Many construction businesses fail to see that a website build involves more than just a great design and launch date; therefore this blog post breaks down a few elements to consider when implementing a design plan or creative concept for your construction website.
Fail to do this and you’ll end up paying for an expensive website that consistently under-performs and isn’t fit for purpose.
1. Review your current website
Walk a mile in your customers shoes – how does your current website perform? What makes it useful to prospects? Is it easy to navigate? What standard of content are you currently producing? This will help you to determine what success looks like and where the gaps lie for further improvement.
2. Align your business objectives
There are too many businesses out there who, when asked why they need a website, cannot provide a straightforward answer. Whilst a range of construction organisations will have websites to serve different purposes, ensure you know exactly what your business objectives are and how a new website will help to achieve them.
3. Outline & prioritise your marketing goals
Whether your marketing goals are to sell more products online, present yourselves as thought leaders, attract new customers or increase lead generation (or a combination of these), you need to outline what these are and prioritise them. This will then help you to define which call-to-actions are required across the website to encourage the user to complete a specific goal. Discussions at this point will help to steer the way a website is designed and structured going forward.
4. Review Keyword Rankings
Do you show up in search for any key terms? Which keywords do your competitors rank highly for? Every piece of content on your website needs to work hard to be seen by those that matter. No matter how great your website is, it’s of little value without effective SEO implementation. Outline your priority keywords from the very beginning alongside an effective content strategy in order to keep SEO implementation consistent and focused.
5. Create a supporting content strategy
Alongside call-to-actions, the content you create is the most crucial element to driving these marketing goals and encouraging visitors to take the next step. Create a content strategy that specifies what type of content will be useful to your target clients at various stages of the construction buying process. How will your website support and engage your target audience throughout this cycle? Will you focus on blog posts, case studies, CAD datafiles or technical whitepapers? Check out our Content Marketing eBook for more information on this.
6. Brainstorm where the content needs to sit
Whilst the content strategy should support the type of product and service you offer, where will content sit on your website in order to improve the user journey and encourage them to stay on your website for longer? How will it encourage them to re-visit and refer your website to others? Ensure that this ‘resource’ or ‘insights’ section becomes a place where a growing portfolio of content can be easily organised, for the benefit of both website visitors and search engines. After all, this will become the most valuable section of your lead generating website.
7. Discuss useful website tools
Consider which tools will be most beneficial to your audience – what would provide them with further technical support, product training or simply ease the specification process? This could be a simple yet effective system selector, a U-value coverage calculator or project portal.
8. Use email marketing automation
Marketing automation is a powerful tool for creating detailed customer profiles based on their behaviour, enabling you to send out targeted emails based on what your audience requires. With this intelligence, every email message can be aligned to key decision-making moments within the construction buying cycle. By implementing a CRM such as Salesforce that integrates with your website, this will enable you to make additional offers to prospects that will convert them to higher levels of engagement.
9. Integrate with social media
Social media is a crucial element to sharing and promoting content based on your website to directly engage and attract prospects. Extend the boundaries of lead generation by ensuring you’re not only aware of the best platforms to engage upon for your audience, but also how social media is implemented into your website design. Check out our Social Media eBook here for more information.
10. Optimise your website design
Whilst your new website must reflect your brand identity in the best way possible – ensure you aren’t sacrificing performance over looks. Your website needs to be optimised not only for desktop but also for mobile and tablet devices, in order to ensure the user receives a flawless experience regardless of the device they’re using. If you fail to do so, this will also affect your search rankings within Google.
By outlining the above we can now see that a lead generation website involves more than creating a stream of effective wireframes. Whilst this blog covers a detailed overview of our top considerations when implementing a website build, our brand new eBook also covers the creation of website goals, creating the right type of content, search optimisation and social media implementation for your construction website.
