TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
It is 6:40 on a Tuesday evening and there is water on a basement floor in Prairie Village. The homeowner is standing in it, on their phone, with three tabs open, and in the next two minutes they are going to call somebody. Not the best plumber in Johnson County. The first one whose website answers a short list of questions without making them work for it. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites across the Kansas City metro, and contractor sites are where the gap between the quality of the work and the quality of the website is widest.
Trades around here rarely lose a job on craftsmanship. Once you are standing in the driveway, the work speaks for itself. The problem happens earlier, in the ten seconds a homeowner spends deciding whether you are worth a phone call, and that part is a website problem rather than a trade problem.
The short version: a homeowner is running four questions
Every visitor to a contractor site, whether they could tell you this or not, is checking four things:
- Do you do this exact thing? Not home services, the actual job. A furnace that will not light, hail damage on a roof, a basement that took on water.
- Do you come to my address? Lee's Summit and Lenexa are both Kansas City, and neither homeowner assumes you drive to them.
- Can I see work like mine? Their house, their neighborhood, their era of construction.
- How do I reach you right now, and will a person actually answer?
A site that answers those four in under a minute books jobs. A site that makes someone hunt for a phone number underneath a stock photo of a smiling family does not, no matter how sharp it looks on a laptop.
Your phone number is the most important design element on the page
Home services leads are still mostly phone calls, and they are impatient ones. The number belongs in the header of every page, tappable on a phone so a thumb starts the call instead of copying digits, and repeated at the bottom of every service page. If you answer after hours, say so on the page, because call now means something very different at nine at night than it does at ten in the morning.
Forms are the backup, not the plan, and they should do something useful the moment they arrive. A form that texts the lead to your phone beats one that emails an address you open on Sunday. Whoever calls back first usually gets the job, so anything that shortens the gap between submit and callback is worth more than another round of design revisions. Test your own form every month too, because forms fail quietly and a dead form is one of the signs a website is losing customers without anyone noticing.
One page per service, named the way people say it
The biggest structural fix on most contractor sites is breaking the Services page into real pages. A bulleted list of fourteen things gives Google nothing to rank and gives a homeowner nothing to read. A page about furnace repair, with what usually causes it, what a typical visit runs, how fast you can get there, and three photos of the work, can rank on its own and answer the entire question before the call.
Name them the way customers say them, not the way the trade says them. People search for a furnace not blowing hot air and for gutter guards. Nobody has ever searched for exterior envelope solutions. Start with your three most profitable services instead of all fourteen, since those pages take real writing. They are also what feeds local search, and they work hand in hand with your Google map pack listing, which is where most of this traffic actually starts.
Service area pages, but only the honest ones
Contractors get sold on a page for every suburb in the metro, sixty near-identical pages with the city name swapped out. Google has seen that trick for fifteen years and it does not work anymore. Worse, it points you at towns you do not really want to drive to. Google's own guidance for service area businesses is that your whole area should sit within roughly two hours of driving time from your base, and it is worth reading how they expect you to set your service areas before you draw the map.
A service area page earns its place when it has real detail. Which neighborhoods, what the housing stock is like there, since 1950s ranches in Prairie Village have entirely different problems than 2015 builds in Olathe, which cities are slow on permits, and photos of jobs you have actually finished in that area. If you cannot write three honest paragraphs about working in a city, skip the page. Five real ones beat forty thin ones.
Photos of your own work beat stock every time
Nearly every contractor site I inherit has the same catalog kitchen on it, the one with the marble island and nobody standing in it. It tells a homeowner nothing, because they are trying to picture their own house and a stock photo actively fights that. Before and after shots, framed the same way in the same light, are the most persuasive thing you own, and they cost nothing but the ten seconds it takes to pull out a phone.
Do it whether or not you ever touch the website. A shared album the crew drops photos into, a hundred jobs a year, feeds the site, your Google Business Profile, and every estimate you send. Homeowners look at photos before they read a word.
The quiet disqualifiers
These are the things that lose you the call without ever producing a complaint, because the homeowner simply moves to the next tab:
- No license number or insurance statement anywhere, so a careful homeowner has to ask a stranger about it.
- No service area listed, so half the metro assumes you are too far away to bother.
- A site that takes six seconds to open on a phone with one bar in a driveway. Website speed matters more in this trade than in almost any other.
- Reviews that live only on Google, with nothing on the site itself.
- No pricing signal at all, not even a typical range, which most people read as expensive.
- Financing never mentioned on a twelve thousand dollar roof or a nine thousand dollar system.
- A contact form as the only way in, pointed at an inbox nobody opens after five.
What I would fix first, in order
If you do nothing else this month, do these, roughly in this order:
- Put a tappable phone number in the header of every page and at the bottom of every service page.
- Write real pages for your three most profitable services, in customer language.
- Fill out your Google Business Profile: service area, hours, services, and twenty photos.
- Add twenty of your own job photos to the site, before and after wherever you have them.
- Put five real reviews on the page, with first names and the city the job was in.
- Load your homepage on a phone with wifi off and make sure it is readable in about three seconds.
None of that is a redesign. It is an afternoon of work and a phone full of photos, and it will do more for your call volume than a new color scheme ever has.
If you would rather hand it off
I build sites for trades and contractors across the metro, from a five page site covering your three main services to a full build with a page per service and per city you serve. Prices are published on the pricing page, so you can see roughly where you land before you talk to anyone. If you only want a straight answer about the site you already have, send me the address and I will tell you whether it needs work or whether your money belongs somewhere else this year.