5 Best Practices for Construction Websites Using User Experience
Construction Website Tips Based On Your User's Journey
Creating an effective website for your construction firm is an important step in both your sales and marketing process. For construction firms, we often see a longer buying process that includes a good deal of research - a lot of which can be done on your website. That means you have the opportunity to present a great website that makes the research easy for your potential buyers to learn why you’re so great!
It’s important to first consider how a user might be researching on your website.
Construction Firm User Experience
They have a project in mind and need to find a firm, so they’re probably going to do a Google search and click on the first few options. They’re going to land on your Homepage and are going to make a decision within a few seconds about how they feel about you and if they’d like to proceed.
From there, they’ll probably look to see if you have the services they’re looking for.
Once they’ve confirmed they’ll want to see some project examples to see if they like how you complete the work and solve the problems.
After they’ve confirmed your beautiful and quality work, they’re probably thinking “Okay… who are these guys? What experience do they have?” which means they’ll probably head over to your About Us page and learn more about your team, experience, and qualifications.
Finally, after learning about your years of experience, awards, and amazing team, they’ll probably want some confirmation, thinking “so they think they’re great… what do other people think?” and look for testimonials as to how well you do your work. At the end of this long research process, they’ll hopefully want to contact you, and you should make it as easy as humanly possible for them to do so.
With that user journey in mind… let’s dive into 5 best practices for how construction companies can optimize heir websites to make sure that they’re reaching their full potential.
1. Show Off of Your Projects
Your work speaks for yourself. It should be important for your website to show off your work throughout its design. We often build AEC sites around the idea of robust Project Portfolio pages. It’s important if you’re offering multiple services that users are able to sort and filter and find the projects relevant to them. The Project detail pages should then include further relevant information, depending on how you’re appealing to your users. Many of our firms choose to share project details like the problems solved, timeline, architecture partners and share a story about how the project happened. This information should all be paired with a plethora of photos of the project, allowing your work to speak for itself.
Not only should you have a robust and easy to navigate Project Portfolio, your site should also have your work integrated into the design through your Homepage design, blog posts, on your About Us page, on your Services page.
2. Link Services to Projects and Projects to Services
Two of the most important parts of your website are your Service and Project pages. These pages not only tell your users what you do, but they also give real-life examples of your quality of work and give insight as to how you approach a problem.
Your Service page should include links to Project examples after your general service information. Similar to our friends at MRJ, you can link just a few projects to show proof of your work right below the service.
Similarly, your Project pages should include links to the services provided. For construction firms that offer a wealth of services, you can input a whole list of services for each project.
These links are not only great for user experience but also is beneficial for your organic SEO.
3. Provide a robust about us page sharing experience and what makes you different
Remember that user journey we mentioned at the beginning of this blog? Your About Us pages are a great place to share your value proposition with the user. Tell them about yourself, your experience, and what makes you different.
We often encourage users to show pictures of their leadership team to help put a face to a name and show users some of the real people behind your business.
This is also a great place to recruit new team members! At the bottom of your general About Us or Team page, you can include a link to current openings or applications.
4. Display Key Industry License, Certificates, and Stats
Any accreditations, awards, special licenses or certifications you have should definitely be included if important to your services. These don’t have to be listed outright, but logos, inclusions, or badges are beneficial to share with users.
One such example we often see is when a building meets a LEED requirement for green buildings. If you’re able to meet these requirements and have for previous projects, you can include these on the Project detail pages, letting users know your capabilities.
5. Include Client Testimonials Wherever Possible
Finally, you can tell people all you want how great you are, but when it comes down to it, customers love hearing from other clients. If you have some testimonials, it’s important that you sprinkle them throughout your site, including your Homepage, Service pages, and Project pages.
Bonus: Create a landing page around service and it’s project
If you want to take your marketing up a notch, we’d recommend creating a whole case study page highlighting a Service and Project. Use this page to pull in important stats about the project, as well as highlight the client testimonial and including a Contact Form. Then, you can point Pay-Per-Click ads to this page surrounding the Service, giving all the information a client may need right on a landing page.
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