The Footer Is Not the Hard Part of a Pest Control Website
63.1% of pest control websites link out to a social profile, the lowest this trade lands on anything I check. Four habits the ones who get it right have in common.
You wrote today’s date inside a bait station lid this morning, in Sharpie, with your initials after it.
Then you snapped the lid shut, walked around the side of the house, and did the same thing at the next one, because that’s how a pest control route goes and because the guy who covers for you in August has to be able to read it.
Nobody else will ever look at those initials.
You keep records for a living. Product, rate, time on site, all of it written down in case someone asks you about it two summers from now.
So it gets me every time, where the record stops. Why does the one place a stranger looks end up being the one place nothing gets written down?
63.1% of the pest control websites I audited link out to at least one social profile, 29 of 47 once I ranked the trades, and no other check I run puts this trade that far down.
My check is blunt. Does the site point at an account on a social network, yes or no. I don’t care which network it is, and I don’t care how many followers are waiting on the other end of it.
Nobody clicks those icons anyway, owners tell me. Indianapolis links them more than almost any city I check, and I still hear it every second week.
Landing under the 66% I get across every trade I count costs you nothing you can feel on a Tuesday, and a habit that never sends you a bill is a habit that gets to stay.
It isn’t a story about bad websites either. Pest control comes out at 76 out of 100 overall, 4 of 47 on my industry table, which is the top end of everything I’ve got.
So I went the other way and spent an evening with the pest control sites I keep going back to, the ones that do link out, looking for what they had in common.
Four things kept turning up, and not one of them is a design decision.
1) The link sits in the template
On the good ones the row of icons is built into the footer, which means it turns up on the carpenter ant page, the wasp page and the page listing the towns you cover.
On the rest it’s on Contact, and nowhere else.
That sounds like nothing until you think about how she got there in the first place. She searched a bug and a town, landed halfway down your bed bug page, read the part she needed and left from that same page without ever going near your menu.
Whoever holds your login can move those icons into the footer this week, on an ordinary afternoon, for the price of an email asking them to. It isn’t a project.
When did you last scroll to the bottom of your own website on your own phone?
2) One live account, and the dead ones come off
The best sites I opened link the account they actually use, and usually there’s only one of it.
Everyone else links four, and three of those stopped in a year you’d have to sit and think about.
I still open sites with an icon pointing at a profile whose last post announced a phone number the company doesn’t answer anymore. A customer who taps that has learned something about you that you never meant to tell her, and she can’t unlearn it on the way back.
An empty profile is worse than no icon at all. Taking the dead ones off is a ten minute job, and it’s free.
It belongs on the short list of jobs a site needs after launch, sitting next to the opening hours nobody has touched since 2019.
Could you name, right now, every account your website points at? I’ve asked that on sales calls for years and the honest answer is usually a laugh.
3) The photo has an owner
None of the good ones are “doing social media”. Someone on the crew has one small job, and the job is the photograph.
The nest before it comes down. The sub-floor once the boards are up. The raccoon in the trap, from far enough back that it looks like a job rather than a trophy.
It goes up to one account at the end of the day, from the truck, the same way the paperwork goes anywhere.
Who on your crew already has fifty of those photos sitting on their phone? Because I promise you one of them does, and nobody has ever asked him for them.
And you’re already good at asking people for things. 94.6% of the pest control businesses I looked at hold at least one Google review, so getting a customer to act on your behalf is clearly not your weak spot.
The writing habit is there too. 47.4% of this trade publishes a blog, 6 of the 47 trades I checked, which is more of you than most of the trades I’d have bet were wordier.
The raw material exists, in other words. It just never gets pointed at from the one page a stranger actually lands on.
4) The name matches the truck
The good profiles are named the same thing the truck is named and the same thing the website is named, which sounds too obvious to write down until you go looking.
I watched a woman scroll a pest control Facebook page for about fifteen seconds and then close it, because the page sat under the owner’s own name from back before he had staff, and she couldn’t tell whether it belonged to the company she’d just phoned.
She didn’t complain. She called the next one.
Does the name on your page match the lettering on the door? If it still carries the one you used back when it was you and a single truck, change it tonight. Nothing breaks, and nobody gets an email about it.
What she’s doing on that page anyway
The part I think gets missed is what she wants from the tap. She isn’t going there to admire your brand.
She’s checking whether you’ve seen her problem before.
There’s a wasp nest over her back door and she’s been ducking under it for four days, so what she’s hunting for is a photograph of a wasp nest over someone else’s back door, gone, taken by you, last summer.
Proof of the job, not personality.
Wineries link the feed better than any trade I audit and still leave the proof three screens down, which is the same miss wearing a nicer label.
That errand is unglamorous enough that the follower count stops mattering to anybody except the person selling you a social media package. An account with eighty followers and forty photographs of finished jobs settles her question better than a professionally managed page with a thousand followers and nothing on it but seasonal promotions.
And when the link isn’t there, she doesn’t hunt for it. She goes back to the results and taps the next company along, the one that put the icons in the footer.
You never hear about it.
Does that sound like an exaggeration? It did to me, until I sat beside enough people while they picked someone.
The promise, and it’s a small one
Do the four and nothing dramatic happens. Your phone doesn’t ring off the hook on Thursday and your ranking doesn’t move.
What changes is smaller than that. The next person who finds your Facebook page at ten at night can get from it to your booking page in one tap, and the next person who lands on your bed bug page can see that you were in an attic three streets over last week.
Two doors instead of one. That’s it, and I think it’s worth an evening.
If you’d rather I look first, send me your address and I’ll run the same audit I ran on every site in this trade, then tell you which of the four you’re missing. It’s usually the first one, and it’s usually fixed before the weekend.
