E51 — Light Em’ Up Website Roast

A good roast and website shaming is hard to resist. But that’s exactly what we are bringing to the table in episode 51.

Join us as we scroll through an old website for one of our clients (with their permission of course) who is about to launch a beautiful, new website from us.

We’ll be pointing out the good, the bad and the ugly while delivering suggestions for improvement on design, SEO and first impressions.

It may not be the Tom Brady roast but man, it’s a close second.

In this episode you’ll see the dos and don’ts of website design and learn:

1. Why strong headlines and clear communication of a company’s services are so crucial
2. Why there is a need for “meaty” content rather than thin content that doesn’t provide value to visitors or search engines
3. How the placement and effectiveness of call-to-action buttons are important and you’ll see suggestions for improvement
4. Insights on how to better showcase a company’s unique selling points on the homepage
5. The value of internal linking throughout the website’s content

Let’s get going!

Amanda Joyce:
Hi, welcome to another episode of the Trade Secrets Podcast. We’re excited about today’s topic. I mean, I feel like we’re always excited about the day’s topic, but this is one that’s been kind of a long time coming, and we’ve thrown it out a bunch of times, and then we’ve been a little gun shy to do it.

Devon Hayes:
But in honor of The Tom Brady Roast, we figured we would jump in and do a little website roast. Now, this person, they are a client. We are about to launch a beautiful new website for them, so we have no shame in and just throw it all out there.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
And just Nikki Glaser style roast of this old website. So if you normally listen to us and our riveting content, this is definitely one you want to probably watch on YouTube instead. You’d probably get more out of it versus us talking through what we’re seeing, and it would make way more sense visually for you to watch it, I think, but it’s up to you.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. But nonetheless, if you’re in your car, and you’re listening, don’t tune out. I think you’ll get some good nuggets from this, but this is one of my favorite things that we do typically when we’re first chatting with a potential new client is pull their website up and, in a very nice subtle way, roast them a bit and let them know what they’re missing out on, and how they could make immediate improvements to their website to start seeing better conversion rates on their websites.

Devon Hayes:
Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.

Amanda Joyce:
This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.

Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.

Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.
Without further ado, Devon, I feel like you should do the honors and just pull this bad boy up.

Devon Hayes:
All right. All right, so this is a roofing and exteriors contractor in Minnesota, and we love Addison as the owner of Wright-At-Home Services, and they’re undergoing a massive rebrand and doing some really cool things with the brand and the new website is going to be live, so this won’t even be here by the time this podcast goes live. So this is what I do when I take a look at a site.

So I start from the top and I work my way down the same way a crawler reads your website, right? So, up here in the header, we have a phone number that’s not bad, that’s good for local SEO, but then we have some characters, and then it says, "Email Us", the first rule of thumb, if you are paying a marketing agency or an SEO agency, I would strip your emails out of a website entirely.

You want to track conversions, you can track your calls with CallRail or another call tracking tool and then form fills. That’s how you track the efficacy of your website and the traffic that comes through and who’s converting. So, having your email on there, number one, you’re going to get spam email. But number two, that’s terrible for tracking.

Amanda Joyce:
It skews the data. Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
It really does. You have another place to look, and then you have to say, even if you have a specific email coming from the website, that email is not shared with your marketing company, so they then have to tap you on the shoulder and ask you for how many leads you got via the email. It’s just take your email out of there. And that’s also, you’re telling a crawler that’s a massively important link, and it’s an external link to a new email. So already you’re sending bad messaging.It’s like asking to meet someone’s mom when you first start chatting on a dating app. It’s a bad signal.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
It’s a bad, "Ew, that’s so weird." Bad sign. All right, keep working our way down. We see their logo, Wright-at-Home Services Inc. They are updating their name because truly it is massively helpful to have the name of what you do in your company name. Now you don’t always have to. We didn’t know what Google was, we didn’t know what Amazon was, but those are massive, massive brands. So, in smaller markets, it really is beneficial to your online visibility to have the name of your services in the name of your company and also in your domain. I kind of didn’t start at the domain. So, wahs.net. Love that it’s short, don’t love that it’s .net and don’t love that there isn’t a primary service in the domain name.

Okay, now where were we? All right, now we’re looking at the navigation. It starts with the word home. This is like 2004 internet stuff here. It’s 2024. We know that if we click on this little logo over here, it’s going to take us home. So, this should not be the first item in your navigation. The very first thing should be your primary service. And this just says the word services. It doesn’t say roofing services, it doesn’t say exterior services, it doesn’t say, I don’t know, roofing even. It just says services. If you’re just listening and not watching this on YouTube, and I said, "Okay, it says home, and then it says services." Unless I told you, you literally wouldn’t know what services, what it provides. So that’s how crawlers look at it. They’re blind going into it, so we still haven’t told them what we do other than in an image on the logo on the homepage.

So you’re sucking up crawl budget here. You’re making it take longer to indicate what it is that you do for the crawlers, and we haven’t looked at what the crawlers read that humans don’t read, but we’ll do that at a different episode. We’re going to stick to what we typically look at on page when we’re doing just a quick talking through a discovery call.

There is a dropdown. Under services it says storm damage, roof replacement, siding, seamless gutters. And Minnesota they had a big storm last August and so it is good that they have storm damage as the first item here, but it also, I mean it depends on the market. Storm damage could be to a car. Storm damage doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s to a house. So I would still have roof replacement listed. Your primary service should be number one, the number one service if you’re going under a big umbrella term like services and in storm damage. It does apply typically to exteriors, home exteriors, but it’s still another big umbrella term under a big umbrella term. So I personally would go more granular with it, but our whole nav is actually much different than this one.

All right, then it goes across, we’ve got an about page, that’s great, that’s important for the E-E-A-T algorithm update, and then it breaks out into several pages. Now what you guys can’t see is that there’s really very, very, very little content on these pages. So while we have an about page, no, we don’t have an about page, we have an about headline. There is about us. It’s under the about section, but the about section doesn’t link to anything. It’s just a dropdown, hence the confusion. All right, but even on that page, let’s talk about the about page a second, Amanda.

Amanda Joyce:
To your point earlier too, it’s thin content. I’m not seeing any… The headlines are really weak. We’re going to start talking about H1s and H2s. Again, we are not telling the crawler or the person reading it or the person on the other end of this podcast who we’re narrating this page to what it is they do and who they are. It just needs a lot of help.

Devon Hayes:
So we’ll go back to the homepage here. We can dive into the about, bear with us here. This is how it kind of works in our world. We click through and then we go back. It’s not totally linear. Okay, so then we have the standard classic Canva image that every roofing website has. Every real estate website has. It’s been used, I would venture to say, probably a million times. You guys know the one: wet concrete, it’s at dusk, a little bit of siding, two car garage, three car.

Amanda Joyce:
Well-lit home, very pretty.

Devon Hayes:
Well-lit home, yes, at dusk. And then there’s a CTA. So something else we’re looking at here. I’m going to run my quick little tool. It’s called H-tag, and it checks the headings on your website and the most important heading on your website is a H1. So that H1 should say exactly what you do and where you do it. It is a signal to crawlers that says, "Hey, this is the most important thing on the page." Sometimes you get some marketing lingo in there which can work if you’re an established brand, and you’re already ranking really strongly. Or in this case, that’s not what’s going on, however-

Amanda Joyce:
Not the case.

Devon Hayes:
-Not the case. So their H1, the most important thing about this website, you’re a crawler, your eyes are closed, and I tell you, "Peace of mind for everything that matters." What is everything that matters? What is the peace of mind? What service do you provide? If we’re starting from the top down, so far we’ve got your phone number, email, a picture, a navigation that says, Home, Services, About, Our Projects, Reviews, Contact Us. Our developer did add some text under the logo, so I have to say that was not there previously, but it says, "Roofing & Siding Contractor| Minneapolis," underneath it.

Then your crawler is jumping to the H1 where it says peace of mind for everything that matters. This H1 is so significant, especially on your homepage and these guys are really, they’re not ranking for anything and this is one of the first things that we look at when you tell me you’re not ranking.

So your H1 does not tell me what you do or where you do it. And the beauty of SEO in an experienced agency is that they can combine some of that beautiful flowery marketing language to evoke emotion and connect with the customer with SEO, so that we can tell crawlers exactly what it is you do and where you do it.

Right below that we have an H5. So if you think of a headline hierarchy, you have H1, H2, H3, H4, H5. This can be coded differently. This is probably just the way the website theme was built. Sometimes you pick an H5 because the size of the font over the size of like a H1 or an H2. And it says, "Beautifully crafted roofing and siding systems to protect your home and family in any season!" Which is really nice marketing language. Now it’s talking to us about the services offered, but it still has not told us where those services are offered. So we’re missing out. There’s some SEO opportunity already.

To the right of that there’s a contact form. I think this is truly a preference thing. There could be data, I don’t know. We haven’t seen data that supports asking for your name and number right off the bat before the customer understands who you are and the benefits of working with you over another contractor. So it’s definitely our preference to not put that lead form in the headline of our exterior services contractors. We really buy into that story branding, storyboard telling about the company and the brand and connecting with you and having that human connection and giving you kinds of statements about the benefits and the outcomes you can expect when choosing this specific contractor versus you land on their website, and you just fill out a form.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, it’s a tough call. We do talk to some business owners that just feel like this is how it’s always been done, and it should be like this. But to your point earlier about how we’ve barely introduced ourselves, it just seems like you’re putting the cart before the horse and maybe some strong call-to-action buttons here above the fold and then, as you move further down, is going to make more sense. Honestly, you probably want them to move further down the page. Look at your trust logos, learn a little bit more about what it is you do before they get in contact. It’s probably a spam lead if they’re going to just complete that form without ever even bothering to scroll down the page a little bit. You need to, you know-

Devon Hayes:
And that’s the perspective we’ve seen…

Amanda Joyce:
– give your site visitors a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. They’ve got a brainstem, if they’re a good lead, they want to know more about you before they’re going to get in touch.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah, and that’s what we’ve seen is that the lead quality, when you have those forms right at the top, it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s someone who is looking for a number of quotes and not necessarily the best. So, depending on your business model, I mean it definitely could work, but some of the more established brands, they really… It’s making a good connection because they know they’re not the cheapest, but they provide higher quality service, and they provide something above and beyond to justify why they may be a little bit higher than the competition. So we’ll keep going here with the roast. So underneath these headlines on that kind of big hero image, there’s some, what are called trust logos, and contractor alliance with James Hardie, some service award from Angie’s List, GuildQuality member. None of these link externally, which it’s not a bad thing, but when you put those trust logos up there, a lot of times people expect for that to link out.

So it’s not a terrible UX. For SEO, I like for these trust logos to link, but a bit further down the page in my opinion. So we scroll down, below the fold now. That’s when you scroll past that first section of a website. We still don’t have any H2s. It kind of just jumps into H3s. It has roof replacement, siding replacement, seamless gutter systems, window replacement. There’s no button under window replacement.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
The buttons underneath here they say learn more. Pro-tip, your buttons should not say learn more, read more. They should not say that anymore. So that’s really bad for ADA compliance. If you’re a screen reader, and you read to someone who is blind, and it says learn more, you don’t know where that learn more button is going to take you. So, websites are now getting dinged for their accessibility issues, which is measured in core vitals and core vitals are a confirmed ranking factor in Google.

Did I just blow your mind? Additionally, I mean we don’t have an H2. We’re jumping into the services. I like talking about the services. There’s no internal links within the copy itself. The learn more button is not ADA compliant, that’s just terrible right there. Also, I wonder if they would get dinged for ADA compliance on the contrast of this light gray text on the white.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
It’s pretty light. Pro-tip, you need to have a good contrast for accessibility and ADA compliance with your website. All right, scrolling past the services we have, "Why Choose Wright-At-Home?" And it’s kind of a scrolling slider. At least this one says learn more about our services on the button. It’s getting better, but that contrast is not…

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
It’s like a dark… It’s not great. And why is the whole thing underlined? Oh, gosh.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah, wonder why. It’s like a slider and all of the text on it is underlined like a link, and then it takes you to a page that has pictures of logos. Bad UX. And then we have a photo of the owner, Addison, and he is just the best guy and this is probably the best copy on the site. It tells a little bit about his family, but again, we see that learn more button.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, just the learn more button. And then the thing that does keep sticking out to me is just the lack of internal links throughout all this content.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah, there’s no internal links, there’s no external links. We get down now to where there would be external links. Let’s see if it takes us out. It does. We have their section on their reviews. This is a high five, good job to their previous web team. They have a, I would say, a review widget that connects directly to Google. That is a massive trust signal. So, instead of just typing up what somebody, or taking a screenshot of a review left from Google or someone left for you on Google, having it tie in directly to your Google business profile and display on your site is great for trust, and it’s a great SEO move.

This one pulls in, it looks like both Facebook and Google reviews. It just depends on the widget you get. Right now, we just are obsessed with NiceJob and NiceJob has a widget for your website that pulls in your reviews, but there’s a ton out there, and they even have widgets like from trajectory where you can filter out and just show your four and five-star reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google Business Profile, even your GuildQuality profile, all of those places. But, whatever you do, definitely have a widget that integrates real-time Google reviews.

Okay, so going beyond the reviews, God, you’d think the page ended the way that is styled, it’s the thickest world map in the background, reviews, three show. Then we have another section on trust logos that don’t link anywhere. In 2022, a bit dated here, a couple of years old. Below, we have a section called Project Gallery. This is, I know, a tool I believe from Project Map It and there’s a lot of debate on these kinds of tools.

Whether or not they help with local SEO, they’re kind of sold to contractors this way. It’s not bad, but anything that’s an embed or in an iframe on your website is not passing the local SEO juice that you might be told that it is. What this actually does is it helps with conversions, it helps people see you do work locally. It’s kind of that social proof that folks are looking for. So don’t be sold on one of these, like Project Map It, RealWork Labs. These kinds of tools that are great, but they help with CRO, not necessarily your local SEO.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, and for those of you that are listening that maybe aren’t familiar with the names of those tools, it’s a map embed that you can put all your job locations in it. So, if you have really serviced an area for a long time, and you really keep it updated, it shows your breadth of work and people are like, "Oh wow, they’ve done 45 homes in the general vicinity of my home." It can definitely add that level of trust as well.

Devon Hayes:
Yes. But, with that, because they have that map, they actually don’t have the Google Maps API on here with their brick and mortar location, which is another like thumbs down for SEO. You truly want your Google Map location embedded on the homepage preferably, or even in the footer is a great place to stick that in there and that does a lot for you in local SEO. Then we’ve got some, it looks like a project gallery below that. This isn’t… What we know our client’s qualm is, they’re like, "Ah, there’s only a handful of projects. They’re not up-to-date. They’re not professional photos." For us, what we know about their performance, site speed wise, it was slowing down the site and in home remodels, any of that bigger contractor world, landscaping for certain, your project images, siding, your project images really help sell your services and convert people.

So I can see the need for having those on a homepage, but when your primary service is roof replacement and storm, you’re getting a lot of those leads from storm damage. I don’t like what it can do to a site in terms of slowing down the performance. So, personally, I don’t think that this is necessarily necessary, especially because they’re not these professional images that are going to, they’re asphalt roofs, and it’s not like some Spanish tile roof with copper gutters in a gated community. They have a section on their referral rewards program, Addison, and we joked with Addison, the logo looks like, I don’t know, like Imperial China something or other. It’s not hurting them. And then their footer, again, we’ve got an email address in there. Good job, they have their address. Bad job, their company name is not typed out, it’s just a logo and their primary service is not typed out or listed here.

Footer is out of date. You should always have your copyright 2024. I like that they have the site map there. I like that they have the privacy policy. Crawlers look for that. So there’s actually two copyright sections. One is 2022, the one below it is 2024. Bottom says, "Powered by Wright-At-Home Theme." All right, long story short, your footer is just a chance for you to have some SEO gold, and we have text, they’re probably getting dinged for this.

They have black text on a dark background that you can only see if you highlight it. They do have some external links to their social profiles. For us, this, outside of their reviews links, their first external links are really these social profiles. When you want to establish authority, they really should have an external link in here that’s going to like top 10 roofers in Minneapolis or something like that that’s relevant to the service.

Amanda Joyce:
I hear you.

Devon Hayes:
When we’re trying to help a contractor establish prominence, we strip all of these socials and put them on the contact page and take them out of the footer because this is not the most important thing about you right now. I would, well you guys will see when this comes out, what we would do, but we didn’t even get through to the other pages, but we can tell you overall there’s thin content.

You want at least 600 words per page minimum. There’s no FAQs on here. You want FAQs, you want schema markup on those FAQs on every single page on your website so you can sneak them down at the bottom. We’ve all seen the little accordions that there’s the question, hit the plus sign and then there’s the answer below it. Great way to get in a lot of content, but also it really helps customers and that’s why sites that use FAQs are favored on Google’s search engine. There’s the search page, but.

Amanda Joyce:
I agree. I think you get the point. There’s so much more we could go through.

Devon Hayes:
All right guys, well if you found value in this, or you would like us to roast your website, please do reach out. This is the part of our job that we truly love, because we get to go in there and take a peek and if you tell us something’s not working, we can usually figure out why and give you some good pointers. So, let us know. We would love to hear from you. If you found this helpful, please share it with people you might know who would find it helpful as well. And thank you so much. We will see you next time.

Amanda Joyce:
That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.

Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.

Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe and don’t miss our next reveal.

Devon Hayes:
Until next time.