The First 6 Months
Atlantic Seascapes - Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Update: We caught up with this story a year later and have an even more successful outcome. Read below first, then check up on how they did the next year. It's good.
Atlantic Seascapes is a small but diverse landscaping services company in a market of about 450,000 people. Before venturing online, the company relied heavily on word of mouth referrals and some hit and miss local print advertising. The business was growing, but slowly. The owner, Quentin Riggs decided a web site was worth a try. Especially after loosing a partner who was the sales guy.
We built a website that features their various landscaping services. The site was started in January and after a couple months of active search optimization the site began to receive good rankings for some of its keywords. This happened to hit at spring just as the landscaping business starts to pick up.
The website began sending the odd lead here and there and traffic continued to grow as the landscaping season began to hit its stride. With that increased traffic and improving search rankings for a wider range of keywords, the number of leads the site generates has also increased.
So, after 6 months online we asked Quentin about the experience with the site so far;
Stever: This spring and summer, your busy season, was your first experience with a website as a marketing tool for your business. How is it going?
Quentin: Oh, it's made a big difference. We got a few decent jobs early in the season, when typically we would have still been a bit slow. And now there is a steady flow of jobs from the site, plus our usual referrals. Its steady.
S: The web analytics software indicates that 72 visitors contacted you through the website email form from mid February through to mid of July. How many of these were serious inquiries and how many of those turned into real business.
Q: A lot of them are real leads. Local people asking for a retaining wall, a tree cut down, a deck built, a driveway, whatever. I do get the odd request for other things, maybe for a list of plants that grow well in the area, or tire kicker/price shopper types, but most are people who have a project they need done, and they're looking for a landscaper to do it. The tire kickers are easy to screen out early.
I have the emails set up to go direct to my Blackberry. So I get them right way. Often while I'm on a job site. I turn around and call them back, unless I'm busy on the excavator, or something. I'll phone them shortly after they sent the email. And it always surprises them that I replied so soon. I think they like it and puts you in their good books right off the bat. Makes landing the job easier, too.
Yeah, I'd say half, no, well over half of the emails are the real deal. People that need a landscaper.
Lots of smaller jobs and a few bigger ones. I'm now weeding out the small jobs to focus on those bigger jobs that come in. I also offload some of those smaller jobs to another contractor. A friend of mine, and we trade work back and forth.
S: Now email is not the only way to contact you from the website. Of course your phone number is on there too. But we cant track those on the web side of things. Do you have an idea of how many phone calls you get from the site?
Q: Sometimes the caller tells me they we're just on the website. Often their still on the computer and calling from work. Sometimes I'll ask them where they got my number. I don't always ask, but enough to get a sense, I think. My guess is that the website might send half as much phone calls as it does emails. But its really hard to say. They don't always tell me, or I forget to ask.
S: Well I have some hard stats here that look really good.
80% of traffic is from search engines.
42% is from Google alone.
Search engines sent 54% of all email leads.
65% of all email leads can be directly tracked to sources that send qualified leads. Be it a specific keyword phrase or a few specific websites that link to your site. Besides the search engines there are a few certain sites that are sending local visitors looking for a landscaper. The remainder of the traffic was deemed to have not been there for the purpose of looking for a local landscaper.
With 72 contacts over 6 months, 65% equates to 46 or 47 real leads.
Q: That sounds about right. Pretty close. I get a few emails every week. So far this season the website has grossed about $42,000 in new business. Most of that from 5 nice sized jobs.
S: Now that's a nice number, very impressive. And we still don't have the rankings we want just yet. There's one set of keywords that have been harder to rank for. Were going to do some more work to go after those.
Q: Yes, the proof is in the pudding here. Its been a great investment so far and doing more to squeeze even more out of it is just a no-brainer. I'm happy, the site gets compliments from people, and its sending business. The website alone seems to have filled the void left from loosing my partner last year. Not only that, I now have to think about expanding to accommodate the growth.
One thing I'm just noticing now is, at this time of year, early to mid summer, business usually slows down a bit as people go on vacations with the kids and stuff. Now, it seems, these vacationers are still shopping and planning from their laptops. I get emails from locals who are out of town. They tell me what they want to do, give me the address to go look at the job, their not even home, I calculate out a quote on the job and email it to them. Sometimes they say ok, go ahead, do the work. It'll be done by the time they get back home.
It's perfect. They don't have to deal with the mess and blocked driveways for few days. We can do the work without anyone looking over the shoulder all day long. We finish the job, they get home to a fresh new landscape feature, or driveway, new lawn, or whatever. Their happy, and we get paid.
S: Now that's cool. Even funny. And those are people that would never have found you if you did not have the website and the good rankings in Google.
Thanks Quentin for sharing your experience so far. Yours is a great example of what a nice website with good search engine rankings can do for a local small business. And we love hearing it and being part of this kind of success.