What a homeowner checks before they call you

A homeowner with a problem does not read your website. They scan it, for about as long as it takes to decide whether you are worth a phone call, and then they either call or they go back to the search results.

Here is what they are scanning for, roughly in order. It is worth opening your own site on your phone and going down the list.

1. Are you real

Before anything else they are checking that you are a business and not a guy who will take a deposit and disappear. That means a street address, a phone number that is not a form, a licence number, and evidence that other people in this county have used you and lived.

This sounds insulting. It is not meant to be. Everyone has heard the story about the neighbour who paid half up front and never saw the contractor again, and every homeowner runs this check whether they admit it or not.

Put the address and the phone in the footer of every page. Put the licence number next to it. It costs nothing and it answers the question before it gets asked.

2. Do you do this specific thing

Not "roofing". They have a specific problem: a stain spreading across the bedroom ceiling, a breaker that trips whenever the microwave runs, a patio that has sunk at one corner.

If your site says "residential and commercial services" they have to guess. If it says "we repair active leaks, usually the same week", they know.

The test: could somebody with your exact problem find the words for it on your site? Most contractor sites list services the way an invoice does. Customers arrive describing a symptom.

3. What is it going to cost

This is the one nearly everyone leaves out, and it is the one they most want.

You do not have to quote a job you have not seen. You have to give them a range so they can work out whether to keep reading. "Most full kitchens we do run between $95,000 and $225,000" loses you the person who had twenty thousand in mind. That is the outcome you want. You were never getting that job, and you were going to spend two visits finding out.

A contractor who publishes ranges gets fewer calls and better ones.

4. Have you done it near here

A homeowner in Nutley wants to see a job in Nutley, or at least in a house that looks like theirs. A gallery of beautiful work in towns they have never heard of does less than three jobs with the town name under them.

Name the towns. "1963 split level in Wayne" does more work than any photograph beside it.

5. What do other people say, and is it believable

Five-star reviews that all say "great job, highly recommend" read as fake even when they are real. The long rambling one with a specific detail in it is worth more than ten short ones.

If a customer wrote you four hundred words, put all four hundred on the page. Do not trim it for tidiness. The detail is the credibility. One of my clients has a review where the homeowner mentions that the township inspector told them the work was impeccable. That single sentence sells more jobs than the rest of the site.

6. What happens if I call

Who picks up. How fast you get back to them. Whether the estimate costs anything. Whether they are about to be put on a list and pestered.

Three lines on the contact page covers it. Nobody does it, and it is the cheapest anxiety to remove.

The thing under all six

Every one of these is a homeowner trying to reduce risk. They are about to let a stranger into their house and hand over a lot of money, and they have almost nothing to go on.

Most contractor websites are built to describe the company. The ones that work are built to answer the six questions above, in that order, before anybody has to ask.

If you want to know which of the six your site currently answers, send me the address and I will go through it with you. Or look at the recent work, where each build has a write-up of what the site had to do and what I did about it.

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