5 Steps To A Better Water Damage Website

It should be no secret that you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars from your water damage restoration website.

Heck, we routinely have customers who make $50,000+ from just ONE job.

Forget plumber referrals. Forget TPA’s. Websites have the highest return on investment out of any marketing program you have.

Unfortunately, most restoration company websites don’t generate leads.

Listen, it’s 2022.

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If you don’t understand the power that your website has (when utilized properly) then you won’t last in this industry in the next 20 years.

The time is now. Start dominating your local service area and make the phone ring. Every single day, there are tons of customers standing in water LOOKING for someone to call.

Your company MUST be the one they contact.

Yes, you probably have a website. Yes, it probably sucks.

If you are generating less than $100,000 per month from your site – you’re doing something wrong.

Reasons Why Your Website Is Your Most Important Tool

First impressions and brand awareness

You can sell the job before your technician arrives by having a clean, easy-to-use, trustworthy website.

Consistent job growth during slow season

The Internet is resistant to seasonal change in the restoration industry. No rain or floods? There are still people with cupped wood floors or fridge leaks looking for your services. Your website can draw in tons of jobs that aren’t emergencies.

Best ROI

For every dollar in advertising you spend on the internet you should expect $3 in return. This is substantially higher in the restoration industry due to the large nature of jobs.

Easily adaptable

Want to start providing reconstruction services? Pack out services? Expanding into commercial restoration industry?

Just write content and BOOM! You have a 24/7 dedicated marketing rep working for you, and his name tag reads, “Your Website.”

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Making tons of money on your restoration website shouldn’t be hard. Pester your SEO company or your in-house marketing team.

Let them know you expect results and most importantly, you expect flood jobs and lots of money from them!

Here are some simple changes we’ve come up with to help you improve your website marketing and get you more flood and water damage restoration jobs:

1. Focus On Call-To-Action & Converting

Look, when customers are in emergency disaster situations – they need your help and they need it FAST!

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Your website needs to give them an option to quickly complete their objective – which usually is to give you a call for a free estimate.

Focus on phone calls first. Form submissions are too slow and laggy for customers in disaster situations.

By the time they submit the form (which is always annoying) and you receive it and call them back – they’ve already clicked the back button on their browser and called someone else.

Limit the amount of conversion opportunities you have on your site. Forms suck. Remove them.

Good examples of quality Call To Action buttons on restoration websites:

Why it works:

  • Great use of white space.
  • Creates urgency (response time).
  • Stands out among page.

Why it works:

  • Looks great on mobile.
  • Click button is visual.
  • The Call-To-Action is clear.

Bad Examples of Calls-To-Action:

Why it doesn’t work:

  • Too much text. Can’t decipher what they want me to do.
  • Text is ugly. Point blank. This makes you look like an amateur.
  • Text is too close together. Makes you not want to read it.

2. Create city specific service pages

We’ve gone over how to get more flood jobs by creating local city service pages before but I’ll touch base on it again because it’s so damn important.

In the restoration industry – if a potential customer searches for a restoration contractor they’re HIGHLY likely to add a “local denominator” onto their search query.

  • Water damage restoration SAN DIEGO
  • Water extraction company HOUSTON

It’s almost impossible for your homepage to rank highly (hopefully #1) for all the cities you service because you can’t put that much content on the homepage and expect it to convert. Nobody is going to read that much.

The solution is to have pages that cater to the goings-on of a specific location. For example, on the city-specific pages we wrote for Regent Restoration, we included information about the city, where the employees liked to visit in that area and some of the jobs Regent had completed in that city in the past.

Each section was brief and easily skimmable. Now Regent is the NUMBER ONE organically ranked site on Google for terms like “water damage restoration lewisville.”

3. Schema Coding

This is the magical, behind-the-scenes part of the Internet.

You know how Google always seems to know exactly what you’re looking for – even when you use a typo or forget part of a search? That’s because of wizardry like schema coding.

Schema codes are messages you tell your website in HTML. These codes stress that some parts of your web copy are more important than others.

They allow Google to read your copy more easily, so Google can do you a huge solid and pull out those important parts and show them to your customers on the right side of the search engine.

Your phone number, for instance. Way important for your customers to be able to find that pronto. Who cares if they make it to your website as long as the calls are coming in, amirite?

Schema coding in the background of your website makes it so that cool stuff like this happens.

4. Quality Pictures

The pictures you use on your website will either make somebody pick up the phone or make them keep searching for one of your competitors.

Consumers are already confused about what water damage restoration actually is. By using quality pictures that show your technicians, equipment and branding, it eases their already unstable frame of mind (they’re in panicky, disaster mode).

You have to let them know what you do. The easiest way to do that is by using quality pictures.

Picture best practices:

  • Take REAL photos of your technicians
  • Use photos of your equipment
    • Air movers
    • Dehumidifers
    • Mat drying systems

STOP using default stock photos that everyone else uses. This confuses a potential customer and makes them assume you’re all the same. That defeats the purpose of marketing.

5. Site Load Time

If your water damage website takes longer than 2 seconds to load the customer is going to leave. On top of that, Google hates websites that have a bad page speed score. It’s a pain for a customer making a search query.

Use tools like Pingdom or Google Developer Page speed to determine how fast/slow your website and how to make it better.

Tips on how to improve your site load time:

Optimize your quality pictures

This is sort of the bonus expansion pack for the previous point.

Make sure that your images are the right size (570 px wide), the right format (JPEG or PNG) and the right coding (<img src=””>).

Reduce HTML scripts

If you’re using WordPress, edit your webpage copy in the text tab, rather than the visual editor.

Each time you skip a line in the visual editor tab, it creates a line of code in the text tab. Each line of code that needs to be “read” means a slower load time for your website.

Stress important content

Make sure your most important content is above the fold, that bottom of the webpage before your viewer has to scroll down.

Having just one image and fewer coded blocks of above the fold means a faster load time – and it means that, even if the rest of your page is slow to load, the reader will be on the page long enough for it to load without even knowing it.

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