Educate Your Website Visitors to Drive Repeat Business

Remember when just having a website for your company was enough to drive more business? It’s a different story nowadays, considering most – if not all - of your competition has a presence on the web. To drive repeat business, your site needs to be more than just visually appealing and easy to navigate; it needs to give potential customers the answers that they’re looking for...

What Is It?

Educational content is an essential part of having a quality site that gets your phone ringing. Before customers know whether they’re ready to request an appointment with a pest control professional, they want to understand their problem and what it’ll take to fix it.

Therefore, your website needs to tell a story about your business. Don’t limit your story to just a list of your services and your phone number. Use a blog to address pest concerns that you often hear from customers. Create an FAQ page to ask and answer questions in the language that prospects are using. Add a video to your ‘About’ page that shows your technicians tackling inspections or maintenance treatments. All of these pieces of content together expand your company’s story from a simple service provider to an industry leader that has the answers customers are looking for.

Why Is It Important?

Educational content does more than just make your company look smart. It yields a variety of benefits that not only get your company new customers, but also bring the same customers back for continued service:

• It Guides Customers to a Decision. It’s not always the case that people searching for pest maintenance services are looking for help right away. A lot of the time, online searchers, or researchers more accurately, like to learn as much as they can before they make a decision. So when a prospect finds a site that doesn’t offer much in the way of helpful information, they’ll jump to a site that does – and eventually take their business elsewhere.
  
  Educational content keeps users engaged while they’re in research mode. Pest control plans aren’t signed every day, and it’s important to remember that your customers are making a substantial investment in their homes. With this in mind, make sure you are making an equal investment in them by providing information that helps them make an educated decision. 

•  It Gets You Noticed Online. Google keeps its cards close their chest in regard to the complex way they rank online search results. Their mission, however, is simple: show searchers the most valuable results possible. Google – and other search engines – “crawl” sites on the Web to get a feel for how valuable content is to any given search. They want to make sure that when someone looks up “termite control” or “bed bug control,” the results are related and useful.
  
  Educational content is a fantastic way to get noticed by Google and make it easier to get noticed online. Quality content about your services, products and company history will spell everything out to search engines. The easier you make it on search engines to understand what you do, the higher you’ll show up in online searches. The higher you rank in search results, the more site visitors and phone calls your company will get. After all, think about the last time you searched for something online; did you look beyond the first page of results, or even look at the bottom of the first page? 

• It Sets You Apart From the Rest. Like we said earlier, most of your competition has a website that features their services and contact info. If your company’s site is the same, it’s going to be hard for customers to tell you apart from the pack. Educational content will allow you to stand out and get noticed.
  
  Some pest control companies get nervous about sharing valuable knowledge pertaining to the industry. They fear that this knowledge could lead to a “teach a man to fish” situation where the customers know enough to finish the job on their own. The truth is, especially in the pest world, customers are just curious and want to make educated decisions for themselves. If they can’t find the information that they’re looking for on your site, you end up losing business when they find a competitor with site that does.

Business owners know better than anyone that customers move fast. The same is especially true of prospects online. In order to hold the attention of potential clients and drive them back to your site when they’re ready to make a deal, load up your site with quality content that helps users make choices they can feel good about. Your website is the foundation of your online marketing strategy, so reinforce your foundation with quality educational content!

Alain Parcan, Director of Marketing for Market Hardware, Inc., contributed this article. Alain brings nearly 10 years of experience in educating businesses so they can market themselves more effectively. Market Hardware helps small businesses compete on the web and offers special discounts for PCOC members. You can reach Alain’s team at 888-381-6925.