Someone lands on your site from a Google search. They are on a phone, they are half distracted, and they will decide within a few seconds whether to keep reading or go back to the results page and try the next business. That is the whole game, and most websites lose it before the visitor has scrolled once.
The three questions
Every visitor arrives with the same three questions, in the same order. What do you do. Do you do it where I am. What happens if I get in touch. A site that answers all three above the fold converts. A site that answers none of them, however good it looks, does not.
- What do you do. Not your slogan, your trade. "Roofing and carpentry" beats "Excellence since 1998" every single time.
- Do you do it where I am. Name the suburbs or the communes. A visitor should never have to guess whether you cover their street.
- What happens next. One action, made obvious. Call, or request a quote. Not both fighting for the same attention.
The hero image problem
The most common way to fail all three at once is a full-width photograph with a short poetic sentence over it. It looks like the sites in the design awards, and on a phone it fills the entire first screen with something that answers nothing. By the time the visitor has scrolled past it, a proportion of them have already left.
This does not mean no images. It means the image sits next to the answers rather than instead of them. On a phone, the first screen is roughly the size of a postcard. Everything that matters has to fit on that postcard.
Proof beats adjectives
Every trade website in the world says "quality workmanship" and "competitive prices". Those words carry no information, because the alternative is unthinkable. Nobody advertises poor workmanship at inflated prices. Adjectives that nobody would ever claim the opposite of are dead weight.
What does carry information is a photograph of a job you finished, with the suburb named underneath. A before and after. The number of years you have been trading. Whether you are insured and for how much. These are checkable, and checkable is what builds trust with a stranger.
The questions that eat your phone time
Think about the last twenty enquiry calls you took. A large share of them were the same handful of questions. Do you do small jobs. How long is a quote valid. Do you work weekends. Can you come and look before quoting.
Every one of those answered on the site is a call you never have to take, and a visitor who is further along when they do call. This is the single cheapest improvement most trade websites can make, and it costs nothing but the honesty of writing down what you actually do.
A website does not have to be impressive. It has to be unambiguous.
How to check your own site
Open it on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi. Start a timer. Read only what is visible without scrolling. If a stranger could not tell what you do, where you do it and how to reach you in that first screen, that is your problem, and no amount of redesign further down the page will fix it.