Websites for contractors and trades

Someone with a leaking pipe or a dead breaker is not browsing. They are searching on a phone, often in a hurry, and calling one of the first few businesses that look trustworthy. Your site has a few seconds to pass that test:

• What you do, in the first line: "Emergency plumbing and water heaters", not "Welcome to our website".
• Where you work: the towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods you cover, written out.
• A tap-to-call button that stays on screen, and a short quote form for the jobs that can wait.
• Proof: photos of real jobs, your Google reviews, and your licence or insurance where your trade requires one.
• When you are available, especially if you take emergency calls.

Most trades work is won in the local results, the map and list Google shows for searches like "electrician near me". Google's guide to local ranking says those results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence includes how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. It also says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.

So the work is plain: a complete Google Business Profile, real reviews, and a website that says clearly what you do and where. The site's service-area text helps relevance; links from suppliers, trade bodies and local directories to your site help prominence. If you have a profile but no site, read whether you need one.

List them in plain sentences, the way a customer would say them, and only the ones you actually cover. A paragraph that names your main towns and the neighbourhoods you work in most is useful to people and to search engines. A wall of hundreds of town names, or a separate thin page for every suburb, reads as padding to a customer, and it tells them nothing about where you really work.

If one area brings most of your work, say so: "Most of our jobs are in Katy, Cypress and the west side of Houston." That is specific and believable.

Show what a homeowner would want to know before letting you in the door. Photos of finished jobs with a line about each. Your reviews, which we pull from your Google listing when we build. How long you have been working, if it is true and worth saying. Your licence number or insurance, where your trade and state require one.

Our concept study for the trades, Ironridge Construction, is built on the line "Found first. Trusted fast. Called today." It is a concept, labelled as one, showing the standard we hold trades sites to. What it never does is invent badges, awards or numbers. Neither should yours: customers can tell, and so can the platforms you list on.

Building it and showing it to you is free, with no card. To put it live:

• Website: $99 a month. Your domain registered and renewed for you, hosting and security handled, changes whenever you email, no contract.
• Website, yearly: $990 a year, two months free.
• Website, owned: $1,499 once. The site and the domain are yours outright, with one free revision, and hosting and updates optional at $175 a year.

Online payments and ad tracking are custom builds, not part of these plans. See every plan.

The build takes about 20 minutes from a sentence about your business or your Google listing, and a designer checks it before you see it. Once you choose a plan, it is live on your own domain within 48 hours. Most trades already have what we need on their Google listing: the name, the category, the photos, the reviews and the area.

Send us a list of the services you most want to be called for, and the areas you cover, and we build them in. Changes after that are an email away, which matters in a trade where the services you push change with the season.

• No phone number on the first screen of the mobile site.
• A site that only loads well on desktop.
• No mention of the area, so nobody knows if you cover them.
• Stock photos of smiling strangers in hard hats.
• An old phone number or email that no longer works.

Every one of those is easy to fix. Build your site free and look at it on your phone the way a customer would.