North Valley Marketing

Howdy Friends,

Recently, I ran a couple of polls on FB/LinkedIn to try to determine what contractors wanted to hear about in this newsletter. The results were quite sparse. I did get a little insight, and one topic that came up was understanding websites.

There’s a lot of snake oil and smoke-n-mirrors spewed all over the internet on websites and SEO (or any one of its variants). Even for someone in the industry, keeping up with developments can feel like a fulltime job. I can only imagine how someone who just wants the facts so they can make a decision and get back to work feels. I’m not jealous.

One of the first things we need to get into the clear is that websites and SEO are not the same thing. They are joined at the hip and from there the tentacles of each reach out all over the place.

SEO is a topic for another day…

In today’s world, a contractor needs a website for several reasons. Here are some of the more important ones:

• Proof of existence to people, search engines, and AI
• A place to display your work
• A place to portray your values
• A place to position yourself and attract the right customers while repelling the wrong ones

I’ve a little story that fits here to hold out the point.

A couple of months ago we started working with a new client. He wanted his website upgraded and some help with other marketing activities. His old site was a little disjointed and didn’t visually align with the high-end customers they wanted. To be honest, it looked like something that I would have created when I first started 3 years ago.

We spent a lot of time understanding him, his business, and his customers, and then rebuilt the site to fit.

Hardscaping is very visual, so we put a lot of photos of his work on every page along with premium-sounding copy and plenty of white space. In short, we made him feel like a fit to his ideal customers.

Last week, his salesman and I were messaging a bit. He reported the updates are producing very qualified leads and the customers respect them more because the company has a more professional online presence.

Ok, I’ll quit patting myself on the back now. On with the show…

One of the places that most small contractors thinking about building their own website get tripped up is the hosting and site builder. There are too many hosts and builders to cover here. I will go over a few key points to consider and who I use in the agency before we go.

There are various classes of websites that range from ones built on the super-easy drag and drop or AI platforms to fully custom-coded websites.

Super-easy DIY: Great for new, one-chuck-and-a-truck contractors that just need something to prove they’re not a scammer. These kinds of sites are easy and cheap to put up yourself without much personal expertise. They generally do some sort of “SEO optimization” automatically, but are difficult to truly optimize well when you get into the weeds. My recommendation is to use one of these if you are new and on a tight budget, but if you are even mildly successful, plan on replacing the site in 1-3 years with something more professional.

Semi-custom: This is where most contractors will ultimately land. They are typically professionally built on some kind of a block website builder with some custom-coded sections. You can have a great looking website that loads well and costs a fraction of what a fully custom-coded website would. They also are easy for a contractor to change a few words or a picture on if an agency’s maintenance retainer doesn’t fit in their budget.

Fully custom-coded: 99% of construction companies don’t need this level of website, no matter what that silver-tongued agency salesman tells you. Yes, they are the most optimizable and should have the least amount of bloat. This makes them load super quick. The design will also not be limited by a builder platform. On the downside, it wouldn’t shock me at all if you would drop $8-10k on a site like this and still not be able to make any of your own updates.

Here at North Valley Marketing, we host and build on WordPress.com. That puts us squarely in the semi-custom bracket. We choose the commercial version of WordPress because it is a solid platform that performs well on loading tests and is relatively easy to build on. Their hosting includes all the security features and updates a contractor needs in a site. And it does all of this while remaining inexpensive.

In short, it fits what we need for our clients.

I’m sure this doesn’t clear up all your questions. If there is something you would like to dive deeper into, contact me here.

Later, Chad Beachy