Why people land on your site and never call

1. The phone number isn't visible without scrolling

The most common one and the easiest to fix. If the number is in the footer, half the people never see it, because on a phone the footer is five screens away.

The number has to be at the top, before anything you have to scroll past, and it has to be a link that dials when you tap it. A number written as plain text forces people to copy and paste, and that's where you lose them.

Test it now: open your site on your own phone and tap the number. If it doesn't start dialing on its own, it isn't set up as a link.

2. What you do isn't clear in two seconds

A lot of sites open with the business name and a nice phrase. "Rivera & Sons, excellence since day one" doesn't say whether they do roofs or sell insurance.

Someone who came from Google knows nothing about you. They need to read, without hunting, something like "24-hour plumbing in Hialeah and Miami Lakes." Plain, direct and clear beats pretty and vague every time.

3. It doesn't say where you work

Someone searching from Homestead needs to know whether you go to Homestead. If it doesn't say, they assume you don't and call somebody else.

Write your cities the way people say them, not by county. Write the big neighborhoods too if you work in them. It's the same reason it pays to have your cities in your Google profile: the search engine and the person need the same thing.

4. It takes too long to load

In South Florida a lot of people arrive on phone data, not wifi. If the page takes more than three seconds, a share of them leave before seeing anything.

What almost always weighs is the photos. A gallery of forty uncompressed photos, each one four megabytes straight off the camera, is the number one cause of a slow site. Twenty properly compressed photos show the same thing and load five times faster.

5. There isn't one photo of your actual work

Stock photos show, and what they communicate is that you have no jobs to show. A plumber smiling with a wrench in a white catalog kitchen convinces nobody.

Ten photos of your own work, shot on your phone, are worth more than any image you can buy. Before-and-after pairs are better still: it's the cheapest proof there is.

6. It says nothing about price

This is where most people get it wrong out of fear. The thinking is that leaving price out keeps the door open to more people, and the opposite happens: someone with no reference assumes it's expensive, or that the number will be invented based on how they look, and moves to the next site.

An honest range filters and builds trust at the same time. "Most jobs run $300 to $800 depending on size" saves you an afternoon of calls that were never going anywhere.

7. There's no proof anyone was ever happy

With no reviews, no testimonials and no names, all you have is a stranger's word. Three real reviews with a name and a date do more than any sentence about years of experience and commitment to quality.

If you have them on Google, bring them onto the site. If you don't have any yet, ask for them: that's the first thing to solve, before the website.

How to check it yourself in twenty minutes

Open your site on your phone, on data and not wifi, and time it. Three things have to be clear inside two seconds: what you do, where, and how to call you. Then scroll all the way down and look for three proofs: your own photos, a price reference and a review.

Whatever fails that list is what needs fixing, and fixing almost all of it doesn't require rebuilding anything.