The Best-Reviewed Flooring Shop in Town, and a Quiet Phone

My wife asked me to find someone to redo the floors in our place, and because I build websites for a living, I naturally ignored every website in the search results and picked the shop with the most stars.

Four minutes, start to finish.

A decade of telling people their website matters, and I hired a flooring contractor off a star rating and one photograph of a staircase.

So when I tell you this trade is winning the review column, understand that I’m one of the people handing them the win.

96.1% of flooring companies hold at least one Google review, which puts them 6 of 47 among the trades I check, against 88% of the businesses in my sample.

Your customers like you enough to leave the typical shop 78 reviews at 4.6 stars, and they’ve gone out of their way to say so somewhere a stranger can read it.

When did you last sit down and read what yours wrote about you? Not the star number at the top of the box. The sentences underneath it.

Which brings me to the shop I actually want to tell you about.

Fairview Flooring, in February

Two brothers, a showroom on a busy road with nowhere to park, and a truck that was booked solid every summer and completely dead every winter.

They’d been at it since 2009, and their listing was the best one in their city. I checked the others properly before I said that to them. Nobody was close.

The phone stayed quiet anyway.

The older brother had a theory, which was that Google had done something to them. He’d read an article about it.

What I found when I looked

I start these the same way every time, by pretending to be the customer instead of the contractor.

So I searched what she’d search, their listing came up with the stars and everything, and I tapped through to the website exactly the way she would.

What loaded was a page built once, around 2015, and touched maybe twice since.

A slideshow of stock photography. Not a single floor either brother had ever laid in his life. A phone number printed inside an image, which meant no thumb on earth could dial it.

Nowhere on that first screen could a stranger type her name and say what she wanted. Only 30.7% of flooring homepages give her that, a shade above the 28% I find everywhere else, so the brothers had plenty of company in their misery.

And nothing was keeping score. They had no analytics running, meaning nobody in that building could answer the simplest question I asked them, which was how many people had looked at the page last month. 55.8% of this trade runs it against 58% of everything I audit.

Their reviews, meanwhile, were sitting on their Google Business Profile, which is the free listing Google assembles for a business and shows beside a map.

That listing was doing every last bit of the selling.

Google hadn’t done anything to them. Google had done exactly what it’s supposed to do, and handed a ready customer over to a page that couldn’t finish the job.

Have you tried that on your own place lately? Search the thing she would search, tap your own listing, and let the site load on a phone you are holding in one hand in a parking lot.

Plenty of decent websites come apart right there. Raleigh builds better ones than most cities I audit and still slips in that parking lot.

The three things we changed

None of them was clever, and I want to be honest about that. I’ve sold an owner the expensive fix before she needed the cheap one, and a salon owner paid me for a rebuild that was never her problem.

1. We put the reviews onto the site. Not a badge in the footer, but the actual sentences customers had written, near the top of the page, with their names underneath.

2. We put the brothers’ own work on it. Photographs of floors they’d laid, in houses in their own town, with the streets named in the captions.

3. We gave her a way to start without calling. A box on the first screen, four fields, landing on both of their phones at once.

Which of those three would you have started with? I’d have put my money on the photographs, and I’d have been wrong, because the box on the first screen was the one that changed their week.

None of the work that makes a site easy to use is more glamorous than that, whatever a designer tells you.

Then they started asking on purpose. The older brother now hands over a card at the end of every job with a link that drops the customer straight into the review box printed across the front of it.

What happened afterwards

The phone didn’t explode. I want to be careful here, because I’ve read enough of these stories that finish with a number I don’t believe.

What happened was smaller than that, and better.

Quotes began arriving in writing, late at night, from people who were never going to call a stranger up to talk about a floor.

By May the younger brother could tell me where a job had come from without having to guess.

Could you? Most owners I ask can name their last two jobs and then start reaching for the ceiling.

And February finally got an explanation. Their quiet season was never Google. Nobody in that town was being reminded they existed between November and March, and now the brothers had a page worth sending someone to. When a customer forwards it to her husband, something decent shows up in the message.

None of what I’ve told you about this trade came out of my head, either. Pick flooring companies off the industry list in the explorer on my report, leave the city box alone, and it prints every check with the number of sites sitting behind it, including a dozen I’ve left out of this story to keep it a story rather than a pile of numbers.

Where the trade really stands

Add my ten checks up and flooring lands on 73 out of 100 on my industry table.

Fair enough for a business that does the human half beautifully and hands everything else to whoever built the site and then walked away from it.

The stars are real. The stars were always real, and I’ve never once met a flooring crew that earned them by accident.

What the brothers had was a listing doing the entire job of a website, and a website doing nothing whatsoever alongside it.

Your listing might be carrying your business the same way, and you’d have no way of noticing from where you’re standing.

Does that sound like anybody you know?

Who this was not written for

Not the shop with two reviews and a listing nobody has touched since 2020. That’s a different post and a harder one, and I’d start you somewhere else entirely.

Is your calendar already full through October, with a waiting list stacked up behind it? Then close the tab and go and lay a floor, because none of this is your problem this year.

I wrote this for the brothers, and for everyone in the same position: voted the best in town by the only judges who count, and still losing work to a competitor with worse floors and a better website. If that’s you, send me your address and I’ll go through it for nothing, then tell you which of Fairview’s three fixes would move the most for you.

Flooring is a trade I build for on purpose, so I’ll be biased, and I’ll also be specific. If your site turns out to be fine, I’ll say so and let you get back to your day.

And if your phone rings anyway, off two reviews and a website from 2011? None of this was aimed at you. Enjoy the luck, because it holds right up until the day it doesn’t.