We love builder’s websites and indeed have a page dedicated to the Builder’s Websites we have done previously. Here is a snippet of a recent conversation that demonstrates our attention to detail and understanding of the composition of a typical website for a Builder and a reason why our websites regularly feature highly in competitive search terms in Google like ‘Essex Builders’.
Here are our notes / thoughts / ideas / quotes for the redesign / update / promotion of your new website
During this redesign process it would be a perfect time to review / update / improve all pages / galleries / projects / news section and this would naturally help your SEO (website ranking potential). Once complete you would have a future-proof website that was responsive and you can update it yourself going forward.
As you can imagine this is a fair bit of work and to let me work out how much work is required please confirm my notes above and add / change / remove to the proposed framework here:
So please review the notes and comment freely, once I get your response I can give a better indication of time / cost involved and can give you a quote.
Website is a CMS based – WordPress / Responsive. There is a Google Maps entry and entries in some local business directories.
Initial observations / problems
1, CMS – 12 updates pending including a WordPress update
2, 40 pages indexed in Google but old / incorrect pages not relating to current website is indexed (e-commerce products)
3, Robots.txt file has a crawl delay on it
4, No website stats recording (Google Analytics)
5, Company Number needs to be shown (legal requirement)
6, Currently Projects page is the Gallery – will ensure new site has a gallery and a projects section/
7, No Google Search Console Entry (Webmaster Tools)
8, Website and pages are not search engine optimised
9, Website text is copied and used on business directories
10, There is not enough pages / content on the site in general
To do
1, Delicious Webdesign to advise how to contact Nominet and get website changed to be registered to the LTD company. Initially assuming your email address was used to register the website use the form on the Nominet Website. Once you have the email and password you can update your details within Nominet’s system.
2, Send us all your photos – You will be invited to dropbox via a shared folder.
3, Review the page names above (page framework) and add on as many services and you want
4, Provide Gallery Photos in sub-directories of main folder in dropbox
5, Provide Project details and associated photos from the project within the ‘InHouse’ main folder in dropbox
6, Provide the logo in professional format (ai / psd)
7, Pro Stock images liked – before and after
8, Send us client testimonials
9, Confirm if you want Pinterest / Instagram / LinkedIn icons / links
10, Please create and send us a ‘summary’ of the business in a short sentence.
11, Provide us with the domain / hosting access (need cpanel / ftp access as a minimum)
Proposal
Design / Development – To create an upgraded / bigger / better page framework and fill it with unique / relevant information / photos on all the services / projects and to promote the website to bring in as many website visitors as possible.
Webcopy – We will work with yourselves to create content based on your thoughts / ideas / request for each page in the framework. For example we shall request that you give us as many FAQs as you think should be on the site and we will update / improve and add more to this section.
SEO – The site will be built from the ground up in a search engine friendly way then ‘polished’ and promoted in the search engines to ensure the best ‘first impression’ and best long-term visitor flow.
Options / Ideas
Video – You could consider having a video created for the company, we can do these and have done them before as you can see from these on our video page.
These can be added to the website / Facebook and used on your tablet / laptop to show clients and perhaps use it for trade fairs also. Feedback from other clients have confirmed that they increase ‘enquires’ after people look at the website as clients like them and learn a lot about your company just by watching them. – script – narration – production for 90 second video will be included.
Social Feeds – Perhaps we can have your Facebook feed embedded in the site also as you regularly update it – will encourage you to add news to your new news section also as this is great to improve the website and then you can link these news articles from it.
Domain – Renewing it in advance to improve the SEO
To confirm we will create you a search engine friendly website design that is ‘responsive’ (works and looks perfect on all devices) and content managed (CMS) – giving you the ability to change anything (text / photos / gallery items).
Our proposal includes the domain transfer / configuration / email setup and management / the design / optimising the site for the search engines / review of all the existing webcopy provided (and adding more where appropriate) / news section management and help and support to ensure you can use it correctly and efficiently / Google Analytics Management / Google Local optimisation / Google Webmaster setup. In short there is nothing missed or nothing that will be charged for as an ‘extra’. We even include wordpress updates in the first year as part of this agreement to managed your website.
[Website Owners] we have had a busy few weeks since our meeting but I have gone through your email and tried to answer and comment as best as possible.
I think other than your suggestions listed below and physical changes and additions to the website, in terms of Google etc, we wish, that if somebody were to Google our company name in any form with local areas that we operate in Essex, we will appear somewhere ideally on the first or second page of Google. Outside of that, if somebody were to search other key words such as renovation, refurbishment, re-decorate, extensions, building work, house doctors etc) in the local area then once again, it would be ideal that we appear in those searches.
We like the idea you have put forward here but as mentioned, we are struggling to decide what to do. If we have a dedicated page specifically to Rendering & Plastering, we don’t want to appear to any viewers of the site that we are a plastering company and neither do we want to be taking on those types of jobs, where we are being asked to plaster a room. Our aim is to have a large project whereby we would combine many trades and co-ordinate the process of a refurbishment for the client, stress free. Our issue is how we explain or show that without coming across as a typical building company. Also our initial focus when we first thought of this company was the House Doctor service. Here we are trying to appeal to those who are struggling to sell their home and with our help, we can renovate etc to appeal to wider market and hopefully the client sells their home at a greater value. We do think though that the name House Doctor may not be ideal but have noticed that others refer to this as Home Staging. Perhaps we could change the references to House to Home staging to Sell? What are your thought on this? As discussed we do already have many enquiries for ‘odd job’ work or small works which we are not interested in taking on. Therefore, we feel having this on the website will only encourage those enquiries. We want to make it appear that we take on the large projects and not minor DIY work.
We really we don’t want lots of website pages on there, we would prefer it for viewers to get an idea of who we are, what are about etc, from the sub sections, be able to view some photos of previous work then contact us if they want to know further info.
[Website Designers] Ranking for your company name is normally assumed and standard so should be easy but as you have a pretty generic name this cannot be guaranteed (indeed no ranking can be guaranteed) but its likely you will rank highly for your company name if / when we redesign and update the site. We normally take for granted that a company will rank highly for its own company name and concentrate on the more ‘important’ and difficult search terms like the ones you mentioned that are relevant to your business but you must acknowledge that you wont initially rank on nationwide basis for a competitive search term but we aim to get you ranking highly for geographic search terms like ‘renovations Thurrock’ and ‘Romford Extensions’ and ‘Essex Refurbishments’.
Regarding the ‘House Doctors’ and ‘Home Staging’ idea, My thoughts are that the more ‘related’ pages to your trade you have the better chance you have of ranking highly, having pages about parts of your business that you think could ‘confuse’ people into thinking that is a key service of yours should be linked from your ‘key services’ pages and not linked from the main menu. ‘Home Staging’ is a new term on myself but sounds good, we need to be aware from a SEO perspective of what people search for and ‘renovations’ ‘property repairs’ ‘extensions’ etc will always be popular. If a website visitor happens upon your site when making one of the searches above and realises that you specialise in full house refurbishment and are able to offer everything from extensions to plastering then all the better.
We have a good idea for this – we don’t feature these ‘sub-services’ on the main menu but have them as standalone pages that are only linked from the text within the descriptions of the main services. So on the Extensions page we can talk about extensions and include links to the services like plastering from within the pages. The direction and goal of the site will be for larger projects and that is understood
If you wanted to do best possible job with the website giving you the best chance to attract big building project and ‘extension’ business I would suggest creating a page for each of the main services, if you provided some brief notes about each of the above we can then add to the text making it more search engine friendly and allowing the site the best chance to increase visitor numbers over the coming years.
Really think these pages are needed to attract search traffic, actually it’s almost essential to have them to give you the best chance to attract a growing number of search visitors. and suggest having these pages not on the main menu but have them linked to from within text sections so we have the content without the ‘menu bloat’ confusion that could occur
We now have the code / database / WordPress access and domain registration details to start managing the domain / website – do you have any thoughts / preferences about staying with your current website registrar and hosting company and keeping all 3 domains? Normally we transfer clients to a better / faster hosting provider but happy to keep your domain / email / website where it is now.
