Turning Website Visitors Into Clients

It seems that it is essential to have a website for your Computer Repair business is in this day and age. Luckily for us, setting up a website is easier than ever thanks to many pre-existing packages like WordPress or Joomla. Even without these pre-existing packages, basic web design skills are taught in many computer related courses now days there a huge amount of people know how to get a basic webpage online.

Getting targeted traffic is also much easier thanks to services like Google Adwords. The problem is that creating a website is one thing, creating a website that converts is something else. For most sites a “conversion” would be a making a sale but in our case, a conversion would be a phone call or a booking made through the website.

The reason why many sites don’t convert is because they don’t answer the questions the visitor wants to know straight away. There has been many studies that say that you have about 7 seconds to get a users attention before they leave the website.

So what are these questions? The questions you need to answer very quickly are:

What is this site about? – Imagine you are searching for something on Google and you arrive at a website. Do you take the time to read the 400 word block of text on their front page? or do you scan quickly and trying to figure out whether this site is relevant to what you are searching for? Unless you have a lot of time to read large blocks of text, you would scan the information instead of reading it. You need to answer the question about what your site is about very quickly, ideally a sentence somewhere near the top of the site.

What type of work do you do? – OK, so I now know you do computer repair, but will you be able to fix my problem? A very short list of the type of work you do is a good idea. I recommend that you don’t get too technical with your list since many people dont know what they need. For example, instead of writing that you setup exchange servers, it might be better to say that you setup “Business Email”.

For example, lets say you have a Real Estate business contact you. All they know is that they need their guys to be able to receive emails to their Blackberrys in the field and also synchronize their calendars and contacts.

They don’t know a setup like this is would need an Exchange server, all they need to know is that they need a business level email setup. Its up to you to listen to their needs and determine that an Exchange server would be best for them.

You need to reflect this in your marketing if you wish to cater to this type of client. Of course, if you are an Exchange expert and help troubleshoot business that already have an Exchange setup, then it would be worth mentioning since they already know what they need fixed is called an Exchange Server.

Where are you located? – I now know that you are a Computer Technician and you are able to fix my problem, but I need someone to come onsite which means you will need to be local. Where you are located and what areas do you service? Many Computer Technician websites will put this critical information on another page but you cant always expect the user to visit any of the other pages. You need to answer these questions in a way that they can pick up while only scanning.

How much will it cost? – An obvious extension on the other questions. Some users will be shopping solely on price so again, you need to answer this questions quickly before they leave the website.

How can I get in contact with you? – Great! You sound like a good match. Im just going to pick up the phone and… umm.. wheres your number? Oh, its on this contact page.
I personally believe that the phone number should always be on the front page and if they want any additional contact information like Fax or postal address, then they can find that on the contact page. Take a look at the flyer from your local Pizza place. A Pizza shop is another business that relies on getting phonecalls to make money. It is almost guaranteed that their phone number is on the front page of the flyer, even if the flyer has multiple pages.

This is the difference between someone who has just has a site verses someone who has a site that turns into phone calls. Steve Cherubino from the Podnutz podcast already knows all of this and has specifically created a product catering to computer technicians with his Tech Site Builder. This allows technicians to skip all the time and experimentation trying to make a site that converts – and just buy a template that does.

One last issue worth mentioning in regards to converting is the quality of traffic you are bringing to your site. There are various forms of advertising you can do both online and offline, but one of the best ways to get instant targeted traffic to your website is Google Adwords. Basically, you choose the keywords you want your website to come up under when someone searches for a certain term and your ad will be on that page. You bid how much you pay for that keyword and that will determine the position of your ad on the screen. If you want the top ad position then you need to pay more than the other advertisers.

Unless your business serves all states in your country, then you will want to target keywords like “computer repair dallas” rather than just “computer repair”. All the big franchises bid against each other for “computer repair” to get the the better ad locations which raises the price of that keyword significantly. This is fine for the big boys which large budgets that serve every state, but for someone who works only within their state this is a bad way to go.

You can pay for the term “computer repair”, but the ad may show up for someone who is a significant distance from you which means that they will visit the site, but since you are nowhere near them it wont convert. To make matters worse, you still have to pay for their visit! So choose keywords very specific to what you do in the location that you do it in since they are cheaper and will convert better.