A local service website has two jobs. Get found, and get the person who found it to ring you. Everything that doesn't serve one of those is decoration.
Getting them to ring
- Your phone number in the header, on every page, tappable. Not in an image, not only on the contact page. The single most common failure on trade sites.
- What you do and where, above the fold. A visitor should know in two seconds whether you're relevant to them. “Welcome to our website” tells them nothing.
- Real photos of your own work. Stock photography reads as a business with nothing to show. Phone photos of actual jobs beat professional stock every time.
- Your Google reviews on the page. Live if you can, so they stay current. Proof at the moment of deciding.
- A short form. Name, phone, one line about the job. Every extra field costs you submissions, and nobody fills in a seven-field form on a phone.
- Service area stated plainly. People want to know you come to them before they ring to find out.
Getting found
- One page per service. Not a single Services page listing eight things. A page about hot water systems can rank for hot water systems. A list can't rank for anything.
- Title tags that name the service and the area. It's the strongest on-page signal and it's one line of HTML.
- One H1 per page, carrying what the page is about.
- LocalBusiness schema with your real name, address, phone and hours, matching your Google profile exactly. Mismatches between the two are a genuine ranking problem.
- Your name, address and phone identical everywhere. Site, Google profile, directories, Facebook. “St” on one and “Street” on another is the kind of thing that quietly costs you.
- A sitemap.xml and a robots.txt. Two files, five minutes, and plenty of local sites have neither.
What you don't need
- A homepage slider. They measurably reduce conversions and slow the page down. They've been a bad idea for a decade.
- A blog you'll never write. Three posts from 2023 looks worse than no blog.
- Animation on every scroll. One or two is fine. A page where everything slides in is a page that feels slow.
- A chatbot nobody answers. An unanswered chat is worse than no chat.
- Fifteen pages of corporate copy. Six good pages beat fifteen thin ones, every time.
The order to build in
- Homepage that says what you do, where, with the number visible and a form.
- One page per main service.
- A page showing real jobs with real photos.
- Contact page with the number, the form, the service area and the hours.
- Suburb pages, but only for suburbs you can say something genuine about. A template with the name swapped is a thin page and Google treats it as one.
That's six to ten pages. Built properly it will outperform a thirty page site that was signed off on how it looked and never checked against either of the two jobs.
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