Welcome to this post about Roof Restoration Brisbane and where I attempt to discuss a local business who is using the internet to the fullest (well, almost). It’s hard for local businesses these days, well it’s always been hard, but I think it’s even harder now. Let’s take this roofing business and it’s leader, Justin, as an example.
On his own, Justin is responsible for many different types of roles. And then at some point he needs to get the jobs done and manage the projects. Being the head of a roofing company, Justin oversees taking phone calls (customer service), marketing, accounting, inventory, project planning, and the list goes on but you get the picture. This is all part of keeping a local roofing business alive these days.
Compare these to a large multi-national company who has a team of people managing each of the previously mentioned tasks. It hardly seems fair.
Bring on the internet. Now small businesses can represent themselves online equally as well as large businesses. At least, that is the theory or once was the theory. No longer did a small local business need the budget to match the larger business to advertise as strongly in the Yellow Pages or TV or newspapers.
That is, until Google grew from a search engine to huge world/internet owning beast that monopolies and manipulates the once free world of the internet. Let me explain. See, for Justin to set up his local business, Roof Restoration Brisbane, on the internet he needs to build a website. Easily done, either he pays someone to do it or he uses one of the thousands of tools available online.
Once the website is created, what then? The problem now becomes how does his website (and this his business) get found in Google. Well if he paid someone to build his website, then hopefully that web designer had enough savvy to carry good SEO practices on the site whilst building it. If Justin built the site himself, well then how’s Justin supposed to know about SEO? He probably doesn’t but he’s heard of it, because Google inadvertently created an industry of SEO companies that seemed to have adopted cold calling from India as the sales strategy norm.
So now, Justin has to pay an SEO company to get his website found in Google. Typical of most things in life, SEO companies are “you get what you pay for”. So it comes back to budget. The businesses with the highest budget (i.e. not small local business) are the ones that get found up the top of Google.
Again, it comes back to the budget/dollar. The poor budget-constrained small local business owner misses out on getting his business found on the latest world wide phenomena. Not cool.
Google has tried to help. So they invented this thing called Google My Business and allow businesses to submit their details for free. Then they show 3 businesses in the search results with a map to their location. Not a bad idea and it seemed like a good way to help small, local business. However, it’s not often there’s only 3 businesses in one location and one industry and many other businesses will miss out for reasons unknown, except to say they didn’t make it into the top 3 for that particular search.
That was a long way to come to recognise the efforts of Roof Restoration Brisbane. Firstly, the website has been built with conversion in mind. The phone number is in the optimal spot, the content is clear and relevant, and the visitor can quickly get in contact once they decide to. The website contains information about the roofing services that this roofing company provides;
- Roof restorations
- Roof replacements
- Roof cleaning / roof painting
- Roof repairs
- Gutter installations and gutter replacements.
The intent of their website is to appear in the search results for anyone searching for relevant roofing services in the Brisbane area. This has been achieved by optimising the website.
Accompanying the website are social media pages, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, where updates to relevant information are posted and shared.
Roof Restoration Brisbane have taken on the big roofing companies by playing the game and they’re right in there!