Three Telecom Fixes Worth Buying, and the One You Already Own
Telecom sites already run analytics at 66.1%, where 58% of small business sites do. So if there’s a little money on the table, I’d spend it on the parts your buyer actually touches.
You’ve been putting this off, and I think I know why.
Every conversation about your telecom website turns into a rebuild, a discovery call and a retainer, when all you wanted was the annoying part fixed before the busy season starts.
So let’s pretend the budget is one afternoon of a capable person’s time and not a penny more.
Three jobs, in the order I’d do them. Then the line I’d cross straight off the quote.
Every rate below comes out of one audit I ran on telecom sites in 24 markets, and all of it sits on a page of mine you can open in another tab. The explorer near the bottom of that page rolls a whole trade into a single card if you set the industry box and leave the cities box on all, with the number of sites printed under each rate. I run that on my own figures whenever one arrives looking too flattering to trust.
First: somewhere for her to type
Your buyer spends her entire working day on a telephone. She is not going to spend her lunch break on another call, especially one where she has to describe a building’s wiring to a stranger who keeps saying “sure, sure”.
A contact form asks nothing of her except a name, a company and one line about what she’s running now, and it works inside the twenty minutes she has free between meetings.
23.4% of the telecom homepages I opened carry one, and even the 28% I get across small business sites in general is nothing anyone should be proud of.
So she taps back to the search results, and the company below you gets her name, her company, the address of the site and what she’s running now, typed at ten past one while she eats a sandwich.
You never hear about it, and the silence is what makes this expensive. A lost quote at least tells you that it was lost.
Four boxes, not eleven. The technical questions come later, on the call you’ll be making back to her.
When did you last fill in your own form and time how long a reply took?
Second: what it does at phone width
Your pricing table is the usual casualty here.
On a laptop it’s four tidy columns. On a phone it collapses into a stack of numbers with nothing left to say which plan any of them belongs to, or it runs off the side of the screen so she has to scroll sideways hunting for the price.
73.6% of these sites clear the phone check, which is behind the 78% I get across everything I audit, and the failures I open are nearly always one stubborn piece of the page rather than a broken site.
A table. A header that eats the whole screen. A hero image left over from the day the theme was installed.
None of that is a rebuild, and anybody who tells you it is has priced the rebuild before they looked at your site.
Open your own plans page on your phone right now. Did you have to zoom in to read a price?
If you did, so did every buyer who visited you this month, and not one of them mentioned it to you.
Third: proof you’re still trading
Companies in your trade get bought, merged and quietly wound down, and the woman comparing three providers knows that better than you’d like.
A website written in 2019 looks identical to a website written on Tuesday morning. So she goes looking somewhere else for a pulse, and if the trail stops at your homepage she assumes the worst.
61.2% of these sites link out to a social profile against 66% across my whole sample, which makes this a cheap way to look alive beside a competitor who hasn’t bothered.
An hour in the footer, pointing at accounts you already post to.
Photos of a rack you tidied, a tower crew on a clear morning, the new van. Ordinary, dated, and worth more than the adjectives on your services page.
If you post nowhere at all, skip this one and go back to the form. I’d rather you did one job properly than three of them badly.
The line I’d cross off
If the quote in front of you carries a line for setting up analytics, ask what it’s for before you initial anything.
Your trade is better at this than most: 66.1% of the telecom sites I audited already count their visitors, where 58% of small business sites do, so the odds are decent that you’re being sold something already running on your own homepage.
I’ve watched that line item get priced at more than the rest of the quote put together, on a site where the counting had been switched on since the launch.
Ask them to open your site, show you the tag sitting in the code, and tell you which email address those monthly reports have been landing in since nobody read them. It’s a five minute conversation and it usually ends the line item.
Dentists install the counting better than almost any trade I check too, and the reports land in an inbox nobody opens.
Nearly every telecom owner I quote tells me the phone rings and he already knows where the work comes from. His own site has been keeping score the whole time.
What I’d happily pay for is someone reading the thing once a month and telling you what changed. That’s a different job, the slow upkeep side of owning a site, and it belongs on a different invoice.
I build telecom websites for a living, so you can guess which way my bias runs, and I’d still rather you spent this money on a form than on a rebuild you don’t need until next year.
Which one is broken on yours
Three jobs. An afternoon, an hour, and one stubborn table.
None of them needs a designer, a strategy document, or a meeting where four people look at fonts. If the proposal in your inbox opens with a rebuild, it’s answering a question nobody in your trade asked.
Not sure which of the three is failing on yours? Send me the address and I’ll tell you, and I’ll tell you plainly if the answer is none of them.
One last thing, before you spend anything.
None of this was written for the company with a marketing manager, a signed-off rebuild and a designer already arguing about the shade of blue. Go and enjoy your project.
I wrote it for the two-van outfit whose website got built once, years ago, by a brother-in-law with a free weekend, and whose owner still answers the phone himself at seven in the evening because there is nobody else left to answer it. If that isn’t you, you’ve been reading over someone else’s shoulder.
