The Contact Form Montreal Gets Right and Never Brags About

Every Montreal owner I visit keeps a notebook beside the phone, and three pages into yours sits a first name, a number with one digit you’re no longer sure about, and two words you wrote down fast enough that they only made sense at the time.

She called on Tuesday, while you had both hands full and another customer waiting.

You’ve been meaning to ring her back ever since. It’s Thursday now.

That notebook is the most valuable object in your building, and it’s held together with an elastic band.

The three questions I actually get asked

Owners ask me the same three things on almost every call I take, in almost the same order.

Is it fast. Does it look modern. Will it come up on Google.

Speed comes up first, and this city is in decent shape on it. The grade is the number Google hands back after loading your homepage on a pretend phone over a poor connection, and shifting it is a developer’s fortnight of re-cutting photographs one at a time and pulling out plugins nobody remembers installing.

Montreal averages 59 out of 100 there, a touch ahead of the 58 I get across every site I run the test on.

Modern is a taste question and I’ll happily argue about it for an hour. Nobody asks what a cheap quote leaves out either, and the writing is the first thing to fall off it.

Google is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on twenty things, half of which have nothing to do with the website at all.

None of those three is the question I’d ask if I were buying. When did anyone last ask you whether a customer could reach you without picking up a telephone?

The question nobody asks

I went looking for what Montreal does badly, and the best result of the lot, 5 of 24 among the cities I ranked, turned out to be the check I can almost never talk a client into caring about.

The box. The one on the front page with a name, an email address and a space to say what you want.

29.7% of the homepages I opened here have one, against 28% across everything I audited.

I don’t know why this town is ahead on it and I’m not going to invent a reason. My best guess is that a lot of owners here got sold something with a form already built into the template, and never switched it off.

Accidental or not, it’s the right thing to be holding.

What the box does that your phone can’t

The woman in your notebook rang during business hours because that’s when people ring.

Business hours are also when you’re busy, which is a problem nobody has ever solved with a better phone.

A form works the other way round. She types at twenty past nine at night, from the sofa, with the television on and her own day finally finished, and the message is sitting in your inbox before you’ve had breakfast.

That assumes it lands somewhere a person opens it. I went years without asking where a message goes after she taps send, and one worth four thousand dollars can be swiped away with the supplier flyers.

Look at what arrives with it. Her name spelled the way she spells it, a number typed by the person who owns the number, and a sentence about what she wants that you didn’t have to remember while holding a ladder.

Compare that against two words in biro and a digit you’re guessing at.

Of the jobs you won this year, how many started with a phone call and how many started with something a customer typed?

How many of the names in that notebook did you call back within the day? Be honest, because I’ve got a notebook too and mine is no better than yours.

And there’s the group you can’t count at all: the people who won’t telephone a stranger. They aren’t rare and they aren’t difficult customers, they simply belong to a generation that treats an unexpected phone call as slightly alarming.

They found you, they liked the look of you, and then they met a page with nowhere on it to type. So they went back to the search results and gave the job to whoever had a box.

Roofers ask me twice a year to move the box onto a tidy Contact page, and I say no every time, because I know what the clean version costs them.

The thing the box won’t tell you

It won’t tell you about her.

The form only knows about the people who filled it in, and it says nothing whatsoever about the far larger group who arrived, read two lines, and left without touching anything. Those are your bounces, and the reasons a page loses people that quickly are duller than anyone expects. They outnumber your typists every day of the week.

For that you need something quietly counting visitors in the background, and 58.9% of the sites here run one, a shade above the 58% I found nationally.

Turned on, it tells you that Tuesday evenings are busier than Saturday mornings, that most people land on one particular page you’d completely forgotten writing, and that the page you paid a designer to fuss over gets almost no traffic at all.

Without it you’re making next year’s decisions out of a feeling about last year. I’ve done that myself and been extremely confident while doing it.

Which page on your website is the busiest one? Say your answer out loud before you go and check, because the checking is the interesting part.

Where the stars fit into this

Reviews are the habit nearly everybody got right, 88.4% of the businesses I sampled here hold at least one, which lines up with the 88% I counted everywhere else.

Your stars are doing an enormous amount of work. They’re the reason she opened your website instead of the other one, and they’ve done their job the moment she taps through.

Then it’s the website’s turn, and the website has about ninety seconds. What does yours do with them?

She’s already decided she likes you. All she needs now is a way of saying so without dialing a number and explaining herself out loud to a stranger.

What one page can’t tell me

My crawler opens one page, the page a search would drop her on, and it stops there.

So a form living a click deeper on a contact page counted as a no from me. If that’s how yours is built, my number is unfair to you, and I’d rather say that plainly than let anyone quote the figure back at me without it. Where does yours sit, on the front page or one tap further in?

There are also trades where none of this applies. When your customer is standing in three inches of water at midnight, she is not filling in anything, and a form would only get in her way.

I work with businesses across Montreal and I’ve told at least a dozen of them to leave the form alone and make the phone number bigger instead.

But most of you aren’t in that trade, and you know perfectly well whether you are.

One question, and it’s yours to answer

So go and count the names in the notebook, the ones from this month, and hold that number in your head for a moment.

Now put a second number beside it. The people who wanted you badly enough to go looking, and then went quiet because there was nothing on the screen to type into.

No audit of mine can give you that second number, and neither can your elastic band. Which of the two do you think is the bigger one?