Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let’s get started.

Caitlyn Noble: 0:30
Welcome back to Digital Marketing for Contractors. We’re your hosts, Caitlin and Meredith with Fat Cat Strategies.

Meredith Medlin: 0:36
Hello. Hi. We have got a fun topic for you guys today—especially fun for me as a web person myself. She’s so good. I’m—stop. Keep going.

Our topic today is website conversions in 2026 and what actually works to get you website conversions. So we’re gonna be breaking down all the trends, the tools, tips we have for you guys so that you can turn more of your website visitors into booked jobs and that all-important revenue that we’re chasing.

Caitlyn Noble: 1:07
Praise, praise, praise, praise. We’re gonna cover what’s changed this year. And by this year—we’re recording this at the beginning of January—so we’re hoping that all of these changes are coming into fruition. Yep. They will. But more importantly: manifesting it. Thank you.

But these things aren’t changing: AI personalization, frictionless experiences, and conversion optimization strategies that are built for the day and age of the year of our Lord 2026.

Meredith Medlin: 1:39
Let’s get into it. Let’s get into it. So before we talk strategies, let’s talk about what a conversion actually means today.

Caitlyn Noble: 1:48
Favorite question.

Meredith Medlin: 1:49
Favorite question.

Caitlyn Noble: 1:50
What’s a conversion?

Meredith Medlin: 1:51
What’s a conversion? And honestly, if you’re not talking to your marketing agency about conversions—if they’re trying to woo you with just “here’s some new SEO content” or metrics that don’t have anything to do with conversions—ask them about it. Ask us. Send us your analytics. We’ll help you out.

But really, a conversion isn’t just a form fill anymore. It really is any call or phone call. Traditionally, when I first started marketing, it was a form fill or a phone call. That was your conversion. But now, it’s any kind of meaningful action that your visitor on your website is taking that gets them one step closer to becoming a customer.

That can be scheduling an estimate, booking a call, requesting a quote. Sure—some of those overlap. But we also have live chat features, texting features, signing up for email newsletters—that kind of thing. Oh, that’s perfect. Thank you.

Caitlyn Noble: 3:01
I know, I just have to play that person. But since we are in 2026, conversion marketing means understanding your audience so well that your website guides them to the next step without confusion, hesitation, or friction. So let’s dive into key website conversion strategies that are working right now.

Meredith Medlin: 3:24
Beautiful. First-party data and consent-driven targeting. Lots of buzzwords. Lots of buzzwords.

If you or your agency have suggested adding something like a checkbox on your forms with text that says, “By checking this box, I agree for XYZ company to contact me via this or that method,” you are already starting to implement some of these things.

Third-party cookies—and I’m not talking about the delicious kinds that I’m constantly thinking about, I’m talking about on your website—have been slowly and quietly vanishing from the digital marketing landscape over the last few years. Quietly.

It’s made it so first-party data—meaning data that you get directly from users…

Caitlyn Noble: 4:17
Legally. Legally, on your website.

Meredith Medlin: 4:20
…with consent, is more important than ever. Like I said before, consent boxes on your forms are one great example.

Another one is when you have a scheduling tool on your website, which can be Calendly, Housecall Pro, or a number of different tools. If somebody is booking an appointment with you—putting time on your calendar—that is a conversion, and it’s a pretty great conversion, I might add.

And really any other time when somebody’s calling you and there’s something in the recording when they call your phone tree saying, “This call is being recorded for quality assurance,” blah, blah, blah—anything like that, you’re getting consent from the user and you’re able to start tracking their movement in the least creepy way possible.

As marketers, we love that because we get to—with permission—be creepy for a living to generate revenue for your company. So all of these things make it so that your conversions are more targeted and they’re better quality.

Listen to that last episode—if you can hear Meredith. If you can hear me in the last episode, where I was whispering from a closet next door apparently with my microphone—take a listen. I promise you’ll know what we’re talking about. Bad leads. We don’t want them. And these things with first-party data and consent are gonna help you avoid bad leads.

But let’s talk about AI.

Caitlyn Noble: 5:56
Yeah, personalization. Of course. Can we not talk about AI? We have to talk about AI. Strategies that are not going to stop working. AI-powered personalization.

AI isn’t a buzzword. It’s central to personalization. Tailoring content, calls to action, and messaging based on behavior or intent helps boost conversions in ways generic sites can’t. For sure.

This is something where you’re like, “What did all of those words just mean?” And as I was saying them, I’m like, “How do I explain that?”

So, take dynamic content insertion, for example. One of the best things you can do—and this has been one of our tips and tricks that now you all get to hear—is personalize your Google Ads customer experience by adding dynamic location class code on your landing pages, so the user sees exactly what or where they searched from right there when they land on the page. Exactly. Break that down into language that wasn’t what I just said.

Meredith Medlin: 7:17
So basically, on your website, there is a way that your web developer can help you out by putting what’s called dynamic location class. It’s a little snippet of code, but putting that on your page—say, in your headline—when somebody lands on your landing page and they searched from Cary, North Carolina… wow.

When they hit that page, it would say “bathroom remodeling in Cary, North Carolina” or “Cary’s best bathroom remodeler,” instead of wherever your showroom is based. So if your service area covers 40 different cities, you want to be able to make Google Ads where their specific city can show up when they hit the landing page.

It just shows the Google user that your service is tailored to them. Everything makes sense, it’s a cohesive experience, and it really is that next level of personalization. That AI needs to see. It needs to see that—and it’s also going to help the user have a better experience to convert.

Because remember, we’re talking about how to get users to convert on your website. And so this dynamic insertion is just one way to really refine the user experience. What they see after clicking on an ad is exactly what they’re looking for, and they won’t even need to click away.

Weird. It is weird. Speaking of creepy—this is what we do—and it makes for a great user experience. I’ll be honest. It really does.

Let’s talk about something you have a degree in.

I do. Surprise! Psychology major over here. I went to her graduation.

Yes, yes. That was very sweet. Go Pack, if there’s any Wolfpack fans out there. Yes. If you’re not, I’m sorry.

Caitlyn Noble: 8:59
You just missed me throwing up the woofy, which not a soul could see. No, I don’t even think I saw it.

Meredith Medlin: 9:05
You did it secretly. There we go. Go Pack.

Conversion psychology. I know you’re like, “Where are they going with this?” Conversion psychology. That’s what we’re tying it back into.

It’s not just about reducing friction—it’s building trust with your potential customers. And that’s through building trust with clarity, awards, recognition, social proof—making sure that users know you’re a legitimate company, you’ve won X amount of awards, the community recognizes you, you have great reviews.

Caitlyn Noble: 9:42
So big flashy red buttons are gonna work anymore.

Meredith Medlin: 9:47
I mean, you can have some big red buttons, but ain’t nobody gonna click them if they don’t think you’re a legit business. So have your shiny red buttons to your heart’s desire—but make sure that next to those buttons, around those buttons, as long as it’s above the fold, you’ve got some trust-building.

Caitlyn Noble: 10:05
What’s above the fold? I think it is.

Meredith Medlin: 10:08
Yeah—but for all the great people: when you land on a website, before you scroll down, everything you see on your screen is considered above the fold. So basically, you don’t have to scroll or go anywhere to be hit with great reviews, certification badges, maybe pictures of your team. Team pictures—like, “Look, these are real human people.” Oh, here’s their pet.

Like—oh, don’t put a dog on the home page. And by that I mean: please do.

Caitlyn Noble: 10:39
Yeah, please do. Dogs sell. They trust.

You trust people with dogs. You do, even though our company has cat in it. Listen. Listen, it’s animals.

Meredith Medlin: 10:44
We love animals. Yes. So CTAs should always be accompanied by some sort of trust signal.

Caitlyn Noble: 10:52
And that’s the psychology behind conversions.

Meredith Medlin: 10:55
Exactly. They trust you, so they want to give you their information.

Caitlyn Noble: 10:58
This is not new to anybody, but it’s still relevant in 2026. With most users interacting on mobile—your phone—every element from navigation to those CTAs, those call to actions that Meredith was just talking about, need to feel seamless.

Think about your experience when you are on your phone looking at a website. Are you frustrated? Are you happy? Do you feel like, “Okay, I’m looking at this site, I understand this company, I’m able to get to what I need on my phone”? That is so important.

And like we used to say back in the day, the big decision was really gonna come from the people who then went to their desktop and converted. We used to be like, “Oh, look at all the people who came in through mobile and then left and then came back through desktop.” You want to let people convert through their mobile device.

Meredith Medlin: 11:58
Convert while you have their attention—when they’re on the phone—make it easy. Chat feature, form, phone call—make sure all of these are working on mobile.

A lot of times you see a great-looking desktop experience. Don’t assume it looks good on mobile. A lot of times it doesn’t. And that’s why whoever you’re working with should be designing your website with mobile responsiveness first in mind.

So make sure you take a look—while you’re listening to this, as long as you’re not driving, of course—take a look on your phone, look at your own website, scroll through the pages, see what your experience is like, and make sure it’s up to par with what you’re looking for and what you want your customers to have. Exactly. Mm-hmm. This one’s super important.

This next one is big: speed, accessibility, and technical performance. Also not new news. It is a necessary evil that we have to constantly stay on top of because your website changes constantly—not just when you add new content, but if you are keeping your website updated with plugins and all the technical things that you’re paying somebody so you don’t have to worry about, when they’re updating these things, it has inadvertent effects.

So making sure that you’re always staying on top of the technical performance of your website is so crucial. And if you want an action item right now—a good way to know how your website is performing—go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Caitlyn Noble: 13:35
Free.

Meredith Medlin: 13:36
Free tool. Super easy to use. All you have to do once you get there is put your URL in, and it’s gonna give you a score on mobile and on desktop. And this is super important—those scores almost always are different.

It would not be surprising if your mobile score is lower than your desktop. That’s okay. But we want that score to be in a healthy place. Google has some recommendations for you. So when you look at that report, it’s gonna be color-coded—nice and easy. Take a look at it.

And you may be asking, “Okay, well this is just one tool. Why should I trust this? Why does it matter?” It’s Google. It matters because it’s Google.

It is Google’s prerogative to follow what their tools are saying—to provide priority with Google Ads when you’re looking at landing page experience, for Google Business Profile, and to show a website first with organic searches. If Google’s native tool is saying this website performs really well, all of Google’s platforms are gonna be more likely to show your website. So it behooves you to please the Google gods. And a great way to do that is by looking at PageSpeed Insights. Super simple. All you have to do is Google “PageSpeed Insights.”

Caitlyn Noble: 15:01
So we talked all about page speed and technical performance, and it is black and white. Once you plug your site in, it’s gonna be a score. You get some numbers—yellow, green.

Meredith Medlin: 15:11
What about accessibility though? Yeah—accessibility is something that we should all, as consumers, be aware of and concerned about. Basically: how accessible is your website to a variety of users? They may be hearing impaired, they may be vision impaired, they could have any number of other difficulties when visiting a traditional website.

Accessibility tools are something you can add on to your website. It should be very straightforward, and it provides a tool that lets any kind of person with a disability view and experience your website the way it’s supposed to be experienced.

Caitlyn Noble: 15:59
And Google and the internet—they love it. They love that. You’re supposed to have that. In fact—not to throw this out there—but I know many times there have been lawsuits because a site isn’t accessible for somebody who is vision impaired.

Meredith Medlin: 16:14
Right. The ADA has a lot of compliance and rules and regulations. But that may sound scary. The good news is there are tools that make it very easy to take care of it.

One that we really like—and is actually one of our partners, shout out to Accessibility—they have a really easy-to-use tool that’s super effective and immediately increases your accessibility scores. So check that out.

We actually have a place on our website where you can get a free website accessibility audit. If you go to fatcatstrategies.com—“Is your website ADA compliant?”—and we’re gonna put that link in the show notes. Good luck typing that out. If you remember that, God bless you. But go there, go in the show notes, check it out. You’ll get a free website audit and find out how accessible your website really is.

Caitlyn Noble: 17:07
And we can totally help you fix it. We can fix it. We can do it. If it’s not accessible—if you love your agency—we can still help you fix that. Yeah, no worries.

The last thing to really look at in this section, in terms of strategies that are gonna keep working in 2026: you have to continue to test and look at data, and what that means. Conversion optimization isn’t one-and-done—it’s a process. You’ve got to use analytics, of course, heat maps, A/B tests, and user feedback to prove that this is working. Right.

We have a tool that we love.

Oh yeah. Tell them about it.

Hotjar. Yes, yes.

Meredith Medlin: 17:49
Hotjar—again, we’re gonna go back to that note of marketers are really creepy. Hotjar is a tool that allows you to actually record user experiences. Now, don’t get it twisted—we’re talking about the screen, just recording where the mouse is going on the screen of a user to see what their behavior is like.

So if you have a landing page and you’re sending ads there, and it’s really not converting, you’re like, “Okay, I’ve had 500 people click on my ad and go to the website. Why is nobody converting? No forms are being submitted, no phones are being called.” You put Hotjar on the website, let the data track for a couple of days, and when you go back and watch those recordings, you may find something shocking—like the submit button does not work. Or the phone number isn’t click-to-call. It literally makes me sick to my stomach to think about.

Or there could be something where the mobile experience isn’t what you thought it was, but this recording is going to catch it for you.

They have a free plan. There’s a paid version, but the free tool is super simple. There are also Hotjar alternatives—Microsoft Clarity, I think—so you’ve got some options there. But just make sure you’re checking in, doing those kinds of tests, and looking at your analytics frequently.

What you should be doing is keeping an eye on your conversion rate and your click-through rate. Keep an eye on your KPIs. If they start dropping, or you launch a new landing page and something doesn’t seem right—conversions are dropping, form fills are dropping—and it’s not a seasonality thing, go ahead and take a look. Otherwise, you should be checking in on your data pretty regularly.

We check our clients’ data daily, weekly, monthly, and we are always looking at trends. So make sure you’re keeping an eye on that. And it never hurts to do a CRO audit.

Caitlyn Noble: 19:49
Which we also offer.

Meredith Medlin: 19:50
Which we also offer. So call us.

Caitlyn Noble: 19:54
Okay, we kind of teased this next section, but this is proven tactics and tools and practices in general that are going to help improve your conversions without guessing. Meredith just talked about tools like Hotjar. Google Analytics does help monitor your website in general. Session recordings, like she was saying, show where visitors drop off and what stopped them. Those are all free tools. They’re no-brainers. Check them out, keep an eye on that.

I’m just kind of flying through this, but another thing that’s super important: A/B testing. Test headlines, layouts, forms—the position of those forms, the fields of those forms. See what’s actually moving the needle and what feels right. There are tools as well.

Meredith Medlin: 20:43
There are lots of landing page tools. I feel like Unbounce recently came out with a variation of their plan that allows you to dynamically change out the headline on a page, and it will start serving the headline that performs better after a certain amount of time.

Caitlyn Noble: 21:00
So that’s different from the Google Ads trick.

Meredith Medlin: 21:04
Exactly. This is just full-blown changing out a full headline and seeing what performs better.

So A/B tests—you don’t have to have a tool to do this. You can do this manually. Create two versions of one landing page with a different headline, different form placement, run them both, see which one has more conversions. Super simple.

And we did also talk about AI content—or dynamic content. So make sure that if you are not using our secret trick—I hate to give it away, but we want to help you—make sure you’re using dynamic location class in your Google Ads. It’s going to help your landing page performance. And if you do that and you like what you see, we have a lot more tricks. So come back, talk to us.

Caitlyn Noble: 21:50
Yeah. Real-time engagement—super important. Live chat hasn’t gone away. That’s still really…

Meredith Medlin: 21:56
It’s almost a standard now.

Caitlyn Noble: 21:57
Yeah, it’s helpful. You get those quick answers without having to actually talk to somebody at your company and take their time if they’re price shopping, et cetera. Those also qualify those leads for you—having those live chat spots.

Meredith Medlin: 22:14
Then social proof—trust signals, like we talked about earlier—having certifications, badges, real customer reviews. Testimonial videos are amazing.

Caitlyn Noble: 22:26
Star ratings.

Meredith Medlin: 22:27
That is really going to help increase your likelihood of having a conversion.

So all of this was an effort, again, to talk about what actually works to generate more and better conversions on your website. If you feel like you have a lot of conversions right now, but the quality isn’t great, go listen to our last episode—if you can hear Meredith. If you can hear me at all in it. But I think Caitlin does have some good points in it—so you’ll get half of the benefit. So go back and listen to it.

Caitlyn Noble: 22:59
If your website isn’t converting—like Meredith just said—if you can hear her, and we’re gonna whisper… you’re gonna leave revenue on the table. So, Meredith, I’m gonna let you shout this from the rooftops.

Meredith Medlin: 23:15
Oh my God. All right, y’all. At FatCat Strategies, we specialize in building websites and conversion systems that actually work—from messaging to analytics and AI personalization. We make sure we prioritize high-quality conversions on your website.

Caitlyn Noble: 23:34
Yeah, let’s turn your website into a growth engine that delivers qualified leads and booked jobs. Visit us at fatcatstrategies.com. You can schedule a free discovery call.

Meredith Medlin: 23:45
All right. Thanks, guys.

Caitlyn Noble: 23:47
Thank you.

Call Notes Links:

• Is Your Website ADA Compliant?