“What should be on my website?” It is easy to build a site that answers a different question: “What would we like to say about ourselves?” That site opens with the company story, the mission and the years in business, and the homeowner has to dig for the two things she came for: whether you do her job, and roughly what it costs. Here is a five-page site built the other way round, the pages to cut, and an audit you can do this afternoon on your phone.
How people actually use the pages
Some well-known research on this is old but blunt. In 1997, Nielsen Norman Group reported that 79 percent of its test users “always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.” When the team rewrote the same site to be concise, scannable and objective at once, measured usability came out 124% better than the original. In 2008 the same group, analyzing 45,237 page views from a study that recorded everything 25 users did in their browsers, estimated that users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average page visit, and that 20% is more likely. Each extra 100 words bought about 4.4 more seconds of attention.
Google says the same thing from its side. Its guide on people-first content asks whether you are writing to a particular word count because you heard Google prefers one, and answers “No, we don’t.” Its SEO starter guide says there is “no magical word count target, minimum or maximum.” Put together: a page earns its place by answering one question fast, not by being long.
The five pages
1. Home: “Do you do my job, here, and what does it run?”
The first screen on a phone should say what you do, where you do it, and give a price signal: a range, a “most jobs land between” line, or a button that gives a price range. Then one clear next step. Put your license number in the body of this page as well as the footer. Arizona’s Registrar of Contractors, for example, lets a vehicle, radio, internet or billboard ad that gives your web address skip the number only if your home page shows your name and license number clearly, and not in the footer. Our guide to license numbers in ads covers the other states.
2. One page per main service: “What’s included, and what moves the price?”
Say a fencer builds wood privacy fences, vinyl fences and chain link. That is three pages, not one “Services” page with three bullets, because each answers a different homeowner’s question. Each page says what the job includes, what moves the price (for fencing: footage, material, height, gates, tear-out, slope), a typical range, and photos of your own work. Google’s guide says a good page title is “unique to the page, clear and concise,” and that headings help people navigate long content, so “Vinyl Privacy Fence Installation” beats “Services” on both counts. Writing your pricing formula down gives you most of this page.
3. Prices: “Can I afford you?”
This can be its own page or a section on each service page, but it has to exist and be one tap from the home page. The usual reason to skip it is that every job is different; why the homeowner wanted a price anyway makes the case, and showing prices without a quote tool gives three ways to do it with no software, within the advertising rules.
4. About: “Can I trust you in my house?”
Google’s people-first guide says its systems look for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and that “of these aspects, trust is most important.” One of its own self-check questions is whether a site shows “background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page.” For a contractor, that background is concrete:
5. Contact: “What happens if I reach out?”
A short form with only the fields you use, every other way to reach you, your hours, and one honest line about what happens next: who answers and when. Promise only the response time you actually keep. If you are not sure what that is, a one-week audit of every call and form will tell you.
The pages nobody reads
These are the pages that pad a contractor site without answering anyone’s question. Cut them or fold them into the five above:
One time-waster that is not a page: the keywords meta tag. Google’s starter guide says plainly that Google Search “doesn’t use the keywords meta tag,” and that keyword stuffing is against its spam policies. If someone offers to “optimize your keywords” there, decline.
The afternoon audit
Do it on your phone first; the small screen is the hardest test of whether a page answers its question fast:
- List every page. Next to each, write the one question it answers. A page with no question gets cut or merged.
- Read only the first two lines of each page. If they do not answer the question, rewrite them; the 2008 figures above suggest most of what follows goes unread.
- Check each page title: unique, clear, and naming the service or the town, not “Home” or “Services.”
- From the home page, count the taps to a price. More than one is too many.
- Find your license number on the home page body and the About page.
- Fill in your own contact form. Delete every field you never use.
- Check that the response time you promise is the one you keep.
If the price page is the one you keep putting off because every job is different, NapkinPrice™ puts a price range on your existing site from rules you set, and sends you the visitor’s job details with the lead. With or without it, the five pages above, each answering one question in its first lines, will do more for you than another ten that answer none.