Is your website agency actually good at getting you leads?

Two different businesses with the same word in the name

A web design shop and a lead-generation company can both call themselves marketing agencies, but they are different businesses. A web shop is paid once for a deliverable: the site is designed, built, approved and handed over, and the job is done. Its people are good at layout, branding and finishing a project on time.

A lead-generation company is paid every month for an outcome: calls, booked estimates and signed jobs. Its people spend their time on ads, tracking, follow-up and reporting. Neither model is wrong. A good web shop can build a site you are proud of, and a good lead-generation company can fill your calendar. The trouble starts when you hire one and expect the other, so it is worth knowing which one you have.

What a website can and cannot do on its own

A website does one job well: it converts the people who arrive. A clear offer, a phone number that is easy to tap, real photos of your work and a form that reaches a person all turn more visitors into calls.

What a website does not do on its own is make people arrive. Traffic comes from search, ads, your Google profile, referrals and reviews. A redesign with no traffic plan is a photo of a store with no road to it: it can look excellent and still sit empty. Before you judge a site on how many calls it brings in, ask how many people it was ever sent.

Five signs you hired a web shop and expected a lead engine

If three or more of these describe your setup, you most likely hired a web shop and expected a lead engine.

• No tracked phone number. The site shows the same number as your truck and business cards, so nobody can tell which calls the website produced.
• No call recording. Nobody can hear what callers asked for or how they were answered.
• No form routing to a person. Form fills land in a general inbox nobody checks often, instead of reaching someone whose job is to call back.
• Reporting in visits. The monthly report shows visitors and page views, never calls, estimates or signed jobs.
• “SEO included” with nothing you can see. Search work is on the invoice, but there is no list of pages written, listings fixed or problems solved.

None of that means the site is bad. It means nobody was hired to turn it into a lead engine. To hear how a company that does that job should answer, use the 14 questions to ask a marketing company.

What to measure each one on

Judge each one on the job it was hired to do.

Judge a website on four things. Speed: it should load quickly on a phone with an ordinary signal. Mobile: the phone number, the offer and the form should be easy to use with one thumb. Forms that reach a human: every form fill should land with a named person who calls back. Tracked calls: the site should show a tracked number so you can count and hear the calls it produces.

Judge a lead engine on three things. Cost per signed job: total marketing cost divided by the jobs it signed. Speed to lead: how quickly a new call or form gets a response, day or night. Booked appointment rate: how many leads turn into an estimate on the calendar. For how to work out the first one, see how to calculate cost per signed job for DFW contractors.

Five questions before you pay for another redesign

Ask these before you sign for a new site, and get the answers in writing.

1. Where will the traffic come from? If the answer is the new site itself, the plan is missing its biggest piece.
2. How will we know which calls the site produced? Expect tracked numbers and recorded calls, set up before launch.
3. Who receives a form fill, and how fast? Name the person and the response time, including nights and weekends.
4. What is wrong with the current site that more traffic would not fix? A redesign should solve a real problem, such as speed, mobile use or a missing offer, not just look newer.
5. Who owns the site, the domain and the content when the work is done? You should, in writing, with the logins in your name.

If the honest answers point to traffic and follow-up rather than design, the money may do more somewhere else. If you buy most of your work from lead marketplaces today, read why pay-per-lead stops working past $1 million before you decide where it goes.

If you already paid for the site

You do not need to rebuild a site you just paid for. Add the pieces that turn it into part of a lead system.

• Tracked numbers. Put a tracked number on the site, and separate ones on your Google profile and ads, so you can see where each call came from.
• A follow-up system. Every form fill and missed call gets an automatic text or call back within a minute, and a person follows up the same day.
• A Google profile that matches. The same business name, phone number, hours, services and service area as the site, with recent photos and reviews.
• Two or three pages that answer the questions your buyers ask. Such as what a job costs, how long it takes and what happens on the first visit, each with the answer near the top.

That is the same groundwork we lay for contractors across Dallas-Fort Worth. For remodelers, the questions worth answering on those pages are covered on our remodeling marketing page.