Two Things Your Indianapolis Customer Sees, and One She Never Will

A text an Indianapolis owner sent me in June, copied out with the typos left where they were:

“Hey Patrick. site is 4 yrs old, my brother in law built it, he swears its fine. is there a way to actually know”

I get some version of that on nearly every sales call I take. About thirty seconds of it, usually, right before the conversation swings round to price and parks there for good.

Thirty seconds buys you a shrug and a promise to look at it later. So, to the man who sent that: yes, there’s a way to know, and it comes down to three things I can check on your site from here.

Three checks, in the order your customer runs into them. She sees two of them. The third one she will never lay eyes on, and it might be the one that changes your year.

Could you answer for your own site right now, without opening a laptop? Most owners can’t, and the ones who can are usually wrong about at least one of the three.

I ran these same three checks over Dallas earlier this year, and that city finishes exactly one of the three.

The sentence you write before she’s heard of you

She types four words into her phone and gets back a screen of businesses that all look much the same to her.

She isn’t opening ten of them. She reads a line beside each name and rules most of them out inside a few seconds, without ever quite deciding that she’s doing it.

What she’s hunting for is the one detail that answers the thing she typed. Do you come out to her side of town, are you open on a Saturday, do you take the small jobs or only the big ones.

The meta description is the sentence stored on your page for exactly that moment. You get to write it, she’ll never know she read it, and most of the ones I open are either empty or a slogan about quality and service.

I put the cities in order on that check back in the spring, expecting this place to be middling, and Indianapolis came out 8 of 24 with 78.9% of its sites writing one against 77.9% everywhere I audited.

Good news, mostly. Writing one and writing a useful one are two different jobs, and my check can only see the first of them.

Mine said the name of my company and nothing else for about two years, which is the kind of confession I’d rather make here than on a call.

Go and read yours tonight. Would it have stopped you, if you were her?

And who wrote it, while we’re at it? On most of the sites I’m handed the answer is that a piece of software wrote it, by grabbing the first sentence it could find on the page and hoping.

The box she can type into

Now she’s on your page and she’s decided you’ll probably do.

It’s a Tuesday lunchtime, she’s at her desk, and there are four people within earshot of her chair. Ringing a stranger to explain her problem out loud is not happening in the next twenty minutes, and it might not happen this week.

So she looks for somewhere to type it instead. 27.6% of Indianapolis homepages have a form on them, which is about where everybody else lands too, at 28%.

What she sees when there isn’t one is a phone number, an address, and a decision she can put off until this evening. Evening never arrives. She’s cooking, the kids are shouting, and your name has left her head entirely.

The customer is gone and nothing about it registers on your end. No missed call, no voicemail, no bounced email. Nothing at all.

How many of those did you have last month? Neither of us can answer that, and it’s the most expensive question in this post.

A form is also the only one of the three that hands you something you can act on: a name, a number, and four lines about what she wants, sitting in your inbox at seven the next morning while she’s still thinking about it.

Assuming it survives your inbox. I spent years never asking what happened to those messages once they left the website, and one contractor was swiping mine away every morning between a bill and a renewal notice.

Be her for a minute on your own site, phone in hand, nothing you can say out loud. Where would she have typed it?

A missed call gives you a number and no idea what the person wanted, so you ring back cold and hope she picks up a strange number twice in one day. A form gives you her problem in her own words, which means the callback starts halfway through the conversation instead of at the beginning of it.

The one she never sees

Analytics. She sees nothing here, not a pixel of it, and she’s the entire reason it’s worth switching on.

It won’t tell you her name and it won’t tell you what she came for. It’ll tell you she showed up, that she showed up on a phone, and that she left from the page where your prices used to be.

Why she left is your job to work out, and people walk out of a website for a long list of ordinary reasons. The counter only ever hands you the page it happened on.

60.4% of the sites here run it, against 58% of everything I audited, and the city looks better on that check than on either of the other two.

Without it you’re allocating next year’s money based on a feeling about last year. I’ve watched owners cancel the thing that was quietly working and pour the savings into the thing that never worked once, and be completely certain while they did it.

I’ve also done it myself, more than once, which is how I know exactly how good that certainty feels while you’re standing in the middle of it. What did you cancel last year, and what were you going on when you decided?

You can’t argue with a busy month. You can’t argue with a slow one either, and both of them will happily explain themselves to you in whatever way suits your existing opinion.

Which page on your site is the busiest? Say it out loud before you go and look.

Most owners guess the homepage. On the sites I’ve had my hands inside, it’s just as often some page about one small service, built in an afternoon, written badly, forgotten by everyone and quietly doing all the work.

Which of the three I’d do first

The form, and it isn’t close.

It’s the only one of the three that turns a stranger into a name and a phone number while she still wants you, and it’s the only one of the three where this city sits under the national number.

The description second, because it’s a text box and about twenty minutes of thinking, and because the version you’ve got now is probably your company name repeated twice.

Analytics third, and third only because it changes nothing this month. It changes what you know in March, which turns out to matter more than either of the others once you’ve had it running a year.

If your website is four years old and your brother in law built it, I’d guess you’ve got two of the three. That’s what most of the sites I’m sent turn out to have, and it’s never the same two twice.

Now tell me I’m wrong

Some of you are already writing to me about the form, and a few of you are going to be right.

I made that argument for a living once. Six years of talking owners out of contact forms, five excuses I had ready, and exactly one of them survives.

If your customers are standing in three inches of water at midnight, they’re not filling in anything. They’re calling the first number they can tap, and a form would only slow them down.

My check never gets past the homepage, either. If your form sits one click deeper on a contact page, I counted you as a no, which is the sort of thing I’d want said out loud before anyone quotes my figures back at me.

Businesses around Indianapolis hire me for all kinds of reasons, and about half the time the first thing I tell them is that two of these three are already fine and they should stop worrying about the third one until spring.

So make the case. Which of the three doesn’t apply to your trade, and why doesn’t it?

If it’s a good argument I’ll take it, use it on my next call, and tell whoever’s on the other end where I got it. If you’d rather I just went and looked at your own site instead of debating it, send me the address and I’ll tell you which of the three you’re missing.

I’ve been wrong about a trade before. Twice this year, and both times it was an owner in a hurry who couldn’t be bothered to be polite about it.