Pest Control Has One Line Done and Three Things Left
Pest control writes the summary a search result shows on 86.8% of its sites, 3 of 47 trades when I lined them up. So the free part is finished. Where I would spend a small budget next, in order, and the one job I would leave alone.
Eleven at night, in a kitchen, with the light over the stove still on.
Nobody goes looking for a pest control company at a decent hour of the day.
She’s standing on a dining chair in her socks with her phone held up over her head, taking a picture of a corner of the ceiling she’d rather not be looking at.
The picture comes out blurred, so she takes another one, and that one is blurred too.
Then she gets down, sits on the chair with her feet up off the floor, and searches.
She doesn’t type your name, because she doesn’t know your name. She types the bug and the town she lives in.
Four blue links come back, and under each one there are a couple of lines of small print. She reads three of those before her thumb goes anywhere at all.
Each one is a meta description, and each one was either written on purpose by the business or stitched together by Google out of whatever it could find on the page.
What happens after her thumb lands is the part I want to talk about, not that little summary, which your trade writes on 86.8% of the sites I audited and finishes 3 of 47 on when I rank the trades against each other.
So the cheapest job on my list is already done, and done better here than in almost any trade I count.
Which leaves the question I get on nearly every call. If there’s a bit of money and not much of it, where does it go?
In this order. It isn’t a philosophy, it’s the sequence I work in when I build a pest control site, and I’ll finish with the job I’d leave alone, because that part saves more than the other three cost.
First: the phone in her hand
79.2% of these sites pass Google’s basic mobile checks, which reads like a fine number right up until you remember she’s balanced on a dining chair.
That check was never the finish line anyway, and Calgary clears it at the national rate while its pages still keep people waiting.
Failing is rarely dramatic. The type comes out too small, the buttons sit close enough together that her thumb catches the wrong one, or the header eats the top half of the screen and shoves your phone number down past where she’ll look.
Not one of those is a styling decision anybody debated. They’re the ordinary business of how a stranger uses a page, and every one of them gets broken by accident rather than on purpose.
So: number at the top and tappable, one line naming the towns you cover, and a first screen that says the name of the bug she typed.
That’s an afternoon for whoever holds your login. Not a rebuild, not a redesign, and not a conversation about colors.
I’ve handed an owner his own phone in his own yard and watched him scroll past his own number twice looking for it. He wasn’t embarrassed and I wouldn’t want him to be, because he’d never once been the customer on his own website.
When did you last open your own site on your own phone, standing up, in a hurry, the way she did?
Second: a page for the bug, not a list of them
She searched one pest. Not “pest control services”, and not your company name.
And most of the sites I open in this trade answer her with a single services page carrying eleven pests on it as bullet points, one line each, all of them equally important and none of them hers.
The ones getting that call have a page for the pest. What it costs to guess wrong about it, how fast you can be there, what you’ll do when you arrive, and a photograph of the real thing rather than a stock image of an ant the size of a dog.
42.7% of these homepages carry a contact form, which is one of the highest shares I found in any trade, so the box for her to type into is usually sitting right there. She just has nothing worth reading on the way to it.
And one line on that page beats every clever thing a copywriter could sell you: say what happens if she sends the form at eleven at night. Morning, first thing, or Monday. Whichever it is, saying it is worth more than not saying it, because the silence gets read as Monday anyway.
Write the pest you get called about most first, and let the other ten wait until you’ve seen whether the first one works.
Which one would that be for you, honestly? Not the one you’d like to be known for, the one that fills the calendar in July.
I’d rather build one page that answers her properly than eleven that each get a sentence and a stock photo.
Third: find out which page did it
Third, and only third, work out which of those pages pays for itself, because 64.1% of these sites run analytics and everyone else is guessing which bug brought the call in. You shouldn’t take my word for that one any more than I’d take yours, so set the industry box in the explorer on my report to Pest Control, leave the city box on every city, and the card that comes back prints every check with the number of sites standing behind it.
A rate with no sample size under it is a rumor with a decimal point, which is why I built the thing that way.
What I want out of it is nothing fancy. Which pages people arrive on, which ones they leave from, and whether the bed bug page you paid for last spring has been read by anyone at all since June.
Do you know which page brought you your last five jobs? I’ve asked owners that in the middle of a quote and watched the room go quiet.
What I’d leave alone
The way it looks.
Pest control lands at 76 out of 100 across the ten checks I run, near the top of the trades I graded, and your trade does not have an ugly website problem. It has a “she couldn’t find the phone number” problem, which costs a great deal less to put right.
I get sent a lot of quotes for a fresh design, usually the third or fourth one the owner has collected. They’re rarely dishonest. They’re just answering a question nobody asked.
The icons at the bottom of the page can wait as well. This trade links fewer social profiles than it does anything else I check, and I still wouldn’t put that ahead of the three jobs above.
If a designer looks at your site and leads with the logo, ask what they’d do about the first screen on a phone instead, and listen for whether the answer has any detail in it.
Would you re-badge the truck before you fixed the sprayer?
Go and look tonight
So here’s the dare, and it costs you four minutes after the trucks are in.
Pick the pest you get called about most, search it with your own town, on your own phone rather than the office computer. Scroll until you find yourself, and read your two lines the way she read hers, standing on a chair with something moving in the ceiling.
Then tap your own link and count out loud until you can see a phone number you could press.
If you get past four, you already know where the money goes, and you didn’t need me to tell you.
