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What should a new business's website say?

Say what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you, in the words a customer would type. Name each service plainly and give each one its own page, and do the same for every town you drive to. Show your own photos and your phone number on every screen. Skip the mission statement; nobody is buying one.

Say the work in the customer's words

A homeowner with a leak types "water heater replacement" and their town. They don't type "plumbing solutions" or "residential service offerings". Your site should use the words they type, because those are the words Google matches and the words a reader recognizes in half a second.

Name each service the way you'd say it standing in the driveway. Roof replacement. Furnace repair. Paver patios. Then give each one a page of its own instead of a line on a list, because a page can answer the questions that service brings up and a line can't.

Say where you work, town by town

Google builds a different list for every town, from sites that say in plain words they work there. A site that only names your home town is off the list in every other town, however far you'd drive.

So name the towns, and give the ones you want work in a real page each: your service, that town, and something true about the work there. A row of town names in the footer isn't the same thing, and Google treats it that way.

The things every page needs

Your phone number, where a thumb lands, on every page. Your business name spelled the same way as on your Google listing. What you charge for, if you can say it. Whether estimates cost anything.

Your own photos. Four real jobs beat forty stock pictures, and a customer can tell the difference instantly. Put the before beside the after when you have both.

One thing to do next, said plainly: call, or fill in a short form. A page that ends without asking for anything gets read and closed.

What to leave off

The mission statement, the "about our journey" paragraph, and the word "solutions". Nobody searching for a fence has ever read a mission statement and called.

Anything you can't back up. Years in business you don't have, a team of ten when it's you and a helper, awards nobody gave you. A new business that reads honestly is easier to trust than one that reads padded, and being new is a fact rather than a flaw.

Prices you'd have to change monthly, unless you're happy keeping them current. A range with what it depends on works better than a number you'll regret.

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

Write down the words a customer says when they call you, and use those on the site. Give each service its own page and each town you want work in its own page. Put your number at the top of every one, add your own photos as you finish jobs, and cut anything you couldn't say out loud.

You don't write any of it. Bindingstone writes every page for you, in the words your customers use, from the services and towns you tell us at signup. You send photos when you have them.

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.