90% of Tradies Make This Website Mistake

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In this episode of Marketing for Tradies, Shannon walks through a four-point website audit checklist that's costing tradies jobs right now. These aren't small tweaks. These are fundamental errors that separate a high-converting website from one that just wastes leads.

This episode covers:

◼️ The four common website mistakes appearing on over 90% of tradies sites

◼️ Why your website is like a bucket with holes draining your leads

◼️ The lowest hanging fruit for instantly improving your conversion rate

◼️ How to fix these mistakes without spending big money on redesigns

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:01 The “Leaky Bucket” Problem

00:01:11 The First Thing Costing You Leads
00:03:00 The Trust Killer Most Websites Have
00:04:45 Why Your Messaging Isn’t Landing
00:06:20 The Hidden Conversion Mistake

00:07:59 The 4 Biggest Website Leaks
00:08:15 What To Do Next (Simple Action Step)

Stay Connected:

• Eastbound Digital Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eastbounddigital_/
• Shannon's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonbain1/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannon-bain-2a18b2105/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eastbounddigitalagency

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The phone number on your website and landing page is not a clickable button. Trust is built on authenticity, and stock photos are the opposite of authentic. Your headlines are about you, not your customer's problems. Your call to action is a generic contact us button. And adding to that, it's also hard for a customer to find. After auditing hundreds of tradies' websites and landing pages, these same four common mistakes appear on over 90% of them. They're absolutely the lowest hanging fruit for instantly improving your conversion rate. Welcome to Marketing for Tradees, the podcast where we help trades and service-based businesses with straight-up marketing advice to get more leads and put more jobs. I'm your host Shannon and my agency has helped over a hundred businesses go from inconsistent work and relying on word of mouth to getting a steady flow of jobs coming in every single week. In this podcast, I'm walking you through simple, practical strategies that actually help you grow your business without gets more. So let's get into it. Your website is like a bucket. You spend all this effort pouring leads into the top, and if that bucket is full of holes, those leads just drain away. Today we're gonna find those leak points, and I'm gonna take you through a four-point checklist of the most common website mistakes that are costing you jobs right now. And these aren't small tweaks, even though they're simple to apply, these are fundamental errors that are going to separate a high converting website or landing page that generates real leads from one that just generates excuses and wastes time. Fixing them is the single highest leverage thing that you can do for your marketing and it's not going to cost you a lot of money. You might think the problem is your ad spend or your pricing or the competition, but what if the real problem is simply that a customer can't figure out how to call you from their phone? The most painful problems are often the simplest to fix. After auditing hundreds of tradies' websites and landing pages, these same four common mistakes appear on over 90% of them. They're absolutely the lowest hanging fruit for instantly improving your conversion rates. So grab a pen or open your website on your computer. We're gonna go through the checklist together, one mistake at a time. Let's start with the most common and most costly mistake of them all. Mistake number one. The phone number on your website and landing page is not a clickable button. Over 70% of your customers are searching for you on a mobile phone. They're standing in the room with the problem right in front of them looking for a solution. If a user has to manually try to copy and paste your number, switch apps, put it into a phone dialer, you have introduced a massive amount of friction. And friction kills conversions. They're just not gonna do it. They're gonna simply hit back and call your competitor. And this is not a complex technical issue at all. It's a really simple HTML link that a web developer can fix in less than 60 seconds. But it's the difference between seeing plain text that just has your number on it and a link that actually contains the code allowing people to click to call. So just think about it for a moment. Think about your own behavior. When you're on your phone and you want to call a business, do you write down the number? Of course not. You tap the number, you expect it to work, and your customers are no different. Here's the first action step. Open your website or your landing page on your mobile right now. Is your phone number at the very top of the page? The first thing, but can you tap on it immediately to start a phone call? If the answer is no, then this is your number one priority to fix. This one change can literally double your inbound calls overnight. So go ahead and do that one. Now, mistake number two, and this one is a killer for trust, is using generic stock photos. You know the ones I'm talking about, the smiling American actors in pristine, brand new hard hats pointing at a blueprint. It instantly and literally screams, I'm not a real local business. Homeowners are hiring a person, not a faceless corporation. They want to see who's going to be showing up at their house. Trust is built on authenticity, and stock photos are the opposite of authentic. Even a slightly blurry photo of you and your youth or you and your team in front of a real job you just completed in a recognizable suburb is infinitely more powerful and more trustworthy than a perfect polished stock photo will ever be. I want you to think about it from the customer's perspective. They see a generic photo of a model, then they go to your competitors' page and they see a real photo of Dave and his team standing with the work van. Who are they gonna trust more? Like it's not even a contest. So your action step is to go through your website and delete every single stock image of a person or something that's not yours. Every single one. And replace them with real photos of you, your team, your vans, and your actual work. Even if the photos aren't perfect, they are real and real sells. Mistake number three, your headlines are about you, not your customers' problems. Now let's talk specifically about the main headline at the very top of the page because 99% of traffic is going to see this first. That headline has one job and one job only, and that's to confirm that the visitor is in the right place to solve their immediate problem. Most tradey headlines fail this job spectacularly because they are all about the business's ego. They say things like Sydney's most trusted builder or quality craftsmanship since 1998. Instead of Sydney's most trusted builder, a good headline says reliable home renovations for Sydney's northern beaches, call for a free quote. Instead of quality craftsmanship, it says on-time electrician for switchboard upgrades in Perth. So you can see the difference here. It's much more specific. So your action step for this part of the episode is to read your main websites or landing pages headline out loud. Does it clearly and simply state the specific service you provide and the location that you serve framed around the problem a customer is trying to solve? If not, rewrite it using this formula: service for location. It is that simple. Like, of course, it's not gonna be plumber for Brisbane. Like you won't expand on that service and the specific types of jobs you want and the locations that you're wanting to serve, but that's the formula you need to be using for headlines that convert. And finally, mistake number four, this is my favorite one because this is a big one, guys. It's that your call to action is a generic contact us button. And adding to that, it's also hard for a customer to find. It's not even on the first page, it's on a separate page on its own. If a customer with an urgent problem has to hunt for a contact us button that then takes them to a separate page, you're making them do so much work. Like I mentioned before, friction kills conversions. You're literally making it harder for people to give you money. Homeowners with a problem are looking for the path of least resistance. They want a big, obvious button that says call now or get a quote. They don't want to have to search for your contact details. A great landing page or website makes the call to action the most unmissable element of the entire page. Like just think about it. You're on your phone, your basement is flooding, and you're you land on a plumber's website. Do you want to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find a contact us link? Or do you want to see a massive call now button right at the top of the page? It's honestly a no-brainer. Like, no one's going to do that. People want fast action. So your final action step of this episode is to look at your website from the perspective of a customer in a hurry. How many seconds does it take to find your call to action? Is it a button? Is it a clickable phone number? If it's not immediately obvious, you're losing jobs. So make it big, make it bold, and make it a button and make it accessible on the first page that they're landing on. So to wrap it all up, let's recap the four mistakes I ran through in this episode. Mistake number one, your phone number isn't a clickable button. Two, you're using fake stock images. Ugh, so bad. Three, your headline is about you, not your customer. And four, you have a generic contact us call to action and it's hidden on a separate page. You now have a checklist of the four biggest leaks in your digital bucket, and they're really simple but super effective things that you can do to fix your conversions. Your task is to fix at least one of them this week. Don't get overwhelmed, just pick one, plug that one hole, and I promise you it will be the most profitable job that you do all month. Thank you for tuning in to the Marketing for Tradies podcast. If you got something out of this episode, don't forget to like, follow, and subscribe, or leave us a review on whatever platform you're listening on. And if you're a service based business owner who'd rather have someone handle your marketing for you, book a call with my team using the link below and let's see how we can help you.