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Do I need a website before I open?

Yes, and the day you open is late rather than early. Google takes months to trust a new website, so the clock starts when the site goes up and not when you're ready for the work. It's also where your Google listing points, what a customer checks before calling a name they don't know, and the only thing you own in the whole setup.

Why the timing matters

A new website doesn't show up on Google the week it goes live. Google finds it, reads it, and then waits to see whether it sticks around and whether anyone links to it. That takes months, and there's no way to buy your way past it.

So the site is the slowest thing on your list, which makes it the first thing on your list. Every week you wait is a week the clock hasn't started. A site that went up three months ago is getting found now. The same site put up today is three months away from that, and nothing you do in between shortens it.

What the website does that a phone number can't

A customer who's never heard your name does one thing before calling: looks you up. If there's nothing to find, they call the next name on the list. That's not about trust in you, it's about a stranger with a wet basement and two other numbers to try.

Your Google Business Profile needs somewhere to point too. The listing has a website field, and Google reads the listing and the site together. A listing with a real site behind it, saying the same name and the same phone number, is worth more than one pointing at nothing.

And it's the one piece you keep. A Facebook page lives on Facebook's terms. A directory profile sits on a page full of your competitors. The site is the address you send everybody to for the next twenty years.

What the site has to have on day one

Your business name, your phone number, and what you do, in the words a customer would use. Not "solutions" or "services". Gutter cleaning. Furnace repair. Paver patios.

The towns you'll drive to, each one with a real page about your work there. Google builds a different list for every town, and it builds each from sites that say in plain words they work there. A single page listing eight towns at the bottom doesn't get you onto eight lists.

Photos of your own work, even if there are only four of them. A new business with four real photos reads better than one with stock pictures of somebody else's truck.

What it doesn't need yet

A logo you paid for, a video, a blog, or a list of team members you don't have. None of it makes the phone ring, and waiting on any of it is how a site sits unfinished for a year.

It doesn't need to be finished, either. Add services as you sell them and towns as you drive to them. A plain site that goes up now and grows beats a perfect one six months later.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Put the site up before you're ready, with your name, your number, what you do and the towns you'll drive to. Then claim your Google Business Profile and point it at the site. If you're waiting on a logo or on photos of finished work, go live without them and add them as they come.

Bindingstone builds the whole thing for a business that's opening with nothing yet: the site, a page for your work in every town you'll drive to, the Google Business Profile set up with you, and your leads to your phone.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.