Dave’s Seattle Website Bought Him Nothing

You already know your website needs something doing to it.

If you run a business in Seattle you’ve known for about two years. It crosses your mind on a Sunday evening, you feel a little worse about it, and then you carry on with your week, because nobody has ever told you which part of it is the problem.

That was Dave, near enough, when he rang me in February. Dave isn’t his name and the details are moved around a bit, but the shape of it is exactly right.

The call

Four people, three vans, a yard north of the ship canal, and a website his brother in law built in 2019 for the cost of a decent dinner.

He’d decided it looked cheap. A competitor’s site had turned up in front of him that week and his own suddenly embarrassed him, so he wanted the whole thing knocked down and rebuilt with better photography.

He wasn’t wrong that everybody else has one. 87.8% of the businesses in my Seattle sample list a website, 4th of 24 among the cities I sampled, and Dave had been carrying his around like it was an achievement.

I asked him what the last five customers had said when they called. He couldn’t remember. I asked him how they’d found him.

He said Google, in the tone people use when they’ve never once wondered about it.

Your next caller can tell you exactly how she found you, for free, right up until the second you hang up. How many have you let go this month?

What I found when I opened it

The site was fine. That was the awkward part of the conversation.

It loaded quickly enough, the padlock was there in the address bar, the phone number was on every page, and it fitted a phone screen without any pinching or sideways scrolling.

Nothing about it was broken. Nothing about it was doing any work either.

There was nowhere on it to type, either, and that never bothered me at the time, because for six years I talked owners in this city out of contact forms.

Across the top of the homepage sat the company name in a script font, and underneath that, in smaller letters, the words Quality Service Since 2004.

Then three photographs of a family who have never met him, sitting in a kitchen he has never worked in, smiling at a laptop.

Then a paragraph about being family owned and customer focused, which described every one of his competitors just as well as it described him.

Every line up there passed a check and told a stranger nothing, which is the local specialty. Nearly every Seattle site carries the line Google prints above the link, and hardly any of them use it to say a thing.

Whose kitchen is sitting on the top of your homepage tonight, and has anybody in it ever paid you a dollar?

The reason a rebuild wasn’t going to help

Seattle isn’t special about that, either. Every city I count, put together, comes in at 83%, so the bar he thought he was clearing had been cleared by nearly every yard, shop and office on his street some years ago.

My Seattle sample runs to 5,198 businesses and 3,934 sites I could actually open, and if you want the same numbers I was reading, the explorer on that report will print this city with every rate and its own sample size the moment you set the city menu and leave the other one on all.

Owning a website around here stopped being a difference a long time ago. It’s a floor, and Dave was standing on it congratulating himself.

So what does a stranger get from yours that she couldn’t get from the four sitting around it?

The four things we changed

None of them was a rebuild. I never opened his theme and I never touched a color.

We wrote down what he actually does. The script font came off and the top of the page became the three jobs he wanted more of, in the words his customers use, plus the neighborhoods he’ll drive to without complaining.

That took an afternoon and a phone call, and it’s the change that did the most.

We threw out the stock photographs. He had four hundred pictures on his phone of work he’d finished, and eleven of them were good enough to use once I’d cropped them.

Nobody hires you because a model in a stock library is happy. People hire you because they can see a job like theirs, finished, in a house like theirs.

We wrote down the answers he gives away for free. How long a call out takes, what a rough figure looks like, why the cheap version fails in three years, what he needs you to move before he arrives.

He answers those questions out loud six times a week and had never once written any of them down. 39.5% of the sites I audited here publish anything at all, which tells you how unusual it is to bother.

We started asking for reviews. One text message, sent the evening of the job, with the link in it and nothing else.

What happened after

He rang me in November about something unrelated, and I asked.

He could name where his last four jobs came from, which he could not have done in February. Two people had quoted his own page back to him on the phone, one of them reading out a line about the neighborhoods.

His work didn’t double. I’m not going to tell you it did, and anyone who promises you that is selling something I don’t sell.

What changed is that his website stopped being a business card he was faintly ashamed of and started being the thing that answered questions while he was under a house.

What does yours do for you on a Tuesday afternoon, when both of your hands are busy and the phone is in the van?

I didn’t make it faster, either. This city averages 56 out of 100 on my phone speed test, 19 of 24 once I put the cities in order, and I left his exactly where it was, because none of his customers were leaving over half a second. People go back to the search results for reasons a stopwatch never catches.

What I’d do with your Sunday evening feeling

Open your own homepage and read the first screen out loud, the way a stranger would meet it.

Does it say what you do, in the words your customers say it in? Does it show your work rather than a photograph you bought? Does it answer the question you’re sick of answering on the phone?

If the answer to all three is no, you don’t need a rebuild any more than Dave did. You need an afternoon of typing and the pictures already on your phone.

A therapist asked me to price a rebuild for a different reason last year, and what was actually costing her the appointment sat nowhere near the part she wanted to pay me for.

That’s most of the work I actually do around here, and the invoice for it embarrasses me slightly next to the rebuilds people ask for.

Tell me why you’re different

Some of you are reading this thinking your line of work doesn’t play that way. That the customers are different, or the jobs are bigger, or nobody in your trade has ever been hired off a web page.

You might be right. I’ve been argued round before and I’ve changed how I work because of it.

So send me your address and your reason. I’ll open your site and my own numbers at the same time, and I’ll tell you honestly which of us the evidence is on.