As a contract service business owner, creating a website may sound like a difficult and unnecessary task.

However, a website can be a valuable and effective marketing and sales tool for your contract service business.

We have worked with many business owners who have been able to use their website to increase their local leads, improve their brand awareness, and enhance convenience for their customers.

In this article, we will walk through the disadvantages you can face if you do not have a website for your contract service business, like limited reach, little to no leads, lower brand recognition, and more.

1. Limited Visibility

These days, many customers find service providers by searching online. If you do not have a contract service business website, your company may be undiscoverable online or only have limited visibility.

The only way your company may be discoverable online without a website is if you are registered with the Better Business Bureau, have a profile on an online directories like Yelp or Angi, have a Google My Business profile, or have social media profiles.

However, the most effective way to increase visibility into your company and your offerings is to have a website for your company that highlights your offerings and provides potential customers with a direct way to contact you.

2. Decreased Credibility

As things become more digital, we almost expect every reputable company to have a website and for that website to look professional. A website essentially serves as an organization’s digital storefront.

When walking by stores in person, you probably evaluate the storefronts to get a sense for whether or not you want to walk in. There is a similar evaluation that goes on for websites.

If we continue with the analogy of a physical store, having no website is like having no storefront and expecting customers to walk through a back ally to enter your store. While a storefront does not make a store, it can build a sense of trust.

Creating a website is a courtesy to prospective customers and helps build a feeling of credibility with your customers.

3. Limited Reach

As a contract service business, you will generally start within a few mile radius and keep building out your service area as you get more customers in surrounding areas.

Unfortunately, without a website, this can be more challenging. A website enables customers that aren’t directly in your neighborhood to discover your business and reach out to you for service.

If you don’t have a website, your growth will rely on solely word of mouth marketing, making it more time consuming and potentially expensive to spread the word about your business to surrounding areas.

4. Low to No Leads

While not every website will bring in hundreds of leads each month, it still will generally get you more leads than you would have received without a website.

A website helps sell your services for you without requiring you to be the first one to reach out. By having a website, customers can find you and call with questions about services they need.

As you build your website and online presence, you will begin to notice that your leads and web presence steadily grows over time, providing you with sustainable inbound leads.

Blue Trade Tip: Inbound leads come from customers finding your business online and reaching out by phone or contact form to request service from you. These leads require less time and resources than traditional outbound methods.

5. Inconvenience for Customers

In this digital era, many customers have gotten used to being able to perform extensive research on a company and their offerings before reaching out. Without a website, customers are unable to review your services in depth and have to call in to get this information.

For a customer trying to evaluate many options, perhaps for a home system installation or replacement, this can deter them from going with a provider that does not have an official website that enables them to do their research beforehand.

Providing customers with a website full of information about your services enables customers to evaluate your offerings and reach out to you quickly.

6. Low Brand Recognition

From the moment you start a business, you need to focus on sales and marketing to grow it. Without one or both of these, no matter how good your business is, your business will fail to grow.

As we mentioned above, a website is something that can help stimulate growth if you consistently maintain it. A website also helps you build awareness and brand recognition of your business.

While prospective customers search for services like yours, having a website can help your company’s name and website appear in these types of searches which helps spread the word about your business.

7. Limited Ability to Scale

To scale your business, you need to increase sales, either through increasing the area in which you serve customers or by increasing the services you offer customers.

Regardless of which of these you want to do, a website can help. With a website, you can easily add new services to your website to market them. If you expand your service area, you can create city pages on your website to advertise the areas you offer service.

Without a website for your contract service business, you don’t have one central spot where you can add changes and updates to your business to inform existing and future customers about what you have to offer.

Create a Website To Grow Your Contract Service Business

As you can see, there are many advantages to creating a website for your contract service business.

By creating a contract service business website, you can increase your leads, brand recognition, and credibility.

Do you want to learn more about creating an effective website for your contract service business? Check out our “Guide To Marketing a Home Service Business Digitally.”