Determining what type of content to include on your contract service business website can be one of the hardest parts of getting started.

You may be wondering things like: “What pages should I have? What content should they include? How do I generate ideas?”

At Blue Trade Media, we have helped numerous home service companies determine the structure of their website with a repeatable strategy that can be applied to any home service business website.

In this article we will cover the process you can go through to brainstorm your key services and offerings and structure your home service business website effectively.

10 Things To Consider When Creating Your Contract Service Business Website

1. What Types of Clients Do You Serve?

The first thing you need to define is the type of customers you service. Do you work with commercial or residential clients? If you work with both, what percentage of each?

Once you have this question answered, you should be able to determine how much focus each type of audience will get on your website pages.

For instance, if 75% of your business is focused on residential clients and only 25% is focused on commercial clients and you want it to stay that way, you can create the following kind of pages as shown in the image below.

In this example, you would create high level pages for your commercial side, but keep it as general as repair, maintenance, installation, and replacement. For your residential side, you would start with that high-level hierarchy and create pages that get even more specific into the sub-services under those.

That type of structure enables potential commercial clients to see that you serve commercial clients, but keeps your focus and main content efforts on your residential services.

What Percentage of Your Clients Are Residential Versus Commercial?

If you want to increase the commercial side of your business, you can build out the same types of pages as you would for your residential side, for your commercial side.

The audience you create large quantities of quality content for is the one that you will likely to attract more. If you want to attract residential and commercial clients equally, then you should dedicate just as much time to building out pages for each audience.

What Type of Industries Are Your Commercial Clients In?

Once you determine if you offer residential services, commercial services, or both, and to what degree, there are a few more questions you should ask yourself.

For instance, if you offer commercial services, what types of industries or facilities do you commonly work with?

If you are a commercial HVAC contractor, do you work with food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, etc.?

Calling out the industries you work with will help prospective customers from that industry know that you are qualified to work with clients like them because you have experience with their industry.

To take this a step further, you should include client case studies, testimonials, and photos on these pages from customers in those industries.

Do You Offer Additional Service Options?

One unique service option that falls outside of the scope of a sub-service are outdoor service options. You could be a tile installer, but solely focus on providing indoor tile installation and steer away from performing outdoor tile installs.

However, if you are a tile installer that does both indoor and outdoor tile installation, you should create a page on your site that shows you also perform outdoor tile installation (since most potential customers will assume you do indoor tile).

If you service commercial and residential clients and you offer outdoor services to both of them, you can create a joint page highlighting your commercial and residential outdoor services or you can split them into two pages (Outdoor Residential Services and Outdoor Commercial Services) if they differ in process and expertise.

2. What Types of Services Do You Provide To Your Clients?

There are a set of services that most contract service business services will fall under, such as:

• Repair

• Maintenance

• Installation/ Replacement

• Inspection

• Design/ Remodeling

• Supplies

However, for your specific industry, you may think of even more overarching categories of the service you provide. Once you know those overarching categories, you should list out everything you do and organize them into categories like these.

Once you do that, you should ask yourself if there are any services you offer that other companies don’t offer. Then you should consider, what types of sub-services under those do you provide to your clients?

Once you have your list, you are ready for the next step, which is outlining what each page will include. To do so, you should think of each service and ask yourself questions like:

• What are things about each service you offer that your clients don’t know, but should know?

• What are things about these services that clients want to know, but isn’t always shared? (Price, timeline, potential common issues, etc.)

Once you answer these questions for each service, you will have a general outline for what to cover on each page.

3. What Areas Do You Service?

The next step of brainstorming the structure of your contract service business website is to create a list of cities (and states) you service.

You should make two versions of your location list: the first version should be in order of the cities you service most often to least often and the second should be in alphabetical order.

In your website navigation, you will list your cities in the order of the cities you service. On your main service area page, you will list the cities in alphabetical order.

Once you have both of these lists, you should examine each city you service and write down what is unique about each area you service. For instance, in one area, do customers like a particular style or require unique maintenance, repair, or installation solutions?

The more detail you can provide for these, the easier it will be to create the location pages you will list on your site under the service area page.

This will also enable you to think about the commonalities across each of these areas so you can sprinkle in location-specific information throughout all of your website pages.

4. What Is the Best Way for Your Customers to Request Services?

When reaching out to you, do clients request service on a service calendar, fill out an inquiry form, email you, or call you? If you offer design services, do they come to a showroom?

The primary method of contact you choose to highlight will depend on:

• Your industry

• Your services

• Your preference

• Your systems

For instance, you may want to have customers select service from an automated calendar that automatically balances your team’s availability, but you may not have this type of automation set up yet.

To get your company’s website up and running, you should consider your preference, but also what option is available to you now. Then, you can create plans for the future, like further optimizations.

Once you pick the contact method, you should list out all of your company contact information, such as your email, phone number, location, etc. This enables all customers to reach out to you if your main mode of contact doesn't work for them as well.

To find out how to create a Contact Us page, read our blog “What Is a Contact Us Page For a Contract Service Business.”

5. What Is the History and Mission of Your Company?

Even though your customers will be the main focal point of all of the content you include on your contract service business website, you will still want to share your company story on your About Us page.

You should ask yourself questions like:

• When was your company started?

• Who started it?

• Why did they start it?

• What are your company values?

• Have you expanded over the years?

• Do you plan on expanding? What is the purpose?

• What sets your company apart from the rest?

Once you have the answers to these, you will be able to easily craft your About Us page to explain where your company started, where you are now, and where you are going.

You will also be able to include small pieces of your company history throughout the rest of your website to provide context for your content.

6. What Certifications and Accreditations Does Your Company Have?

In addition to wanting to learn about the services you provide, potential clients will also want to know how qualified you are to perform the services you offer. To convey this properly, you need to consider what certifications you have and what certifications are required to perform the work you do.

After you have that information laid out, you need to think about the why. For example, why are a plumber or HVAC technician may you also need a general contractor’s license?

Explaining the importance of each certification will help your customers understand why you have the certifications you do and how that allows you to provide higher quality service to them.

7. Do You Offer Financing Options for Your Customers?

Depending on the size of your business and the options you created for your customers, you may offer no financing options or you may offer financing options through your company or a bank.

If you offer any type of financing services, you should include a page to show customers that you offer that option. On your financing page, you should cover what they need to do in order to take advantage of those options.

The more detail you can provide as to how customers can qualify for your financing options, the better. This ensures that they will not encounter surprises when they go to request financing options closer to the time of their project.

8. Do You Have Examples of Your Work or Customer Testimonials?

As you probably already know, one of the best ways to attract customers is to share stories and examples of how you have helped others just like them.

To start doing this on your website, you should gather photos from previous jobs, customer reviews, customer testimonials, and anything else you have.

If you have never taken photos of your project, requested customer reviews, or gathered other forms of customer testimonials, then you should build out a process around getting the following:

• Photos

• Customer stories

• Customer reviews

• Case studies

• Project recaps

Some of these are harder to get than others since some involve more time (from both you and your customers).

For example, getting a customer case study will require you to get a customer’s consent to create a case study about the project you did for them.

After you have consent, you will need to interview them to ask more about their experience. Once you have finished interviewing them, you will need to write and design the case study and send it to them for final review before you can publish it.

9. What Roles Do You Plan To Hire for in the Future?

Your website can serve as a great way to funnel leads to your business and funnel candidates to your open job positions. It all just depends on how much time you dedicate to building out your careers page.

To increase the amount of direct applications you get on your site, you should create a general careers page and individual pages for each of the types of roles you are hiring for.

To determine what roles you will create pages for, ask yourself what positions you need to hire for now and what roles you plan to hire for in the future.

If you don’t have time to create all of the pages right away, you should prioritize writing them based on the roles you need to hire soonest, the roles you have the most turnover in, and the roles that would be nice to have.

10. Do You Sell Supplies in Person or Online?

If you sell supplies for the types of services you offer or for complementary purposes, you may want to include an e-commerce portion of your site.

To provide yourself with the biggest chance of having success with the e-commerce side of your business, you should have a dedicated “supplies” page, that will either be titled Supplies, Store, or Shop.

This page may be linked to a separate e-commerce site you manage or it could be built into your standard website. In either case, having it live on your regular website in some shape or form will help it get more traffic than if it were to be completely standalone.

Plan Your Contract Service Business Website Content

Once you have all of the information about your customers, your services, your company, and your service areas laid out, you can start organizing your website in the way that you think your customers would search for information.

To learn more about the types of pages you should have on your contract service business website, read our article “Top 5 Pages For Contract Company Websites.”

For more information about how to create your contract service business website, subscribe to our newsletter below. If you have questions about how to structure your home service business website, contact us today.