# Phones ringing?!



## Stretch67 (Oct 7, 2013)

For those of you who have had websites built...

How long did it take for you to get your first lead off the site? I know its not an overnight deal, but now that my website is for the most part up and running, I find myself anxiously staring at the office phone. Are we talking weeks or months here?

Are there other activities I can engage in to help? We are gonna do some tradeshows etc, but those are still a few months out. Finding myself with lots of time on my hands right now....


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## PressurePros (May 6, 2007)

Probably not the best time of year to gauge a website's effectiveness. 

You will have to start working on SEO to get your website ranked. The best analogy is that you build the most trendy restaurant and hire the best chefs and serve nothing but the finest food. Your wait staff are all seasoened professionals.. but you built the site in the back of a guy's barn in the middle of corn country Iowa. That's your site right now. The search engines probably do not know it exists. Even when they do know, they need a whole formula of things to be in place before they rank you at the top for a certain search. 

When your site shows up at the top of Google (for the terms people are using to search), you will get more calls than you can handle.. no matter what the website looks like.


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## straight_lines (Oct 17, 2007)

Enjoy spending time with your family.


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## Epoxy Pro (Oct 7, 2012)

Start a Fb page if you don't have one yet. We get work from there. Our website is just as yours is, just going online and not near done, but it's up.


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## Rbriggs82 (Jul 9, 2012)

Stay the course and be patient. Ranking on Google can be a slow process especially for a brand spanking new website. It's gonna take some time, enjoy the down time you'll wish you had in a couple months when you're slammed.


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## carls (Jan 15, 2014)

> How long did it take for you to get your first lead off the site? I know its not an overnight deal, but now that my website is for the most part up and running, I find myself anxiously staring at the office phone. Are we talking weeks or months here?


It's only going to take a few weeks until your ranked across the board. You already are showing up for some searches. Leads will follow.

Do a search for:

"wright county mn industrial painters" and see where you rank.

If you'd like some items that you could such as some additional citations and such I can give you a list to tackle.


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## Dave Mac (May 4, 2007)

yeap your website will take months to rank and pull internet traffic IMO, but you can use it now to help you lead potential clients to your site, you now have to have all your printed material that points them to your site. Like business cards, est forms etc...

Also what I did because I was like you and wanted to see instant results, I used add-words pay per click until I got on the first page for organic searches which just recently happened.

PS

Carls Ill take that list also


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## carls (Jan 15, 2014)

> Carls Ill take that list also


Sure Dave, it's not a generic list. I make these unique for each client based on your competitors. I'll get you one.


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## Dave Mac (May 4, 2007)

carls said:


> Sure Dave, it's not a generic list. I make these unique for each client based on your competitors. I'll get you one.


customer service at its finest:thumbsup: 

thanks Carls


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## PaintersUnite (May 11, 2014)

Dave Mac said:


> yeap your website will take months to rank and pull internet traffic IMO, but you can use it now to help you lead potential clients to your site, you now have to have all your printed material that points them to your site. Like business cards, est forms etc...
> 
> Also what I did because I was like you and wanted to see instant results, I used *add-words pay per click* until I got on the first page for organic searches which just recently happened.
> 
> ...


I've used adwords on and off since 2007 and have never found it to generate quality leads. Most of the clicks I received, I found were people not searching for a painting contractor. I understand keywords and negative keywords usage. But know matter what I tried, ie; if I spend $100 for a week or so, no quality leads would come from it.


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## Stretch67 (Oct 7, 2013)

Lol. Im TRYING to relax! But i also got a full time salesman here with no leads! Just cold calling and knocking on doors.... hes gonna fall out of his chair when that first call comes in!

Ill have to google "organic" not sure what that is. Ill do anything lol time is no object. 

Yep ill take a to do list and get crackin on it Monday! Taking the company on a guided pheasant and waterfowl hunt should be fun!!


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## PaintersUnite (May 11, 2014)

bryceraisanen, very nice site. But don't expect your website to generate tons and tons of leads.


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## George Z (Apr 15, 2007)

PaintersUnite said:


> bryceraisanen, very nice site. But don't expect your website to generate tons and tons of leads.


I would expect it to generate tons of leads. Just give it some time and work it.


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## Rbriggs82 (Jul 9, 2012)

It's going to do great. I just took another look at it again from my desktop and man did Carls build you an awesome website.


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## Rbriggs82 (Jul 9, 2012)

Honestly I wouldn't go the ppc route. Using Google pay per click yourself takes a lot of trial and error and can cost a lot of money trying to dial it in. I know the first step is to have a targeted landing page just for ppc. I tried it a couple times before I ranked well organically, it was an epic failure. :yes:


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## ewingpainting.net (Jun 2, 2008)

You should at least put your website addy in your sig here and anywhere else you can. I have tested it, my rank goes down when I remove it from PT sig. 


Id be interested in the list from Carl to....


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## Stretch67 (Oct 7, 2013)

Would it be a good idea to put a link in my sig on other forums i use that are painting related? Like hunting and snowmobiling forums?


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## George Z (Apr 15, 2007)

bryceraisanen said:


> Would it be a good idea to put a link in my sig on other forums i use that are painting related? Like hunting and snowmobiling forums?


Absolutely not if they are not paint industry related.
The jury is still not out about signature links here.


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## Stretch67 (Oct 7, 2013)

Oooops!!! I meant they are NOT painting related. ?


So to clarify... should I remove my sig link from the forums that r purely recreational?


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## George Z (Apr 15, 2007)

bryceraisanen said:


> Oooops!!! I meant they are NOT painting related. ?
> 
> 
> So to clarify... should I remove my sig link from the forums that r purely recreational?


I figured that, my answer still the same.


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## RCP (Apr 18, 2007)

Be interested to hear Carls' response. 
My understanding is that forum links are "no follow", meaning that they may not factor into page rank for your site (which many consider to be not important anymore), but that being said, your responses here do show up on Google searches, based on keywords.


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## CApainter (Jun 29, 2007)

RCP said:


> Be interested to hear Carls' response.
> My understanding is that forum links are "no follow", meaning that they may not factor into page rank for your site (which many consider to be not important anymore), but that being said, your responses here do show up on Google searches, based on keywords.


That alone should draw in new members after reading Steve Richard's stuff. Imagine how many people are googling "weed"


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## carls (Jan 15, 2014)

> Be interested to hear Carls' response.
> My understanding is that forum links are "no follow", meaning that they may not factor into page rank for your site (which many consider to be not important anymore), but that being said, your responses here do show up on Google searches, based on keywords.


Let's categorize these backlinks into two categories.

- money keywords (painting)
- brand keywords (your business name)

Where forum signatures begin to hurt (and they do) is when you have many "money" keywords in your forum signature. These become extremely repetitive when every thread/post can be indexed individually. If you have 5000 posts and a big ugly sig file then it's basically link spam 4999 times.

You can be penalized for this. We have cleaned several sites with very clear warnings in Google Webmaster tools (once it was setup for them) as to why the site owner was penalized and excess forum (spammy) links have been mentioned.

Now where it REALLY hurts you is by buying some fiverr gig or outsourcing cheap SEO where they sign you up for a ton of forums (using software) with nothing more than your fake profile linking back to your site with some "money" keywords. We've billed out many hours cleaning up these messes for contractors. A typical $5 gig on fiverr to blast your url out there could easily cost you $500+ in time to have a guy like me trace it all, clean it up and request and write a manual review after you are penalized.



> My understanding is that forum links are "no follow", meaning that they may not factor into page rank for your site


That would depend on the forum. For example your signature link here is set to "_blank" meaning it opens in a new window however it's missing the rel="nofollow" attribute so it is in fact a followed link.

Onto the second part of these links.... BRAND links. Create as many as you like. You won't be penalized for having brand backlinks coming back to you but you still want to keep them local or industry specific.

IE the anchor text of the link is your *company name* or *actual domain name* and not keyword based anchor text. Get the keyword based anchor text links from small local websites and you're golden.

Think about sponsoring a kids sports team, or an event like a run or race... Essentially any local event that has a website and lists their local sponsors. These links are golden.

Chamber of Commerce and the BBB are also two more local organizations that send strong local signals to Search Engines.

These are the hardest links to obtain (they cost $$$) but some of the most effective that nobody needs a web geek to get for them.

Across ALL link profiles on the sites we study in the contractor niche and client sites we position ourselves the top ranked sites in the most competitive areas ALL have the above local link strategy in common.


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## Hines Painting (Jun 22, 2013)

Hey Carls, for the local backlinks- If I am targeting a new area, would it be best to have the links from there target my homepage, or the local area page for that area?


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## Rbriggs82 (Jul 9, 2012)

So should I remove the cities from my sig? According to carls it seems like I'm walking a fine line.


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## carls (Jan 15, 2014)

> Hey Carls, for the local backlinks- If I am targeting a new area, would it be best to have the links from there target my homepage, or the local area page for that area?


You would want to deep link to the specific area pages.



> So should I remove the cities from my sig? According to carls it seems like I'm walking a fine line.


Your company name is "Paragon Painting" so you really have BRAND links. You are also pointing them to the appropriate service area pages of your site. If they all pointed to the homepage it would be fishy.

I wouldn't be too worried. You can always watch webmaster tools and they'll give you an unnatural link warning if it's a problem.


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