Your garage door repair business website is the most important component of your garage repair marketing arsenal. When planned, implemented, and updated properly and frequently, the site can bring you a ton of qualified garage door leads for your business.
When you get more leads, you can be more selective about the garage door jobs that you're willing to take on. There is also the potential to increase your prices and in turn improve your profit margin. A website is much more than a static brochure, it is an active marketing engine for your business that opens up a world of possibilities.
The purpose of this post is to educate you on the requirements for a highly effective marketing-oriented website for your garage door business. By following the requirements outlined here, you'll be way ahead of most - if not all - of your local garage door competitors. Take the information here and present it to your web designer so they'll know exactly what you're looking for.
Most prospects who arrive at your website are looking at multiple garage door services providers - so they will likely see multiple competitor sites before arriving at your homepage.
As a result, you must be sure that your web design compares favorably to the others in your area. You must have an effective marketing strategy to make sure your site stands out.
Ideally, once they arrive on your website, they'll be so impressed that they'll stop their searching and pick up the phone and call you for your services.
Here are the elements that you should keep in mind for site layout and web design.
Your website must have a modern design. Having an up-to-date design shows that you take pride in your business. Many prospects will likely view your website as a reflection of the level of services that you provide. Make sure it looks clean, professional, and modern.
Look at other local service providers for garage door services and other home services like HVAC, plumbing, etc. You'll quickly learn the design elements that look modern and clean versus those that look antiquated.
Somewhere around half - and in some cases more - of your website visitors will be viewing your website on a mobile device. For your marketing to reach these mobile users, your website must look and function properly on all devices (your design must be responsive).
It must work not only on desktops but on tablets and smartphones as well. To make it easier for mobile device users, be sure to include a click to call button in your design. This way prospects can push a button to make contact with your business.
For your marketing to be effective, the layout for your garage door website must be conventional. Don't try to reinvent the wheel with really "cool" design features or funky navigation. The goal is to get prospects what they need quickly so they can pick up the phone and call you. Don't distract them.
Take some time and look at local service providers in your area to get a feel for the proper layout for local sites.
In general, here are some elements that you should look for in your site design:
Logo
You should have your logo in the upper left part of your website (A in the screenshot above). It should be relatively small. Customers don't get nearly as excited by logos as business owners, just make sure that it looks professional and is in the upper left.
Menu
The menu should be along the top part of the website - and you should have anywhere from 3-5 top level items on your garage door website (A in the screenshot above)
Phone Number
There should be a phone number in the upper right part of your website (C in the screenshot above). If you're running SEO or paid ad marketing campaigns, you can insert code into your website that will change the phone number based on what marketing channel the website visitor used to arrive on the site.
Address / Service Area
While your customers obviously won't be visiting you at your business address, mentioning your service area should be prominently featured on your home page. Establishing this service area is smart marketing - it increases the chances that a potential client that makes contact is located within your service area.
Sticky
If you've been on a website and you've noticed that as you scroll down that some elements stay "stuck" to the top of your web browser, that's called a sticky layout. For your site, you'll want to make sure that your logo, menu, and especially phone number are sticky and stay at the top of the browser.
Having a sticky menu helps tremendously with conversions (getting people to schedule an appointment). A prospect will arrive on one of your garage door services pages, scroll down, then (if you've done your job properly) they will be convinced that you're the right company to fix their garage door.
People have short attention spans - especially on the Internet. They may want your services but get distracted by any number of things. A sticky menu makes it more likely that they'll follow through and contact you by making sure your phone number is always visible.
Reviews as a Marketing Tool
Prospective customers looking to have their garage door spring replaced are going to want to know that this isn't your first rodeo. In addition to showing off your work, you'll want to include actual customer reviews on your website. Text reviews can be faked and don't have a lot of value. Text reviews with photos are better, videos are best. You can also embed your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) reviews on your website for additional credibility.
Symbols of Trust
Prospective customers also feel better about a business if they have some accreditations or membership in organizations. Using these memberships or accreditations as a marketing asset on your website is a must. If you're a member of the BBB or a garage door industry association like the International Door Association, embed their logo on your site.
Garage door service providers must have certain content on their website in order to properly convey their professionalism and experience to prospective customers. Having great content can be a huge help from an SEO standpoint and from a marketing standpoint.
Great content can deliver SEO website traffic to the home page and services pages on your site. Once on your site, you'll use effective marketing techniques to show the prospect that you're the right garage door company to solve their problem.
Here are some content items that really should be on your website.
You need to have a page for each and every service that you offer on your website. When your company participates in Google Ads, these services pages will serve as the landing pages for your Google garage door ads campaigns. From an SEO marketing standpoint, you'll want people to do a Google search for a service like "garage door repairs Houston" - and have your garage door company website appear near the top of the results. When someone clicks on your search listing, they will be taken to your services pages.
Each of your services pages should have a description with unique content about your process and how you provide that particular service. If possible, each page should also have text and photos - including before and after - detailing actual work that you've performed for your customers. So you'll be building a large marketing portfolio of the services that you've provided your garage door customers.
Is this a lot of work? Yes. But... documenting services you performed on actual jobs can be a huge help towards your marketing efforts and getting more customers. By doing this on your website, it can set you apart from your competitors and make it much more likely that you get the phone call instead of someone else. Prospects will know that you are a reliable garage door repair provider.
Sample Services Pages
You should also include the brands that you service on these website pages. Focusing your marketing on brands that you provide services for can be extremely effective. Prospects will know that you're able to fix their garage door based on a brand name in many cases.
You'll also want to have pages for each of your service areas. This can not only help with SEO, but also let prospective customers know that they are within your service area. You will have writeups of the garage door services that you've provided customers in that area on these website pages.
You need to have a detailed about page on your website. Your about page will likely be one of the most highly visited pages on your website. This makes it one of the most important pages for marketing your business, and you need to put time into making sure it positively represents your company.
Why?
Because people want to know who'll they'll be working with. They want to know who they'll be letting into their home (or at least their garage).
Don't just phone it in - the about page is important.
This is a huge marketing opportunity for you to stand out from those pesky lead websites that always seem to rank high up in the search engines. As you probably already know, these sites farm out leads to garage door businesses in the area for a fee.
None of these nameless, faceless lead websites has any photos or descriptions of who will actually be doing the work.
This is your chance to greatly differentiate your garage door company site. Have a photo of you and your team. Tell people about how you grew up in the area and have been in business for a number of years.
Present any awards or recognition that you've received over the years. Depending on requirements in your service area, let prospects know that you are licensed professionals (or have the proper permits).
Make it an even more powerful online marketing presence by including a welcome video on your about page (and/or home page). Let potential customers know that there is a real businessperson standing behind this website.
Your website should also have a blog that is featured from the main menu. A blog is an extremely effective marketing tool to showcase your work.
Your jobs will be documented here, and blog content will also be reused throughout your website.
Your contact page must provide multiple ways for your clients to get in touch with you. The page should be clean and simple for a prospect to navigate.
In order to do well with garage door SEO and rank high up in the search results for the services that you provide, your site will need to load quickly.
A high priority of Google is that users have a good experience using its search engine. A big part of the user experience is making sure that a website loads quickly when they click on one of the search engine results.
Google recently rolled out something called core web vitals which uses page load speed (and similar factors) as a ranking factor for search engine results pages. For both ranking purposes and for customer experience, you're going to want to make sure your pages load quickly.
You can get a quick idea of how quickly your website loads - or how quickly other websites load - by heading over to pingdom page speed test or gtmetrix.
You're going to have a lot of options for the construction and hosting of your website. There are two main directions that you can choose: WordPress or paid website platforms. The pros and cons of each are displayed below
It is possible to create your own website through the use of paid website platform providers. Paid website platforms allow you to host your website for a monthly fee.
Most of these platforms have a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) website builder which allows you to easily put together a simple website.
Examples of paid website platforms include Weebly, Wix and GoDaddy.
The performance of your garage door site on these platforms can be hit or miss. All platforms tend to advertise how fast they are and how they are optimized for search engines, you may find this to not be the case.
On most of these platforms, your website will be placed on a server with dozens of other websites - which will almost certainly slow down your site tremendously. Your website may also be unavailable periodically based on server load.
The platform providers also talk about how sites on their platforms are optimized for SEO. While they may have some SEO-related features, the likelihood of you ranking high up in search engines on these platforms is not all that high. SEO is not a one-and-done process. It requires continuously adding and optimizing content.
I would only consider these types of websites if you're starting out. While it is easy to get a website up and running, the design and technical specifications are usually quite limited.
While the do-it-yourself route with one of the paid website platforms mentioned above can be a way to cut costs when you're first starting out, it is highly recommended that you use WordPress for your garage door website along with an extremely fast web host.
Custom Build
You can get a website designer to build you a custom website from scratch (or based on one of their previous designs) based on your requirements.
It is extremely important to select a developer with marketing experience. Ideally, they will have worked with other home services providers - maybe even garage door companies.
Review their previous work and interview their previous clients to make sure they can meet your needs.
While this option will be the most expensive, it should provide the best results.
Build from a Template
Purchasing a template and having a developer modify that template can be a less expensive and quicker route to getting your garage door company site up and running. Consult with your developer prior to purchasing a template.
Web design templates can be hit or miss. While most of the web designs look great, some can be bloated and have a lot of excess bells and whistles - not to mention code - that slows the site down. A good developer can advise you on whether a template makes sense for your garage door website or not.
Hosting
For website hosting, you have many options that range from shared hosting on a server with many other websites - to having your own dedicated server. It is beyond the scope of this article to do a deep dive into web hosting options. I personally use WPEngine, but I also hear good things about Cloudways and WPX hosting.
Many garage door company owners don't have the time to get up to speed on the tech required to build their own website. If this sounds like you, you might want to consider an agency that offers garage door web design services as part of their overall digital marketing service offerings.
Here's a quick checklist you can use when evaluating these agencies:
Your garage door company website is the most valuable digital marketing tool available to your business. Your website needs to be easy for prospects to navigate and to make contact.
Your website is competing with the sites of your competitors. Make it stand out. Add photo, video and writeups of previous jobs. Demonstrate that you are a hard-working local business owner that homeowners can trust for their garage door needs.
