What your site should say to a builder, and what it should say to a homeowner

Most contractors we meet work for two completely different customers in the same week. A builder or a property manager on Tuesday, a homeowner on Thursday. The work is similar. The sale is not even slightly similar.

Almost every trade website is written for a vague average of the two, which turns out to be nobody. The usual symptom is a homepage that opens with “we do residential and commercial work”, a sentence that tells a homeowner nothing about their kitchen and tells a builder nothing about whether you can hold a date in March.

What a builder is actually checking

He is not reading your site to be persuaded. He is checking whether adding you to a list is going to cost him anything.

Can you hold a date. His schedule is a chain, and your part of it has other trades waiting on both ends. Everything else is secondary to this.

Do you know the sequence. Every trade has one. Plumbing is underground, rough-in, finish. Electrical is service, rough-in, trim. A site that uses those words tells a builder you have worked new construction. A site that does not reads as a service firm that takes the occasional new build, which may be exactly right and may be what is keeping you off the list.

Have you passed inspection here before. Village by village, the inspectors and the amendments differ. Naming the municipalities you have worked in is more useful to him than any amount of writing about quality.

Can the office tick its boxes. A certificate of insurance, the ability to be named as additional insured, a licence or registration number, a W-9. If checking you takes three phone calls, you are competing with a sub whose details took thirty seconds to find.

Who does he ring. A name and a mobile number. Not a form. A builder with a problem at seven in the morning is not filling in a form.

Notice that none of that is about craftsmanship. He assumes you can do the work or he would not be looking. He is buying predictability.

What a homeowner is actually checking

Different list, almost no overlap.

Will somebody turn up when they said. This is the universal complaint about the trades and the thing every homeowner has a story about. Say something concrete about it and you are already ahead.

What will it cost, roughly. Not a fixed price. A range, and what moves it. The firms that publish nothing are competing with firms that publish a range, and the person with two tabs open rings the one that told them something.

What happens to my house while you are in it. Dust, parking, the bathroom being out of action, whether you clear up. Nobody asks this on the phone and everybody wants to know.

Are you safe to let in. Insurance, a licence number, a van with a name on it, a photograph of an actual person. This is a bigger factor for a homeowner than for any builder, and it is the one most sites handle with the words “fully insured” and nothing else.

How long will it take. Not the working days. The disruption, in days they can plan around.

Why one page for both serves neither

The two buyers do not want a compromise. They want their own answer.

A page written down the middle produces sentences like “we deliver quality workmanship for residential and commercial clients throughout the Chicago area”, which is four claims nobody can check and no detail either reader came for. The builder learns nothing about scheduling. The homeowner learns nothing about cost or mess.

It also costs you in search, for a mechanical reason. The things a builder types and the things a homeowner types are different phrases, and one page cannot rank well for both. Split them and you have two pages each answering a real question, which is how this works.

How to serve both without two websites

You do not need two sites. You need one site with an early fork.

Fork on the home page, in plain words. Two routes, labelled the way the reader would label themselves. “For builders and general contractors” and “For homeowners”. Not “commercial” and “residential”, which are your words rather than theirs, and which a homeowner planning an extension will genuinely misread.

Give each one a real page. Not a section. A page, with its own first line, its own list of the work you want, and its own call to action. The builder page ends in a phone number and a named person. The homeowner page ends in a phone number and a form, because a share of homeowners will not ring somebody they have not met.

Write the proof differently on each. The builder page wants the municipalities, the inspection record, the insurance position, the trades you sequence with. The homeowner page wants photographs of finished work on houses that look like theirs, the town, and a review they can go and read.

Keep one set of shared pages. Your record, your service area, your contact details and your prices do not need duplicating. Two front doors, one house.

Say which you want more of. This is the part contractors resist and it is the most useful thing on the page. If you want more builder work, the builder route goes first and says so. A site that is neutral between its two audiences is making the reader do the sorting.

The sentence to delete from your home page

“We do residential and commercial.”

It is on thousands of trade sites and it is doing nothing. It is a description of your invoicing, not of the customer’s problem, and both readers skip it.

Replace it with the two routes, or with the one you actually want. Either is better than the average of the two.

When you should not bother with the split

Worth saying plainly, because this advice is wrong for some of you.

If one buyer is more than about nine in ten of your work, write the site for that buyer and put a single honest line for the other. A plumber who does one new build a year does not need a builder page, and building one will make the site worse at the thing it is actually for.

If you are at capacity on builder work and not hiring, a homeowner page is a route to enquiries you will turn down, which costs you twice: the time answering, and the person who now thinks you did not want the job.

If you only work for two builders, your problem is not a website. It is that two customers are your entire business, and the fix for that is a third builder, which happens on the phone rather than on the internet. We wrote about that in word of mouth works, so do you need a website.

We would rather say that than sell somebody a page they do not need. The split earns its keep when both buyers are genuinely worth having, and it is wasted effort when they are not.

What this looks like built

Four to six pages does it. A home page that forks in the first screen, a page for builders, a page for homeowners, a page proving you are real, and one or two pages for the specific jobs you want more of.

Each page answers one buyer’s questions in that buyer’s words, the phone number is a link on every one of them, and the shared pages carry the licence, the insurance and the towns. That is the whole structure, and it is the one we build at $249 because it is what this trade actually needs rather than what is easy to sell.

If you are starting from nothing, the nine things a local service website needs is the checklist, and licensed, insured, and able to prove it covers the proof both buyers are looking for, in the order they look.