The Next Year Got Even Better
Atlantic Seascapes - Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
This is a follow up to an interview with the business owner after the first 6 months of using a website created by us as a marketing tool for their business.
To recap, this business is a landscaping contractor serving Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Halifax market is a little under 500,000 people.
Last year we built them a website before the spring landscaping season began. It was a real success for them during that first season and now into their second season they see even more sales being generated thanks to the search engine traffic we are able to generate for them.
This follow-up does not take place as an interview like the last one. Instead it is a report based on the traffic stats monitoring we have been doing all along and information provided from various conversations and emails with the owner along the way.
End of the First Season
In the first 6 month interview we noted that the website had generated about $42,000 in gross sales. We we're pleased to hear that at the end of the year this landscaping company was able to attribute $100,000 in new business that came directly from the website. "Give er take a few" says Quentin, the owner.
We saw 2 distinct peaks in internet traffic for this business. A spring peak and a mid summer peak. The summer peak was higher than the spring time peak.
Traffic in the first spring rose slowly at first as Google slowly indexed the pages of the site and its search engine rankings climbed. By mid summer it had achieved top rankings for most of its keywords.
All summer and fall it continued to generate sales and kept them busy till the snow began to fall. Then the season began to come to a close and website traffic slowly declined through late fall and winter.
The New Year
The upswing in traffic began much earlier than we had anticipated. The stats showed traffic bottomed out over Christmas and began to steadily increase from January on. Some early landscaping leads were coming in well before the snow had even melted. It appears some people we're planning well in advance for their spring landscaping projects and were looking to book the work early.
By the time spring rolled around this landscaping company was already fully loaded with landscaping jobs they landed through the website.
More Work Than They Can Handle
In the second spring season the website already had great exposure in Google. The spring time traffic peaks we're now well beyond last years high summer peak. Email requests we're coming in at a rate of a few a day! Where last spring it was a few a week.
At the time of this writing, the first day of summer and a month shy of 1 year from the point of the first 6 month interview, sales from the website we're already beyond the year end total of last year. One job alone that came from the website was a $72,000 project.
So needless to say Quentin is swamped with work. But this has been posing its own problems. They simply cannot handle all the requests that come in and are spilling off opportunities. This is of course a great position to be in.
Adjusting to Accommodate the Growth
Hiring more staff to accommodate the increased work flow was the obvious solution but was proving difficult. Landscaping is a tough physical outdoor job that not many are well suited too. On top of that the economy in Canada has been really moving and the job market is tight for employers.
Solution? Well, the website of course. We added an employment opportunities page to the site. It's very specific about what they need out of an employee looking for a landscaping job in Halifax. And it works. Seems people are searching out local companies online in the industry they want to work in. The text of the job add is also doing a good job of delivering employment requests from the right kinds of people. Most with landscaping experience.
Partnering with Competitors
To make the most of all the requests that come in they now use those leads as a tool. They hand some of them off to another contractor, an old friend in the same business, and they sell some of the bigger ones for a small cut off the job price.
These excess leads are becoming a commodity they can use, both for direct monetary gain (the ones they sell) and for other long term benefits and connection building. They are still working on making new partnerships with other contractors and sub-contractors and having those sales leads to use in trade are invaluable.
End of the Second Season
We're not there yet. It is however looking like the website will double the performance it had in the first year. That first year alone produced a positive return on investment so this year they are extremely happy to already have such an asset.
What a great story of internet marketing success. We're happy to tell it and even happier to be a part in making it happen.
It was a long story and if you've read it this far then you should now be getting in touch with us about doing the same for your business.