If you’re going to be successful in online marketing, your website needs to be designed with your target audience in mind. There are hundreds of general best practices to follow and modern trends to adopt, but you also have to bear in mind the disposition and specific needs of your audience.
The Nature of Emergency Services
There are few niches with more specific or demanding customer needs than non-medical emergency services. When there’s a plumbing catastrophe or a lockout situation, your customers need someone—and they don’t have a lot of time to make a decision. If you’re going to earn more conversions from people experiencing emergencies in your area, you’ll need to implement a handful of seriously important design changes on your site:
- Simplify your layout. Don’t try to stuff everything into your homepage, especially if you offer a variety of different services. It’s tempting to try and list anything and everything you do as a business, but customers in the middle of an emergency aren’t interested in hunting down exactly what they need. Make it easy for customers to navigate your site and find exactly what they’re looking for. For example, Milwaukee Lockstar offers up a descriptive headline to make their services known, then offers three options below it—residential, automotive, and commercial services.
- Speak to emergencies immediately and straightforwardly. Don’t waste time talking up your business, showcasing an interactive design, or showing off other areas of your business; speak to your emergency services bluntly, straightforwardly, and at the top of your homepage. This saves people time, and makes it obvious that you’re available for people in need. For example, One Hour Air Conditioning and Heating announces their emergency services as one of the most prominent features of their homepage.
- Keep your phone number visible at all times. In the modern era, when you experience a non-medical emergency, your first instinct is to grab your smartphone and search for a business that can help you. You’re not looking to browse for information or do background research; you want a phone number that you can call as quickly as possible, and if you don’t get one, you’ll move on to the next candidate. Keep yours prominent and visible throughout your site. For example, Best Heating and Cooling has their phone number featured prominently on nearly every page of their site.
- Save the content for interior pages. It’s good to have some content describing your business on your homepage, but don’t let this weigh your homepage down; remember, you need to keep it easy to navigate, minimal, and concise. At the same time, you need lots of optimized content if you’re going to rank in search engines, so keep your content confined to your interior pages.
- Don’t forget specific emergency instructions. This leans more toward the realm of search engine optimization than design per se, but it’s a good idea to speak to specific emergency situations. For example, you can use a line like “24/7 emergency plumbing services” on your homepage, but don’t forget to call out specific plumbing emergencies elsewhere on your site. For example, you could have dedicated pages for things like frozen pipes or clogged drains, or use specific blog titles to help users in these situations. If a user is checking to see what you offer before they call, these will serve as reassurance that you’re an ideal candidate.
- Include testimonials and reviews. Though the process for seeking an emergency service provider is often fast, on the verge of impulsive, some users still take secondary factors into consideration before they call. One of the most efficient ways to cater to these considerations is to feature testimonials, reviews, or other forms of customer feedback on your homepage. Keep these to the side or the bottom, away from your main features (phone number, emergency service description, etc.). For example, New York Plumbing features a brief testimonial at the bottom of their homepage, along with logos of major companies that have done business with them in the past.
With these design considerations adopted on your home and internal pages, you’ll maximize your user experience and hopefully gain more conversions from segments of your target audience truly in need of emergency services. The more specifically you speak to your target audience, and the more trustworthy you make yourself, the more people you’ll eventually draw in.
