Nurture your website and reap the business rewards

The vast majority of landscape gardeners are sole traders that are increasingly using modern technology and the World Wide Web to propagate its business services to potential customers in their local area, writes Rob Webber.

Millions of pounds are spent each year on web development by the self employed and small enterprises alike; however, a recent report claims that 43% of these set ups have no methods in place whatsoever to measure how useful their website is in terms of germinating sales; or to gauge how well their site is performing.

By following easy steps, Landscape Juice followers will be able to find out if the toil they have put into their website design is as lucrative as the is as the effort they have put into their gardens; after all to nurture your website now is to reap the business rewards later.

* Having a clear call to action on the site will help you monetise the visits your site receives. It should be easy for customers to learn about the service you offer, find out where you operate, request a quote or a call back. A common mistake is to try and present too much information on each page, or too many visuals, which can result in a cluttered look that may put off a visitor and have a negative effect on conversion rates.

* Post a unique telephone number just for website customers. This simple, all too often forgotten action will instantly and simply indicate how many phone sales are coming your way via your website.

* Do some comparative research by running a Google search using the keywords and phrases relating to your business to see how yours performs against your competitors. When designing a site, create it with the search engines – especially Google - in mind. Include relevant gardening search words and phrases throughout your site’s content, which is a basic search engine optimisation (SEO) technique.

* Sign up with Google Analytics, which is a free web based tool that will measure your websites performance in terms of visitor behavioural data. It will help you learn how many visitors get past the first page; how many clicks it takes to send an email or get to the phone number; what particular photographs are getting the most attention and how many site visitors end up actually hiring your services.

* Ask your customers about their online experience with you; also test your site out on friends and family to observe them while they navigate around in order to give you first hand experience of how user-friendly the site is.

* Add a low cost, or even free, survey tool to your site to collect customer feedback.

Rob Webber is the commercial director for Richweb Media, which includes comparison site www.broadband–expert.co.uk