How to Get More Dumpster Rental Leads From Your Website

Turn Clicks into Customers: Simple Website Fixes

Tim: Today we’re going to cover turn clicks into customers: simple website fixes that grow your business. I will try not to walk in front of this too many times, but I like to pace when I talk. So, this is kind of what we went over in the SEO session. We had three things that I shared with you that you were able to do for free. This is the fourth one. This one has a huge impact on your SEO and is extremely beneficial for your business. A lot of companies, again, are not doing this. Basically, what it is, even if you’re getting really good web traffic to your website, a lot of times it’s not converting because your website is not set up for it to convert, and so you are missing out on a ton of business by not having some simple changes done to your website to ensure that it converts. So that’s kind of what we’re going to be going over today. I have a few examples and stuff like that.

The first thing we’re going to do is types of websites. There are three types of websites that I’m going to go over with you.

Types of Websites

Tim: Cheap sites impact. Cheap sites can be really popular, but there’s a cost to it. Anything like we all know, if it’s cheap, there’s always another cost on the other side of it.

What’s Missing: What do cheap sites not have that more expensive sites do have? Why is there such a cost difference between those two?

Good versus Bad: I do have some examples of some really bad sites and some really good sites, and I’ll be able to point out why these ones are bad and why these ones are good. Then I’ll give you some checklists at the end to make sure you can either take a look at your website and make sure you’re doing well, and split testing. There will be time at the end for questions. Any questions you have, we’ll be able to go over those as well.

So, not all websites are created equal. There are generally three different types of websites out there. The first one, the one that I see a lot, is more of a virtual business card. A lot of companies get these because they’re either first starting off and the price tag, like 500 bucks or $1,000 for a website, is appealing. But really, all it is, is your business information virtually, and it’s not a lot more than that. That’s kind of like just having a site. It’s good, but it’s not necessarily going to drive leads. It’s not built to convert, it’s not any of those things. It’s a good place to start, but you definitely, as you grow, don’t want to stay there.

The next one is a template lead site. This one is still simpler but designed to get leads. It’s going to have basic info, contact forms, and occasional conversions, but not necessarily any growth strategy. A lot of web dev companies out there, all they care about is building a website. They want a website that looks good, which is important, but just because it looks good doesn’t mean it performs. That’s the big differentiator. You can have the most beautiful site in the world, but if it’s not making you money, then it’s useless. It’s sunk cost, and that’s not what you want.

A conversion machine is what’s known as CRO-focused, which is conversion rate optimized. Before they look at design, they look at what is the conversion path, what are people looking to do when they land on this site, why is someone here, what do they want to get done. One of the things I shared in the previous presentation is that when someone lands on your site, you have less than two seconds to convince them to stay, or they’re going to leave. With this one, the conversion machine understands what they’re looking for and makes sure that it’s presenting that information in the fastest and easiest way possible. That takes a lot of design, a lot of understanding, a lot of research on demographics, analytics, and stuff like that. These can be extremely impactful. Today, I want to show you how you can change your website into that conversion machine because honestly, for the most part, it’s usually just a few simple tweaks that’ll make a huge difference.

What’s Missing: Why that $1,500 Website is Actually Costing You Money

Tim: It’s built from stock templates. They’re going to use stock content, stock images, etc. Stock images are very common when you’re first starting out. But one of the things that we do know is people actually care about the images on your site, and they can tell when they’re stock images and when they’re not. When you have images of your own branded dumpsters, your own branded trucks, people in your company wearing your shirts, they trust that more because they know that you didn’t just buy it from Shutterstock. It’s actually you, and like, yes, this is a real company, these are real people, and that is a trust factor that’s going to cause them to stay on your site longer. That’s what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to take that two seconds and extend that as much as you can until they convert.

No real conversion strategy. It’s usually simple information about your business, maybe like a “book a dumpster” here, but it’s not engaging, it’s not calling them to action. You might still get some leads from this, but you’re missing a lot.

Desktop-focused and poor mobile UX. UX stands for user experience. Something that has changed, and people continue to forget, is those phones that we carry in our pockets are usually one of the first things that we use when we’re researching a company or looking for something to buy. We look it up on our phones, and so our first experience with most companies is on a mobile device. How does your website look on a mobile device? Most people design desktop first and mobile second, but on average, most first visits are 60 to 70% mobile. With a conversion-optimized site, they understand that and design mobile first, desktop second.

No integration with SEO. This one’s obviously very important considering everything that we just talked about, but they don’t have all of the pieces on there that you need for your on-page optimizations. If it’s not working with your SEO or design to go with it, it’s similar to buying a car, like let’s say you buy a Ferrari but it doesn’t come with an engine. What’s the point of that? The engine is the SEO, and if those two are working together, it’s a really powerful machine, but if you only have one or the other, you’re not going to get very far. That’s kind of what those are missing.

The content, the look, and the feel, everything like that is like a one-size-fits-all, like, no this will kind of work for everyone, and it doesn’t. Every business is different, even in the roll-off dumpster industry. You all have different people you work with. There are different areas of the country, different demographics that you work with. They’re engaging differently. If it skews to an older demographic, they might not like using forms or anything like that. They might want to call you first and talk to you. They might not be using mobile first, they might be desktop first. Those are all things that can change from one business to another that those cheaper sites don’t take into account because they don’t care. They’re there to build you a website, and that’s it. Then they’re gone.

Conversion Machine: Built Around Buyer Psychology

Tim: Buyer psychology is like when someone lands on a site, you have less than two seconds. The first thing they do is they look in the upper left-hand corner, why? Because that’s where logos have been since the beginning of the internet. Everyone naturally looks to the upper left, and then we always scan across to the right and come back to the center. That’s why the menus always go across, and the center is where they land, which is where your call to action should be. A lot of people don’t put a call to action there. They’ll put information about their business or just random facts, and you’re missing out.

The clear call to action hierarchy is important. One of the things I see a lot of businesses doing is they don’t know what to focus on their homepage, so they focus on all of it. It has everything that they’re trying to get the user to do. They’ll have five or six different things that they want the user to do. They want them to do junk, they want them to do dumpsters, they want them to know this and that, and then all of this stuff over here, and then this stuff. Guess what? You just confused them, and now they’re not going to make a decision. They’re going to be like, “Well, I should probably think about this.” It’s like when you go to a restaurant, and they hand you the menu, and it’s like a book this thick, and you’re like, “Dude, just give me like three options. I can pick from three options, and we’ll be out of here in no time.” But if I have to read through this whole book and figure out what I want, we’re going to be here for a while. It’s the same with your users. Make it simple.

Generally, what I tell people is on your homepage, have one thing that you want them to do and only one thing. What is the most important thing? What makes your business the most money? That should be your homepage. You can have everything else on the rest of your site, but if you give them only one option, then they’re generally going to take one option, and they’re going to go with it.

Mobile first UX with conversion paths, we talked about that already. Designed to work with SEO and then split tested for results. Split testing is something I touched on earlier. How many people here know what split testing is? A couple of you. It’s a really simple thing where we do it a ton in marketing. Basically, you’re taking two different ideas, and you run one, and then you run the other, and you just see which one works better. You’re split testing. Let’s say you have a call to action, and you have a “book now” button, and instead of book now, for two weeks, you’re going to run and that button is going to say “get started,” and then after two weeks, you’re going to take a look and see which one got you more leads. That’s split testing. We do it constantly on Docket as well as Service Core. We generally always have a split test running because you should always be optimizing your site.

At the end of the day, even if you don’t do SEO, even if you can’t afford SEO, it doesn’t matter. If you have really good reviews, you’re going to get traffic, but if that traffic hits your site and it’s not designed to convert, you’re losing it. By making that one simple change, you can impact your business by 100, 200, 300% by optimizing for what they’re looking for.

Good versus Bad

Tim: So, this is a site, a company in Colorado. This is actually one of the biggest roofing companies in Colorado, which kind of blew my mind when I was researching this. This is their website. They get about 7,000 visits per month, and when you first look at that website, where does your eye go? It kind of goes everywhere. There’s a lot going on there, a lot going on. You don’t know where to look. The thing that you’re not seeing too is that tiny little “get a quote” button down in the left-hand corner. You’re like, what do I do? They get a massive amount of traffic, and because when people land on this and they are unsure of where to go, I promise you, they are losing millions just by all of that chaos.

This is another. This is one of their competitors. When you first land on this one, now this background is actually a video. It’s nice to watch, very peaceful, very calming. But when you land on this one, it’s a little better. You can at least see a contact form. You can see that they’re a Denver roofing company, but still, one of the things that’s missing is this verbiage here blends right into the video. It doesn’t pop out, it does not stand out. A lot of people do this where they focus on this background image because they’re really proud of it. They paid a photographer to take a picture of their truck or their dumpsters, they put it on there, and then the call to action they put over it is completely lost. This, again, is losing them money because there’s no clear call to action with this site.

Now, this one right here is one of our sites. These are one of the site templates that we build for our customers. If you look at this, as you can see, it’s a lot cleaner, it’s really simple. A lot of people, at first, are just like, “Yeah, but it’s missing all of these things.” It’s like it’s focused. This is conversion optimized. When you land on this, you see the name of their company. You can see that they do residential and commercial dumpster rentals. You can see that they’re Lakewood’s Top Choice, and you not only have a book now button in the bottom left but also in the top right. When they land on this page, they’ll look to the upper left, they see the logo, they’ll scan across, they’ll come down. That’s exactly how they’ll move through it, and they’ll understand what to do. It doesn’t give them a lot of options because it shouldn’t, and it gets right to the point, which is residential and commercial dumpster rentals.

This site converts really well, and we know because we have tested this against a lot of other sites, which we’ll have the data for in just a few minutes.

Real-World Examples

Tim: We did split tests on client sites. When clients come to us, we do manage some sites for our clients as a service, and when they come to us, one of the first things we take a look at is how is their current site converting before we launch our site live. We want to see, is our design still working really well, is it doing what we want it to do, which is getting dumpster rentals.

This first one here was for a client of ours. Their control click-through rate was 1.3%. So, the people that clicked on the book now button, 1.3% of their traffic was clicking that button. When we changed it, now to give you an idea, their site looked a lot like this one, which is why I chose this one. I didn’t want to call out any clients in the industry, so I used another industry, but this is very similar to how their site looked when we first took it on. This is the theme that we used to build for them, and these were the results we got. So, it went from a 1.3% clickthrough, so people clicking the book now, to a 21% clickthrough, which is a 1,500% increase simply by doing those things, by making it really clear and really simple on what you should be doing and what action you should be doing.

We removed all their long-form text and then added the single focus call to action. Your call to action can be as simple as this right there, where it says book now. That’s a very simple call to action. We have tested get pricing, and our results show that while more people will click on get pricing, less will convert. It’s usually probably because they think, oh, I’ll just grab the pricing real quick and then leave. That’s the test that we’ve done, but I always say do your own testing.

The second one here was very similar in design to this site, very similar. Now, when we took it on, they were actually getting a really good click-through rate. 16% is really good. When we redesigned it, we made it look like the one I already showed you, and it increased to 31%, which is an 89% increase in clicks. Now, when you—this isn’t doing any SEO—all this is doing is changing how people engage with your website when they land on it. You can see from these two examples that you can increase your business simply by changing how people interact with the website, by making it more engaging, more focused, more streamlined, and increasing those conversions is going to give you more business without having to do more reviews, without having to do blogs, without having to do any of that stuff.

Split Testing: Hidden Money on Your Site

Tim: Split testing is what we just did in those previous two. This is a split testing checklist for your website. What you want to test, one of the first things is your call to action button. It’s a really good one to test. Book now, see availability, get pricing, things like that.

This is where Chat GPT shines. You can ask Chat GPT, hey, what should we be trying? ChatGPT will give you some really good results like hey, try this, try this, try this. I think that’s kind of the disconnect where people misunderstand the use of ChatGPT. They think that it can do all the work for them. Chat GPT is really great at ideas, and now you can actually, with Chat GPT, put a link to your homepage on there and ask how it would do for converting, and it’ll actually give you feedback on it as well.

Button color is a huge one. We did this for Service Core and Docket. You’ll notice that on Docket’s website, our call to action button is orange. Orange is not our color, it’s blue and green. It used to be—I think it was blue or green, we might have done both at one time—but orange converted 30% higher. I don’t know why, people like orange apparently. You want to test the button color because for us it was huge. We changed all the button colors across all of our landing pages and everything to orange once we learned that information. It had a huge impact on our business. You want to test the button color. Bright colors grab attention. Generally, you don’t want to get too wild. We did test hot pink; it did horrible. So, FYI, probably don’t test hot pink, it doesn’t do well, I don’t know what that was.

Phone vs. online booking call to action. See what your audience prefers. Again, if they’re more likely to want to call, then making sure that you have a call called action, especially on mobile, is important. A lot of people will put a call now button on desktop not realizing your desktop won’t really call anyone, but you do want to make sure you have that call now showing on mobile. Yes, you can have different things show on mobile vs. desktop, and you should. They should be two different experiences.

Homepage headline. The first words decide if they stay or bounce, it’s the first thing that they look at. Again, this is something that you want to test. Now, on here, we have it really simple: residential and commercial dumpster rentals. It lets them know what you do, but you can test a lot of different things here. You could even put this up here, you know, Lakewood’s top choice for dumpster rentals, book now. That would be more of a trust builder. When people see things when they read it, we tend to believe it, whether it’s true or not, we tend to believe it. Testing different calls to action, but you want to keep it really simple. You don’t want a full sentence up there; you want maybe four to five words. Again, this is where chat is great. Hey, what calls to action can I put in here? Letting it know what you’ve used, what you haven’t used. Chat is also fantastic at putting all this data together and letting you know what you should do next.

Showing prices vs. no prices, definitely split test that. We do have some clients that want prices on their dumpster rentals, some that don’t, and we see kind of a variation. Sometimes it does well, sometimes it doesn’t, but you’ve got to split test it. What’s best for your business isn’t going to be what’s best for the next.

Before and after photos. People are very visual. Your photos are very underrated. People forget how important those are. Really high-quality photos, when someone lands on your site and you have high-quality photos, they’re going to assume that you’re a high-quality business. If they’re very clean photos, they’re going to assume that you’re very clean. They associate visuals with how you run your business. If you have crappy photos that are kind of blurry or like with a flip phone or just like bad angle or not proportional or like anything like that, they’re going to assume that’s how you handle your business. Be very aware of how you use your photos on your site.

Mobile layout. Testing your mobile layout. Your mobile layout should be even more simple than your desktop. People have an even lower attention span, if you can believe it, on mobile than on desktop. On mobile, it’s like 1.2 seconds; desktop, it’s about 2 seconds. Social media is killing our attention spans, let’s be honest.

Reviews. Above vs. below the fold. The fold is an industry term. This is the fold when you land on a website. Everything that you can see is above the fold. As soon as you scroll down, that’s below the fold. Most people, like 80% of people, won’t ever scroll down, which is why it’s so important to optimize above the fold with everything they need but making sure it stays as simple as possible.

And then the next one is going to be your conversion rate checklist for dumpster websites. Clear call to action above the fold. Ditch the wall of text; nobody reads it anyways. Less than 7% of people read text on your site, especially if it’s in long-form sentence form. We don’t read it.

Show pricing or flat rate info; it can build trust. Use Docket Shop for booking instant online orders. 85% of people prefer to book online, and that’s not just with dumpsters, that’s just in general. People like buying online; we prefer to do that versus calling, vs. filling out a form, etc. 85%. So making sure that you can do that is incredibly important.

Mobile-first design. We’ve kind of covered that one to death. Show real photos. Add trust badges. If you have any trust badges, a simple trust badge is you can make one in Photoshop that, you know, five-star Google reviews, 100 reviews, if it’s true, don’t lie. But if it’s true, you can make one really quickly and just show that, like, we have all of these reviews above the fold. That’s a huge trust builder. People are looking to trust you as quickly as possible, so be sure to do that.

FAQ

What are the three types of websites discussed?

The three types of websites discussed are virtual business card sites, template lead sites, and conversion machines. Virtual business cards provide basic business information, template lead sites are designed for occasional conversions, and conversion machines focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) to drive business growth.

Why do cheap websites often fail to convert visitors?

Cheap websites often fail to convert because they lack a real conversion strategy, rely on stock content, and are usually desktop-focused rather than mobile-oriented. These sites often miss personalized elements, which can build trust and engagement, leading to lost conversions.

How does mobile-first design impact website conversion?

Mobile-first design significantly impacts website conversion as most users access websites via mobile devices. Designing for mobile first ensures a better user experience, which is crucial as 60 to 70% of first visits happen on mobile. This approach can help retain visitors and improve conversion rates.

What results can be achieved by optimizing website conversion?

Optimizing website conversion can lead to substantial improvements in business performance. For instance, a client saw a 1500% increase in click-through rate from 1.3% to 21% after implementing conversion-focused changes. Another client achieved an 89% increase in click-throughs by improving site design.

What is split testing and how is it used in website optimization?

Split testing involves running two versions of a website element, such as a call-to-action button, to determine which performs better. It is a crucial part of website optimization, allowing businesses to continually improve site effectiveness based on real user interactions and preferences.