Four Excuses Flooring Owners Give for a Blank Link

When did you last paste your flooring company’s web address into a text message and look at what came back on the other side?

Not your homepage. The address on its own, sent to a friend, the way a customer sends you along to her sister.

I run that test on sales calls now, because it takes about eight seconds and it tells me more about how a business gets looked after than half an hour of polite conversation ever does.

Flooring is a strange trade to run it on.

The owners in this business are excellent at the part of the job that involves actual people, and 96.1% of flooring companies hold at least one Google review against 88% of everything I audited. Nearly every other trade I checked finished below them on reviews.

Then I lined the same trades up by Open Graph tags and watched flooring drop to 71.5%, 39 of 47, with nearly everyone I’d checked now sitting above them.

Same businesses, same week of my life, and two completely different companies depending on which half of the job I happened to be looking at.

Restaurants live at the same split. Nearly every one of them gets talked about, and almost none of their homepages can take a message back.

The guy with the gray box

A flooring contractor I’ll call Marcus called me last spring, because his Facebook page was busy, his website was not, and he wanted to know which of the two had let him down.

He’d posted his own web address onto that page a dozen times, and every one of those posts went out as a strip of blue text sitting over an empty gray rectangle.

Open Graph tags were the thing he didn’t have. A page carries them so that Facebook, iMessage and everything else has something to grab hold of when your address turns up in front of a stranger, and with none of them written the apps go looking, come back with nothing, and print the bare address instead.

Marcus sells floors with photographs. Herringbone in a hallway, wide oak in a kitchen with the morning sun lying across it, the sort of picture that stops a homeowner scrolling.

Not one of those photographs ever made the trip.

He’d been paying to boost some of those posts, too.

How much would you spend to put a photograph of your own work in front of a stranger who has never heard of you? Marcus was already spending it, and sending a gray rectangle.

So why does one half of that job get tended carefully while the other gets abandoned? I’ve asked plenty of owners that question, and I get four answers back, arranged below with the best of them first, because two are stronger than I expected.

1) “The reviews look after themselves”

True, and I think it explains the entire gap between those two numbers.

A review arrives because a customer had a good week. You laid her floor, she loved it, her daughter asked her about it on the phone, and she typed four sentences into her phone while sitting in the driveway.

Nobody at your company logged into anything to make that happen. The work you did in her hallway wrote it for you.

None of that makes asking pointless. The way I ask a customer for a review is one sentence long and it still beats a poster by the register.

Tags never turn up that way, because no amount of anyone’s happiness produces one, and unless a person sits down deliberately and puts them in, that gray box stays gray forever.

So who was ever going to write them?

Verdict: holds up completely, and it explains the gap without excusing it.

2) “My web guy handles the technical side”

Sometimes he does. It depends entirely on the web guy, and on what he understood the job to be on the day he quoted it.

WordPress runs 39.1% of the flooring sites I opened, and a WordPress site will write these tags on its own, as long as one switch got turned on during the build.

Usually it didn’t get turned on, because nobody sitting in that room was thinking about a text message a year later.

So ask him. Not by email, on the telephone, and get him to paste your address into a chat with you while the two of you are still talking.

Verdict: half holds. It was someone’s job, and nobody ever agreed whose.

3) “We’re not really a social media business”

I’ve got sympathy with that one, right up until the moment I look at what your own trade actually does.

66.9% of these companies link a social profile from their site, a shade ahead of the 66% I get across every site I audit.

You’re already there, and you’re already posting the before and after shots, because your work photographs better than almost any trade I write for.

Those tags aren’t a social media thing anyway. They do their job inside a text message, inside an email preview, inside the group chat where a builder is passing your name to a project manager he owes a favor.

Verdict: doesn’t survive. You’re on social already, and the tags do their work in places that have nothing to do with it.

4) “Nobody has ever mentioned it”

Of course nobody has.

Your customer isn’t going to text you afterwards to report that your link looked bare when she forwarded it to her husband, and she hardly noticed it herself. If she did notice, she noticed it as a small feeling that this outfit might be a bit rough around the edges.

That feeling never comes back to you as feedback. It comes back as a quote nobody ever asks you for.

Verdict: true and completely useless. Silence isn’t evidence, it’s just silence.

What the two halves add up to

Weight my ten checks the way I always weight them and this trade lands on 73 out of 100, 19 of 47 on my industry table.

Middling. A middling score built out of one half of the job these owners own outright and another they’ve quietly walked away from.

I’ve stopped calling that a budget problem, because the reviews already prove these people care what a stranger thinks of them.

Those reviews still don’t fill a February on their own. The best rated shop in its city rang me about exactly that, and the reason turned out to be nowhere near the listing.

They care about it in the one place where they can see it, and the link preview happens somewhere they’ve never once looked.

Would you inspect a thing you didn’t know existed?

Do this tonight

Open a message to yourself. Paste your web address into it and hit send.

Wait a second or two for the preview to catch up, then look properly at what you just delivered.

A photograph, your name, a line about what you do? Good, someone did their job, and you can go to bed happy.

A blue string sitting over a gray box? Now you know what every recommendation you’ve ever earned looked like when it arrived at the other end.

Then try the same thing with a page nobody remembers building, your hardwood page or your commercial page, because those get forwarded around as well and those are the ones that get built and forgotten.

Flooring companies are what I build for, so I’ll say this with a straight face: it’s an afternoon of work on most sites, and I’ve never once been thanked for doing it.

If yours comes back gray and you’d rather not go hunting through your own code looking for the reason, send me the address and I’ll go through the whole thing for nothing.

But run the test yourself first. I want you to see it with your own eyes, because a thing you’ve watched happen gets fixed, and a thing you’ve merely read about doesn’t.