And once you develop your avatar, you actually have notes that you can then write the content for your website, for your blog, for your social media posts. You’re speaking to your audience because there’s a lot of noise and the more that you can speak to your audience, to your ideal client avatar, the easier it is for them to relate to you, know, like and trust you and to use you as a designer over others. Be real, use authentic images. Talk about these. Use images that you’ve done of work that you’ve done in the past and your team. Use video and multimedia images and multimedia elements, so you want to do a welcome video explaining who you are. You want to explain what differentiates you from others, leverage social proof. So you want to have all of your reviews, you want to somehow showcase them on your website where you use one of the tools that we recommended or whether you just place the testimonials on your website. I mean, that’s the easiest thing to do. Get the basics in order. We have talked about inner foundation and just the basics. You know, you want to have the name, number, you want to have a clickable name, you want to have mobile optimized, you want to have call-to-action. It may be in the evening. It may be on the weekend. It may be a holiday. Your team may have off that day. You may not be able to get on to the phone. They may not even call. They just may want to look at your website and see that you have a chat or some type of communication feature that they can then communicate with you and find out the information that they want to find, which may in turn lead to the reaching out to you by phone. Have some type of booking option so they can book online, so whether that be free software like Calendly, which integrates with a lot of the software that I talked about, and there’s a lot of other free options, but Calendly is one of the most dominant. But you want to make sure that people can book with you or with your team whether that is a prospect looking to do business with you or a client looking to have an update from you on what’s happening with the project, make sure there’s some type of booking action on your site. Remember, site speed matters is the ranking factor, so how fast your site loads is important. There’s a number of sites that we talk about that you want to use and put in your site there because site speed matters and engage your prospect. Marketing automation is vital. And if you’re growing, marketing automation is important because being able to automate a lot of these processes is helpful to take a lot of the marketing, promotion, PR and all that off your hands and off your team hands and put it in an automated software. Now, there are aspects you may not want to automate. You may not want to automate everything, but if you automate aspects of the process, that lessens what you have to do and what you are doing when your team engages. Now, it’s more one on one with people that are interested because you want to automate the looky loos. The people that may not be interested are just looking to see the information. But then once you take it to that next step, could remember I said it takes seven to 10 plus touch points for you to have people engage with you. So if you can have the first five to seven words automated to a certain extent, and then they are still showing interest, now, you or your team could get involved and now they have that human touch point in the game. All right. So what website optimization action item. You’re going to take a look back over all of the things I talk about and look at three initiatives that you’re going to implement to optimize your website. Now, I know there’s 12 things we talked about you won’t be able to do. All of them are if you can do all of them. That’s awesome, because that means that you are really looking to move your business forward and get to that next level. But at a minimum, look and check all three of them that you want to write down here. You want to start. And identify people on your team or people externally, whether it’s an agency or whether it’s somebody else that you know, that can help you start to implement and move this forward, because as I showed that first example. With the same amount of traffic that you get to your website, if you do a little optimization here and there, you can convert more people and gaining more leads and more business without having to spend a lot more money. So just by optimizing your Web site and doing some of these tweaks that we talked about here can help you enhance your website, enhance the lead flow and getting you more business at the end of the day, because otherwise what it’s all about as a business owner, if you’re not making money, you’re in a hurry. So we are here to help you take that next level. OK. So what we talked about why website conversions are important. I went over that example of scenario one where they made thirty seven thousand, roughly, and then we tripled it by the optimization to over one hundred thousand. Pinpointed the fundamentals, one of the fundamental things you have to have on your website name, number, call to action of some sort. What are the fundamentals? Make sure you have those. And we identified the critical elements that are needed to enhance conversion. So if you implement a lot of this or like I say, just three of these things, just move it slow. You can’t do it all at once, do it slowly, move, do three things now that you can do, which you will have to spend a lot of time, a lot of money, or you can have your team do that without spending a lot of time and money, then move to the next. Then over time you have all in and now you’re starting to optimize that or that you have to build the website. OK. So any questions? So if you are looking to have someone help you get in contact with us at the number here, 18005165773. You can reach out to our team and schedule an appointment with us. This is our call to action because we know a lot of this information you may need some help with. You may not be able, you may be one of the go getters out there that can analyze information, develop a plan of action and implement if that’s perfect. If not, if you need a little more handholding. That’s why kitchen and bath marketing solutions is here. We help designers and remodelers all across the country. We’ve been in this industry for over two decades. And we’ve had the firm. We’ve had this program for over a year. And we help. We have design or remodel clients all over the country, Texas, Louisiana, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, Arkansas, Maine. So we clients. So we are here to help. Whether you just want to have a consultation. We offer free consultations, 30 minute consultation. We just unpack what’s happening in your business and understand to see if it’s a right fit, because we do not work with everybody, because once we work with a firm, we have a 20 mile radius where we won’t work with anybody else. So it’s just not for you to see if it’s a good fit for you, for us to see if you’re a good fit for us, because we don’t work with everybody. But we are here to help. And even if we do not work, would you go to our resource library on our website, Kitchen and Bath Marketing Solutions. Com? or you also here to the acronyms? KABMS.com/Resource Library, one of the tabs. There’s a wealth of information, free information that we’ve developed since the coronavirus since last year. We add new free information in here every week. Free training webinars, free informational articles, free guides. We do CEUs for the NKBA on an ongoing basis and all of that is on our website. So go to our resource library. So whether we work with you or not, we have information to help you grow. So I am Jason Lockhart, and if we can help you out in any way, get in touch. We want to help you and we hope you’ve enjoyed this session and have a good day. Bye. 

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