What to Put on a Contractor Website (Page by Page)

Most owners spend weeks on how the site looks and about ten minutes on what it says.

That is backwards, and it is understandable. The look is the part you can see and have an opinion about. The words are the part that decides whether somebody rings you.

So here is the other half of the job. Five pages, what each one is for, and what belongs on it. This is written for a service business with a van and a phone rather than for a marketing department.

The honest minimum: five pages

A home page. A services page, or a short page per service if you want particular jobs. A service area page that names the towns. An about page. A contact page.

That is a complete site for most trades. It is not a starter version of a real site. Adding pages is easy and rarely the problem. Sites usually fail because the five pages that matter say nothing specific, not because there are only five of them.

The home page: four things, in order

Everything above the fold on a phone has to answer four questions, and it has to answer them in about three seconds.

What you do. The trade, in the words a customer would use. Plumber. Heating and air. Electrician. Not "solutions", not "services", not a slogan about your commitment to quality.

Where you do it. The town, or the county, or the run of towns. This is the single most commonly missing item on a small business website and it is doing double damage. A visitor cannot tell if you cover them, and a search engine cannot tell either.

How to reach you right now. The phone number as a tappable link, big enough to hit with a thumb. Not a picture of a phone number, not the number hidden in a footer, and not a form as the only option.

One reason to believe you. Something specific and checkable. The year you started. The licence number. That you answer the phone yourself. Nothing generic. "Quality workmanship" is not a reason, because everybody claims it and nobody can check it.

Underneath those four, the home page can carry a short list of services, a few real photographs, a handful of reviews and a repeat of the phone number. But if a visitor never scrolls, the top four have already done the job.

If you want to know whether your current home page passes, our free site check loads your real page the way a phone would and tells you what it found. There is no email field and nothing is stored.

Service pages: one per thing worth having

A service page exists for two reasons. It answers a specific question in more detail than the home page has room for, and it is the page that can rank for that specific search.

What goes on one:

• The work, described plainly. What you actually do when you turn up.
• What a visit looks like. Roughly how long, what you need access to, whether you shift furniture, whether you clear up.
• What is not included. Sounds negative, reads as honest, and prevents the wasted call.
• Roughly what it costs, or the reason you cannot say. There is a whole argument about this and it is in should you put prices on your website.
• What happens next. The exact sequence. Ring, we book, we quote, you decide.

That last one matters more than most owners expect. People do not hesitate because they are unconvinced. They hesitate because they cannot picture the next twenty minutes of their life after they press call.

Give each service page a heading a human would type. "Emergency drain clearing in Mercer County" beats "Drainage Solutions" every time, on both counts, because it is what a person searches and what a person understands.

The service area page: name the towns

This is the page most sites skip, and it is cheap to do properly.

List the towns, boroughs and townships you cover, in plain text, on the page. Not on a map image. Not in a drop down. A search engine reads text and a visitor scanning for their own town reads text.

Say something true about the area if you can. Which towns you get to fastest, whether you take call outs at the far edge, whether there is a distance charge past a certain point. That turns a keyword list into a page that is actually useful, and it is the difference between a service area page and the thin doorway pages everybody has seen.

How far to take this depends on how many towns you cover. The full version, including when a separate page per town is worth it and when it is padding, is in service area pages for contractors.

The about page: the most underrated page on a trade site

For a national retailer the about page is corporate wallpaper. For a local service business it is often the page that closes the job, because hiring a tradesperson means letting a stranger into your house.

What belongs on it:

• Who you are, in the first person. Your name. How long you have been doing this.
• A real photograph of you, and of the van, and of the crew if there is a crew. Your own photographs, taken on your own phone. Not stock. This matters enough that it has its own page: photos for a contractor website.
• Where you are based and where you live, if you are comfortable saying. Local is the whole proposition.
• Licences, insurance, certifications, with the numbers where they exist.
• What you will not do. Somebody who says "we do not touch oil boilers" reads as more trustworthy than somebody who claims everything.

Write it the way you would say it standing in someone's kitchen. If a sentence would sound strange out loud, it will read strangely on the page.

The contact page: remove every excuse

The phone number, again, tappable. The hours, including whether out of hours means a real person or an answerphone. The email address if you read it. One form, short.

Short means short. Name, phone, and a box for what the problem is. Every extra field costs you enquiries and buys you information you could get in thirty seconds on the phone. Nobody has ever abandoned a plumbing emergency because the form did not ask for their postcode.

Two things to check rather than assume. That the form actually delivers to an inbox somebody reads, tested with a real submission from a real phone. And that the phone number on the site is the number that is answered today, which sounds too obvious to check until you find a site still listing a number from two vans ago.

What to leave off

A rotating banner of slogans. It delays the answer to "what do you do" by several seconds, which is several seconds you do not have.

Stock photographs of models in clean overalls. They read as a stock photograph, and once a visitor spots one they start wondering what else is not yours.

A mission statement. Nobody chooses a plumber on values. They choose on trade, place, availability and the feeling that you will turn up.

Made up reviews, badges you have not earned, or a star rating that is not real. Beyond being dishonest, it is the easiest thing in the world for a customer to check against your Google listing. If you want more real ones, how to get reviews for your business is the process.

A blog you will not write. An empty blog with three posts from 2023 makes a business look closed. Leave it off until you actually intend to publish.

The order to write it in

Write the contact page first, because it is the shortest and it forces you to settle the phone number and hours.

Then the service pages, because that is where the actual knowledge is and it is the easiest writing you will do. You explain this work to people every week.

Then the about page, in your own voice.

Then the service area page, which is mostly a list.

Then the home page, last. It is the hardest page to write and it is much easier once the other four exist, because the home page is largely a summary of them.

If the site already exists

You do not need a rebuild to fix any of this. Almost everything above is a text edit.

Start with the top of the home page and the phone number, because that is where the losses are largest. Then add the towns. Then work through the service pages one at a time, adding what a visit looks like and what happens next.

If the site is not producing calls and you want the wider diagnosis rather than just the words, why your website is not getting calls covers the structural reasons. And if you would rather start from a structure that already has these pages in it, our site kits ship with them built in, so the only job left is putting your own words in.

The site does not have to be beautiful. It has to say what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you, and it has to say it before the visitor gives up.