You've mastered the business of making and selling building materials. You've helped many people to solve their problem with your product. You provide valuable products for distributors to sell and contractors to rely on.
Building a successful website, on the other hand, hasn't gone so well for you. Even if you’ve spent a lot of money building a beautiful, well-designed website with all the visual bells and whistles, there’s still a chance that no one will visit it.
No need to take a wrecking ball to that website, however. Help is on the way.
Here are some reasons why your site might be flying under your customers’ radars, and some actionable tips for bringing that valuable traffic in.
1. You're not ranking high enough in Google or other search engines.
These days, most individuals with questions about building materials look for answers on the Internet. In fact, they're looking for answers right now. Unfortunately, they're not finding you because your website is not coming up in search engine results. Or, even worse, they're searching for answers on their mobile device and your site isn't mobile-friendly.
You can fix poor search engine rankings by optimizing your website and its content. Start by researching relevant and valuable keywords to find out what language your potential customers use while using Google, then craft content around that material.
For example, after conducting keyword research, you discover searchers use the phrase "retaining wall blocks" nearly 15 times more often than "cinder block retaining wall." When you create a blog post or product description, you'll have better optimization if you naturally work in the phrase "retaining wall blocks."
On a technical level, there are measures you can take to ensure that Google and other search engines can properly index your site. Make sure all of your pages have the proper meta data in place and that your images include alt tags. Search engines favor sites that load quickly, and preference is now given to sites that are mobile-friendly.
2. You're not optimizing the quality of your content.
Search engine optimization is more complex than throwing in a few well-placed terms in your blog posts. These days, search engines have sophisticated enough algorithms in place that they can tell whether the quality of your content is up to par.
You can improve SEO and increase traffic by going through old posts and updating, upgrading, and republishing them. This can be especially useful for posts that already rank on pages 2 or 3 of search engines. By improving the quality of the information, you are providing and giving the content a more recent publication date, you’ll be rewarded for good and fresh content.
You can also look at your competitors' high-ranking posts that need improvement and improve upon the topic yourself. You would, of course, publish them on your site. This helps you better compete for the relevant keywords, and it gives you the opportunity to establish yourself as the expert in your industry.
Keep in mind that quality doesn’t automatically ensure the #1 spot in Google search results. It will take time for search engines to index your site, and you may not see an immediate improvement in your rankings. But if you continue to publish high-quality content regularly, you will see the fruits of your labor in the long term.
3. You're not promoting your website on social media.
Who would follow a building materials company on social media? Don't overthink this. If you said the thousands of architects and contractors who want to improve the quality of their materials, then you'd be correct.
If your building materials company doesn't have social media accounts, get them. If your building materials company already has social media accounts, start using them more effectively.
Use these suggestions for getting traffic to your website using social media.
- Start with one platform and master it before moving to the next platform. Begin with platforms whose demographics match your target audience.
- Use social media tools to get followers. Don't be afraid to hire an agency to take on the heavy lifting of building and maintaining your online presence.
- Provide value. Most businesses repel customers on social media because they spam their followers with sales pitches and product offers. A better use of social media is providing value—good customer service goes a long way, and your customers will appreciate being able to get quick answers to their questions.
- Use paid advertising. Incrementally increase social media engagement with social media ads. Ads are relatively inexpensive and allow you to target a specific audience that might not otherwise find you organically.
4. You're not putting your website address on printed materials.
Even in the digital age, customers will still pick up an old-fashioned piece of paper to find deals or information about the products they might be spending their money on.
Imagine Bobby Builder comes across your line of, let’s say, window treatments at a distributor’s location and grabs a flier on different types of vertical blinds to take back to his wife. Mrs. Builder is impressed by your knowledge of these materials and wants to order 3 large blinds for the bedrooms in her new home.
She needs one question answered, however, before she orders.
Where does she go first for the answer? The Internet.
And does she know your website address? No, because you didn't include it on the flier. And if your site isn’t optimized as outlined above, she might not be able to find it on Google either.
Luckily for her, she eventually finds your competitor's website and gets her answers from them, so she decides to purchase her blinds from them as well.
This problem is easy to fix. Put your website address on all printed materials and make sure there is never a doubt of where to find you online.
What To Do If You're Getting Traffic To Your Website But Not Generating Leads
Maybe you are getting enough traffic to your site, but the visitors are just not sticking around. Page views aren’t turning into leads or sales. This is another variation of the traffic problem that we hear a lot about from building materials manufacturers.
But don't fret. Your site simply needs a bit of renovating.
If you look at your website with a critical eye, some issues will make themselves immediately apparent. The standards of the modern consumer are high, especially those who have spent more of their life with the Internet than without it. If your website looks unprofessional or outdated, is difficult to navigate, or is littered with errors, people will not stick around to find out how great your building materials are.
A high bounce rate—that is, the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then immediately leave it without navigating further—might also indicate that you are not providing value to website visitors. Every blog post you write should teach them something. Every page should answer a question and tell them what to do next. Once you've become the likeable authority online, the leads and sales will come.
