Industries
Websites and marketing for contractors and home services
Can you come out, when, and roughly what will it cost. A contractor site that answers those three above the fold beats a prettier one that makes people ring to find out.
Home-service work splits into two completely different jobs: urgent calls decided in ninety seconds from a map result, and planned projects researched for weeks. Most contractor websites are built for one and lose the other.
How customers actually find a contractor
Emergencies come from the map, at speed, and go to whoever answers. Planned work comes from search and referral, is compared across several firms, and is decided on photographs of finished jobs and whether the price range is honest.
What they type
- emergency [trade] near me
- [trade] [town]
- how much does [job] cost
- best [trade] near me
- [trade] [town] reviews
Bracketed parts are wherever you are and whatever you sell. These are phrasings, not a keyword list to stuff into a page.
Four things contractors and home services get wrong online
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No price range anywhere
Every contractor says it depends, and it does. A range still helps: it removes the fear that stops somebody calling, and it filters out the people who were never going to buy. The competitor who published a range gets the call.
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The phone number is not tappable
For urgent work this is the whole business. A number printed as text means memorising it, leaving the site and typing it. More than half the local sites we measured make exactly this mistake.
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The service area is vague
Claiming the whole metro from one van produces calls you have to turn down, which costs you twice — the time, and the visibility for the jobs you could have taken.
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No photographs of finished work
Planned work is bought on evidence. Photographs of jobs you actually did, on houses that look like the customer’s, do more than any list of services.
If you have no website at all
If you have no website at all, most of that is about faults in a site you do not have, and you are in the majority of the contractors we meet. The first version is one page, and for anybody running whole jobs rather than one stage of somebody else’s it is not a gallery. It is the two things a customer is actually frightened of: what happens when the scope changes halfway through, and whether the number you gave is a price or an estimate. Answer those two in plain words, add your licence or registration, your insurance, the towns you cover and a number somebody can tap, and you have a page that survives being compared. That matters more here than being found, because a contractor is usually picked from a shortlist of three rather than discovered in a search.
Worth reading before you spend anything: word of mouth works, so do you need a website. It includes the cases where the honest answer is no.
If you change one thing
Treating the website as a brochure when half the traffic is somebody standing next to a problem. Emergency and planned work need different pages, different first lines and different calls to action.
What we would work on
- Local visibility & lead generation Help nearby customers find you, trust you, and call you.
- Website design & development Turn visitors into calls, leads and customers.
- Paid advertising Immediate visibility, measured properly.
In that order, for this trade. The pricing is the same whatever sector you are in — a site of up to eight pages is $249 to build and $399 a year to keep running.
Have we done this before
Not in this trade yet. The work we have done is here, and the four problems above hold whichever trade the last client was in.
Straight answers
Questions from contractors and home services
Publish ranges. "Most kitchens run $X to $Y depending on the units" removes the fear that stops people calling and screens out the ones who were never going to buy. Refusing to say anything is what sends them to the competitor who did.
Referrals still check you. A dated or missing site is where a warm referral goes cold, and it is also the only asset you own — referral flow is somebody else’s to give and to stop.
For emergency work, often yes, because it is the one channel that produces calls this week. The prerequisite is a phone somebody answers during the hours the ads run; paid clicks reaching voicemail is the most expensive mistake in this trade.
For anything urgent they decide it. Somebody choosing between three map results with a burst pipe is reading the review count and the most recent one, and nothing else.
They work and they are expensive, you are bidding against competitors for the same lead, and you never own the customer. Worth using while you build something you do own, rather than instead of it.
No, and be wary of anyone who claims to specialise in 14 industries at once. What we have is a way of working that suits small businesses — fast sites, clear pricing, no contracts — and enough time spent on contractor problems to know which of them are worth money. Where we have not done work in a sector, we say so rather than dressing up somebody else's case study.
With whichever of the four problems above you recognised. Most owners know the answer before they finish reading the list. If none of them landed, the fifteen-minute call is free and we will look at what you have got.
Worth reading first
Before you spend anything on a website for contractors and home services
Complete guides, not teasers. If you follow one and never call us, it worked.
- I get all my work from word of mouth. Do I need a website? Maybe not. If you are at capacity, hiring nobody and taking no new customers, a website is not urgent and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. 9 min read
- The gmail address is costing you work A free email address does not stop the phone ringing, but it quietly costs you the jobs where somebody is choosing between you and another firm. 7 min read
- What your site should say to a builder, and what it should say to a homeowner The two buyers want opposite things. A builder is buying scheduling: will you hold the date, do you know the inspection sequence, can you be added to a list without three phone calls. 7 min read
Nearby
Trade by trade, because the advice differs
- Roofing Contractors Can you come and look at it, and will you deal with my insurer. A roofing site that answers those two in the first screen beats a prettier one that makes somebody ring to find out.
- Electrical Contractors Are you licensed here, and have you done this exact job before. Everything else on an electrical site is secondary to those two.
- Plumbing Contractors Can you come today, or can you hold a date three weeks out. Which of those two a visitor is asking decides everything else on the page, so the site has to answer both without making either hunt.
- Concrete and Flatwork Why is your quote higher than the other one. Everything on a concrete site should be building the answer to that, because it is the conversation the customer is having with themselves.