1. It’s no longer accepted as professional to use these types of e-mail addresses for business communications.
2. E-mail addresses are generally provided on business cards and websites. Your e-mail address might be part of the first impression you make on a homeowner.
3. Generally, only an unsophisticated and/or very small business wouldn’t have the knowhow and/or resources to have company domain e-mail.  Even if you are a professional and sophisticated business owner, the use of a consumer type e-mail address says otherwise.
4. Consumer e-mail accounts are so easy to open and close that these types of e-mail accounts can give the impression you are not an established or stable business.
5. Have you ever noticed that so much of the spam you get is sent with Gmail and similar kinds of e-mail accounts?  If you are using a Gmail or similar type of account for business, your e-mails run the risk of looking like they may be spam and either being ignored or stopped by spam filters.

Looking at this screenshot, which of these e-mail addresses look like they come from a serious, professionally run and established remodeling business?

OK, now let’s imagine that you are looking for a new certified public accounting firm because your last one didn’t do such a great job.  You are given e-mail addresses of three accountants by friends.  Each friend said they were happy with the work done for them.

Which of these accountants would you want doing your personal and business tax returns based on their e-mail addresses?

John8542@hotmail.com

John-cpa-associate-pros@hotmail.com

John@cpa-associate-pros.com

Now if you picked the first or second e-mail address, which accountant would you want with you if you get audited?

So, getting back to remodeling firm e-mail, you can see why you want to make sure you use an e-mail address that uses your company’s website domain, such as David@continuum-remodeling.com.

If you already have a company domain, getting e-mail addresses with your domain name is simple.  In many cases your website development and/or web hosting company can provide them to you.  If not, the company you have your domain registered with can provide them to you.  There are companies that specialize in e-mail hosting and almost any IT consultant can set you up with domain-based e-mail.

At Continuum, we think domain based e-mail is so important we provide free e-mail hosting to all our webhosting clients. Contact us if we can help you with Web and e-mail hosting.

1.   Once you know the homeowner is dissatisfied, you have the opportunity to contact them and see if there is something you can do to improve their satisfaction. Perhaps you didn’t even know they were unhappy and can easily remedy the problem. Once you have fixed the problem, you can ask them if they would consider adjusting their rating.

2.  Several good online consumer ratings will generally neutralize one bad online rating. Most people who see online ratings expect to see, even for the best companies, a small percentage of bad online ratings. In fact if you have only good ratings it can make your ratings look like they have been artificially influenced. So if you are lucky enough to have 10 online ratings with four and five stars, and one rating with one star or two stars, it’s not a big deal.

People will just assume that the bad review came from a malcontent. However, they may read the reason why the person was unhappy in the review and be concerned about that reason. In that case, you just want to make sure that you have a good explanation ready for why the problem occurred and how you tried to resolve the matter should any future prospect inquire.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

We suggest you remember “ESS,” “Educate, Sensitize, and Sell.” Homeowners today want help making intelligent decisions about what they buy and from whom. So the best way to sell is to help homeowners make the right decisions. You can educate them in all sorts of ways about remodeling, selecting a remodeler, design trends, green remodeling, and a whole host of other topics homeowners would be grateful to receive information about.

But beyond educating, you probably also want to help sensitize homeowners to things they should be concerned about so that they can weed out those remodelers who are less likely to provide them with a quality project and an enjoyable experience.

This does not mean bad-mouthing others in your industry. It does mean acquainting homeowners to the dangers and downsides of hiring unlicensed and uninsured remodelers, perhaps remodelers with lower qualifications, or remodelers that do not have a well-oiled team working for them, as well as a whole lot of other things that a homeowner should know in order to make a wise decision when they select a remodeler.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

The first site map, the one people use, needs to be simple, straightforward, and well-organized. The second site map, sometimes called an XML site map, is for search engines and search engine optimization. This site map tells the search engines what pages you think are most important, least important, and how often the search engines should check for updates on a given page. The last type of site map is of value, for search engine optimization purposes, if you have videos on your website. There is a special format for video site maps that tells the search engines what they need to properly index videos on your website. The fact that you have videos on your website also helps your site in search engine optimization by improving its ranking… At least as long as videos are not on all websites.

If you have any questions about this or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions contact us.

Now it is important for you to have a strategy for online consumer ratings relative to where people post their rating.
Since consumer ratings, both quantity and quality, help determine your ranking on rating websites such as Google Places, you may want to direct your satisfied clients to provide you a review on Google Places. Or, you may wish not to recommend where people review you, unless they have no idea where to provide a consumer rating. The theory behind not directing people to a specific ratings site is that your clients will go to the sites where they would normally go to seek other consumer ratings for other businesses. In some parts of the country, Google Places might be the dominant ratings destination, whereas in others it might be Yelp or Angie’s List or some other rating site.

Our suggestion is to simply ask people where they would likely rate you, and if they do not know, then you can suggest a source to them. Once you know you have good ratings at a particular site, you can suggest on your remodeling company website that people go to that source to find reviews about you.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions contact us.

The benefits of PPC for remodeler marketing are that it is highly localize-able, controllable, quick to roll out, and you only pay for clicks. However, you still have to do keyword research, write ads, create landing pages that are similar to what you need for SEO remodeler marketing, tweak and modify the program over time, and of course you could end up paying for a lot of clicks that generate no leads. Therefore, when doing PPC, it is extremely important that you also do website optimization to make sure that your landing pages and website make the best use of every click you pay for.

The benefits of SEO for remodeling company marketing is that it is long-term, you don’t have to pay for clicks (especially ones that don’t turn into sales), and it can be less expensive for similar or better results. Furthermore, remodeler SEO efforts build upon themselves so that the longer you use SEO, the better your results. SEO also lasts longer than a pay per click program which is either on or off. Perhaps most importantly, SEO results show up in organic searches, where most people prefer to click, rather than sponsored links and ads.

In that ideal world of remodeler marketing, one would kick-start an online marketing program with a PPC marketing program while at the same time developing and executing an SEO marketing program. If done properly, you will be able to determine which keywords yield high organic rankings via SEO and therefore for which you can stop using, and paying for, PPC. As the SEO program for your remodeling firm continues, you can build your rankings for many of your keywords with SEO and stop paying for those keywords in your PPC program.

Eventually, you may find that there are some important keywords that, no matter what you try, you cannot feasibly rank high in the organic listings using SEO. For those words, you can continue a PPC program and therefore get the benefits of each – SEO and PPC – most cost-effectively when marketing for your remodeling firm.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

So where are homeowners rating remodelers? Angie’s List, Google Places, Yelp, and a whole lot of other online local business directory and search engine places. If a homeowner is looking up a remodeler, let’s say on Google, and they find seven remodelers, three of which have four and five star ratings, but your listing has no consumer ratings, it might be that the homeowner will consider calling the other remodelers, or at least go to their websites first.

It is accepted wisdom that the people most likely to rate a business online are those who are happiest or the most dissatisfied. An unhappy experience with your firm can lead to a bad online review. While only a percentage of people who are unhappy will write an online review, you can expect it to be a poor one. I expect having a poor experience with a remodeler is more likely to result in a bad rating than a good or satisfactory experience will result in a positive review. That is unless you encourage happy customers to write positive reviews about their experience with you on specific sites where consumers rate businesses.

For the record, it is illegal to incentivize a homeowner to write a review about you unless they disclose that the review was a compensated review. However, if you have a satisfied homeowner as a client, you can explain to them how important reviews are to your business and suggest a few places they may share their positive experience with others. While not a lawyer, I am not aware of any federal regulation that would make it illegal or unethical to provide a homeowner who gave you a positive review with a token gift of your appreciation after they placed the review, as long as they didn’t know they would get anything before they provided the review. In short, there can be no quid pro quo.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

So what are the cons of jobsite marketing for remodelers?

The biggest problem with jobsite marketing for remodelers is your lack of control over where the jobsite is and how many jobsites you have going at one time. You might have a great project in an area that may not have many homes close enough to realize there is a remodeling job going on, or the home may be in an area that has poor visibility, like the end of the pipe stem or cul-de-sac. Or maybe it’s in an area where the other homes are not likely prospects for you. The other control problem with remodeler jobsite marketing, and you are all familiar with this by now, is that when the market slows, your cost-efficient jobsite marketing approach has fewer and fewer opportunities for use. Few jobsites means less marketing and less marketing means fewer jobsites.

There are also neighborhoods and buildings (if you work on condos) that do not allow the use of jobsite signs or the parking of commercial vehicles where they can be easily seen. However, you can still do direct mail and sometimes personal canvassing in these situations.

What you should take away from this post, is that you should have a good, multi-faceted jobsite marketing program that cost-effectively generates business when you can use it, but you should not rely solely on jobsite marketing because when you need it most you can use it the least.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

What would be the Google bounce rate for that web page? Would it be 1% ? (99 people visited the page and continued viewing your site.) No. It would be 100%. That page on your website would have a 100% bounce rate. All because one person visited that page from “outside” your website and then left your website without exploring your site more!

So, if you look at Google Analytics and see that the specific page on your website has a 100% bounce rate, should you panic? Not necessarily. It depends on the page. If the 100% bounce rate is for a “landing page” you created, then a 100% bounce rate is a BIG problem. It means that all of the people who were coming to that landing page from outside your website are leaving before they explore the rest of your site. That is bad.

However, if the page with the 100% bounce rate has information on it like a staff member’s name, the site visitor may have found that page while doing a search for a different person with that same name. And if that page is not a landing page, nor is it particularly important, a high bounce rate to that page would not be a problem.

As it was explained to me, Google calculates its bounce rate the way it does mostly because of Google Adwords. When a Google Adwords link is clicked and someone goes to your website, you are paying for each click.

So you really want to know that people going to the page you just paid for them to go to are staying on your website and not bouncing from the site. When you think about it from that perspective, the seemingly counter-intuitive percentage calculation makes sense. Once you understand how the bounce rate is calculated and what it should be used for, you can start making better decisions about your remodeling company website.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.