Why your contractor website gets no calls
A contractor website that gets no calls usually has one of four problems. Google has not indexed the pages, the pages rank too low to be seen, the site has no page for what people search, or nobody answers the leads that do come in. We found the first three on real sites in Google Search Console this month.
This month we went through Google Search Console for a group of contractor and small business sites. The same problems kept turning up.
Google never saved half the pages
One site had 19 pages, and Google had skipped about half of them. Every page on that site answered at two addresses, one ending in .html and one without it. Google could not tell which was the real one, so it held back on both.
The fix was a settings change and a short list of redirects. Nobody had looked, so the site sat that way for months.
You can check yours in a minute. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google and count what comes back. If your site has 15 pages and Google shows 6, you have this problem or one like it.
The pages rank where nobody looks
A gravel driveway page on one site was shown to searchers 318 times in three months and got zero clicks. Its average position was 61, which is the sixth or seventh page of results.
Being on Google at spot 61 does you no good. A page moves up when it is about one service, names the town in the title, shows real photos of that work and has reviews behind it. It also takes time, and anybody promising page one by next week is selling something.
There is no page for what people type
The contractor site with the most Google traffic in our group was shown about 58,000 times in three months. Most of that came from plain questions like how much a cubic yard of dirt is and what #53 gravel is used for.
Customers type questions. A site that answers them gets found, and a site that only says "quality work at fair prices" does not. Write down the ten questions you answer on the phone every week. Each one can be a page.
Leads come in and nobody answers
We have no chart for this one because you already know how it goes. You are on a roof, the phone rings, and by the time you climb down they have called the next name on the list.
The first contractor to answer usually gets the job. If your form sends an email you read at night, or your voicemail is full, the website did its part and the job still went somewhere else.
What to check this week
- Search site:yourdomain.com and compare the count to your real page count.
- Set up Google Search Console. It is free. Open the Pages report and read the reasons pages were skipped.
- Search your main service plus your town in a private browser window and see where you land.
- Call your own number from another phone and let it ring out. Fill out your own form. Time how long it takes to hear back.
If the fourth one stings, that is the one to fix first, because it is costing you jobs you already paid to attract.