Two Calgary Businesses Had Websites. Only One Got the Call.

Nobody opens a report on Calgary businesses hoping to learn something. You’re here to find out whether you’re one of the good ones.

Everybody does it. I do it myself with other people’s research, jumping straight to the part about my own line of work and never reading a word of the rest.

So I’ll spoil it early. On the one number most owners use to answer that question, you almost certainly are one of the good ones, and it will buy you less than you’d hope.

Two owners called me eleven days apart last spring. Same trade, same end of town, both of them fifteen years in, both with a website that someone else had built for them.

One was booked five weeks out and wanted to talk about hiring. The other had watched his phone go quiet after Christmas and had decided, all on his own, that the website was to blame.

He was half right. It took me an evening with both sites open side by side to work out which half.

What they had in common

Both of them had a website. So does very nearly everyone they compete with.

88.7% of the businesses I sampled in Calgary list a website on their Google profile, and out of the 24 cities I graded, only Scottsdale keeps a higher share of its businesses online than that. Corpus Christi sits at the far end of the same column, in a different world entirely.

That number surprised me. I expected this city to do well and I did not expect it to be sitting up there with the very best of them.

Your site is in that count somewhere, one row among the 6,507 businesses I pulled out of this city, sitting quietly beside every competitor you have.

Which makes the website a tie, not a lead

For about a decade, “get a website” was real advice worth paying for. Around here it has quietly stopped being advice at all.

If almost everyone on your street has one, then having one puts you level with your street. Level was not what you were promised when you paid the invoice.

When did a website stop being the thing that set your business apart from the one next door? Around here it happened a while ago and nobody sent a memo.

The question moved. It isn’t whether you have a site anymore, it’s what happens in the ninety seconds after a stranger lands on it, the stretch where a visitor decides whether to stay, and that part nobody quotes you a figure for.

So what does your homepage do that the one next door doesn’t? Take your time with that one, because it’s the only question on this page that costs you money to get wrong.

The busy one had a way in

28.4% of the homepages I opened here have a contact form, a shade over the national 28%. The busy one had a form near the top. On the quiet one you scrolled to the very bottom before you found anything, and what you found was a phone number on its own.

Gaming shows that plainly. Almost every business in it has a site, and far fewer give a stranger any way to book.

From her side of the screen, a form is permission. She can get in touch at eleven at night, from her own couch, without rehearsing an opening line or leaving a voicemail she’ll be embarrassed about at breakfast.

How many of your best customers do you think would have phoned you at eleven at night?

Mine wouldn’t. Mine would have typed two sentences into a box, gone to bed, and taken the first reply that landed on Monday morning.

Owners ask me about speed and about how the site looks. Nobody asks about the box. When I went through Montreal, that box turned out to be the one check the city handles better than anything else it does.

Go and look at your own homepage and find the quickest way a stranger could reach you without dialing your number. If the only answer is the number itself, you’ve quietly made her be the brave one.

Neither of them could see anything

57.6% of the sites I audited here run analytics, against 58% nationally, which puts this city mid-pack and both of those owners in the dark.

Analytics is the one check on my whole list that a customer will never notice. It sits in the background keeping score, and it can name the page people were on when they decided against you.

The quiet owner spent four months guessing at exactly that. Four months, and the real answer was sitting a login away the whole time, unread, because nobody had ever told him it was there.

Could you name the page your own visitors quit on? I’ve asked that in a lot of first meetings and I can remember two owners who knew.

Go and pull these numbers yourself if you’d rather not trust a man who sells websites for a living. Choose Calgary in the city box on the explorer at the bottom of my report and leave the other box set to all, and it prints every check with the number of sites behind it, which is how I catch myself whenever a figure comes out looking too flattering.

What was already working, for both of them

Neither owner needed a lecture about reviews. 92.0% of the businesses I sampled here hold at least one Google review, against 88% nationally, and Calgary sits near the top of all 24 cities for it.

Stars arrive before your website does. She reads them on the map, on her phone, before she has any idea what your homepage even looks like.

Then she taps through, and whatever you built has to carry the good opinion she has already formed about you. The busy one’s site carried it. The quiet one’s dropped it on the floor.

Your stars are out there doing that work tonight, for free, whether or not you gave them a single thought today.

The gap I couldn’t see from outside

My grading runs out of road at about this point, and you should know where the edge of it is before you take any of it too seriously.

Calgary scores 72 out of 100 on my city table, built from ten weighted checks, and the weights are all published so anyone can argue with them.

Not one of those ten can tell whether the words on your page sound like a human being. None of them know if you answer email the same day, or if the person who picks up the phone is any good at it.

Both of my callers would have graded about the same. Out in the real world one of them was turning work away, so what exactly was my grade telling either of them?

What actually separated them

The busy one had answered a question about her customer. The quiet one had answered a question about himself.

His homepage opened with the year he founded the company and a photo of the building. Hers opened with the problem people phone her about, in the words they use on the phone.

That’s it. Same trade, same city, same platform underneath, and the whole difference sat in who the first line of the page was written for.

Which of those two homepages is yours? You knew the answer to that before you finished reading the sentence, and you didn’t need to open your laptop to check.

He is a client now, and rebuilding sites for people in this city is most of what I do. His new homepage says less than his old one did, which took some arguing.

One question, and I’m not going to answer it

I can tell you what a website looks like from the pavement outside. Ten checks, run at scale, on every site in town.

What I can’t see is the thing that decided which of those two owners was busy, and I’ve been doing this long enough to stop pretending otherwise.

So take the question he took a week over, the one that cost him nothing but honesty.

When a stranger who has never heard your name lands on your homepage tonight, what exactly are you asking her to do next?