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 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 five-page site 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 10 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.
Nearby
Other trades, same questions
- Professional and B2B Services Have they solved this exact problem before, for somebody like me. Answer it with evidence rather than adjectives and the enquiry follows.
- Law Firms Have you handled my exact situation, what will it cost, and what happens if I ring today. Answer those three plainly and the consultation follows.