The four things a trade website needs before anything else

Most trades websites don't fall down on the fancy bits. They fall down on the basics. Someone lands on the page, can't tell in a few seconds what you do or whether you cover their street, so they go back to the search results and ring the next name down.

Four things have to be right before anything else is worth paying for. Most of the sites I'm sent get at least one of them wrong, and usually it's the same one.

1. What you actually do, in the first screenful

The first thing on the page should say the trade and the work in the words a customer would use. "Bathroom fitting and full refurbs" beats "Quality you can trust". One tells someone whether to carry on reading, the other tells them nothing.

If a visitor has to scroll to work out what you do, the page has already failed. The two usual culprits are "Welcome to our website" and a paragraph about the company being founded in 2009. Neither answers the question they came with.

Easiest test I know: write the headline as you'd answer "what do you do?" in the pub. You wouldn't say "quality you can trust". You'd say "I fit bathrooms".

Big Builds is a demo site I built for a fictional Swindon builder, and the top of the homepage states the trade and the area before you touch the scroll wheel.

2. Where you work, in place names people search

"We cover Swindon and all surrounding areas" tells a customer nothing. They live in a village and they want to know if you'll come out to it.

Name the places. Swindon, Chippenham, Marlborough, Highworth, Wootton Bassett, and the villages in between if that's where you work. Then be straight about the edges: how far out you'll travel, and whether there's a call-out charge past a certain distance. Better to lose the job you didn't want than drive an hour to an argument about fuel.

People search with a place name attached, so the names need to be on the page in normal sentences. Not a grey list of forty villages in the footer.

Keep it matching your Google listing too. Google lets service businesses set the areas they serve on their Business Profile, so what's on the website and what's on there should say the same thing.

3. Proof you've done the work before

Photos of your own finished jobs beat stock images every time. A phone photo of a real kitchen you fitted, taken in decent light, does more than a polished picture of someone else's. Six to ten good ones, each with a line underneath saying what it was and roughly where, beats forty mediocre ones.

Reviews work the same way. A handful of real ones on the page, with the customer's first name and town, lands better than a badge. Don't invent any, and don't lean on "over 20 years' experience" with nothing on the page to show for it.

All four of my demo sites are fictional businesses, built to show the layouts. The garden design and stonemason ones both lean heavily on finished-work photos, because for that kind of trade the pictures are the pitch.

4. An easy way to get in touch, on every page

Phone number in the header on every page, set up so a tap on a mobile dials it. Then a short form underneath: name, number, postcode, a line about the job. That's it. An eight-field form with a required full address and a dropdown of twelve services will cost you enquiries from people who were only half decided anyway.

Say when you answer the phone and how fast you reply. "I answer between 7 and 6, and I'll get back to you the same day" settles people more than any badge.

Lead with the method you actually check. If the inbox gets opened once a fortnight, don't put the email address first.

And make sure form enquiries land somewhere real, not a spam folder. Send yourself a test one from your own phone, once a month.

What can wait

Plenty of things get asked for before the four above are sorted. None of them are bad ideas. They just can't win you a job the basics have already lost:

• Online booking
• A blog
• A video on the homepage
• Live chat
• A gallery that filters by job type
• A logo redesign
• An about page with the full company story

The order matters more than the list does. Get the four right, run the site for a few months, then look at what the enquiries are telling you. If three people a week ring to ask the same question, that's your next page. If people keep trying to book evenings while you're on a job, that's when booking earns its keep.

Add-ons like booking systems and care plans are priced on the services page, so you can see what you'd be adding later.

How to check your own site in five minutes

Get your phone out and do this now.

1. Open your own site on the phone, not the laptop. Use mobile data, not the office wifi.
2. Count how long it takes to see your trade and your area. More than five seconds and the top of the page needs rewriting.
3. Tap the phone number. If it doesn't start a call, it's text pretending to be a number.
4. Fill in your form as a customer would and send it. Then check it arrived, and check how long it took.
5. Show the page to someone outside the trade for ten seconds, then ask them what the business does and where. Their answer is what your customers get.

If any one of those fails, fix it before you spend money on anything else.

If you've run through that check and your site trips on one or two of them, send me the address through the contact page and I'll tell you which bit I'd fix first. No charge for that, and no pitch attached. Sometimes it's an afternoon's work on the top of the homepage, not a new site.