Where Raleigh Websites Lose the Lead

I once spent an entire afternoon on a single sentence for my own website, one that never actually appears anywhere on the website. Rewrote it four times, read it out loud, felt very good about myself.

A week later an owner in Raleigh emailed me to ask where the contact form on my homepage had gone.

It had never been there at all. I do this for a living.

So when I tell you that Raleigh is good at getting found and thin at getting called, understand that I am describing a hole I fell straight into myself, on my own site, while writing about everybody else’s.

She types your trade into her phone while the kettle boils. Start there and follow her.

Step one: she has to find you

The sentence I spent that afternoon on is called the meta description, and it is the card taped inside your shop window.

The sign over the door carries your name. The card is the part that says what you actually do and whether it is worth crossing the road for.

Google says search snippets come mostly from the page content, though it uses your description whenever that gives people a more accurate summary.

79.8% of Raleigh sites bother to write one, against 77.9% nationally.

Nobody enjoys that job, which is why Raleigh landing 4th of 24 on the dullest chore in the entire audit still surprises me a little.

When did you last read your own? I still can’t look at mine without wincing, and I had a whole afternoon to get it right.

The rest of the getting found work looks healthy too. 40.2% publish a blog and 68.3% link out to their social profiles, and both of those beat most of the cities I lined up alongside this one.

So she finds you. Your listing surfaces with a description you sat down and wrote, and she taps it.

Now what?

Step two: she has to be able to ask you something

28.6% of Raleigh homepages have a contact form on them, which edges past the 28% I found nationally.

Above average is the part that bothers me, because ninth of twenty-four cities is a decent finish in a race where most of the field has left the customer nowhere to type her name.

A form is the bell on the counter. She is standing there with her wallet already out. Where is the bell?

What that costs, counted properly

A woman finds you at nine at night with water spreading slowly across her garage floor. She is on the sofa, her kids are asleep upstairs, and your phone number is sitting right there on the screen in front of her.

She doesn’t ring it. Calling a stranger at nine at night to describe a problem she has no words for is more than she can face today, and there is no box on your page where she can type “water everywhere, please call me in the morning.”

So she goes back to the search results and taps the next name down the list.

That is one customer. You didn’t lose her on price and you didn’t lose her on reviews, you lost her because there was nowhere on the page to leave her name.

Now count the ones you never hear about. How many were there last month? You can’t know, and a gap that costs you nothing you can actually see is the hardest kind in the world to care about.

Before you email me about phone numbers

I know what some of you are about to tell me, and you are not wrong about it.

Plenty of trades live on the phone and don’t want form fills at all. A tappable number does the job, and for a plumber at 11pm on a Sunday it does the job considerably better than a form ever could.

My audit only looks at your homepage, as well. Put a beautiful form on your contact page and my check will never see it, so treat that number as a floor rather than a verdict on the city.

One argument survives all of that. A form works at eleven at night, it works for the customer who quietly hates calling strangers, and it leaves you a written record with a name and a phone number attached to it.

Would you rather have a missed call or an email address?

Step three: you have to know it happened

Analytics is the counter that clicks by the door. It sells nothing and greets nobody, it just keeps a tally, and a tally is the difference between knowing your Tuesdays are dead and only suspecting it.

Analytics runs on 58.3% of Raleigh sites, dead level with the national 58%.

Level with everybody else still leaves an enormous number of shops in this city trading away with the door counter switched off.

Dentists own the other half of this problem. They count visitors better than any trade I check and still leave almost nobody a box to type in.

Would you run your place that way, with the till unplugged as well? For a whole month? Plenty of websites around here have been operating exactly like that for years, and their owners are deciding where the advertising money goes based on a feeling.

It is also the only way you ever discover that people are starting your form and quietly giving up halfway through it.

Installed isn’t the same as usable, mind you. I asked around Washington DC whether anyone in the building could open the reports, and that is usually where it comes apart.

The shape of the problem

All three of those checks live on the same homepage, belong to the same owner, and were built by the same web designer inside the same single afternoon of work. You can lay them out side by side yourself by picking Raleigh off the city list in the explorer on the report and leaving the industry box alone, which prints every rate with its own sample size beside it, including the dozen I left out of this post to stop it turning into a spreadsheet.

The job facing Google got done. The job facing a customer with her wallet already out did not.

My theory is boring. Writing a meta description is a text box in a plugin, while adding a form means choosing a tool, wiring it up to an email address, and testing the thing twice before you dare trust it.

One is five minutes. The other is an errand, and an errand without a deadline is a thing that never happens, which is why I keep finding this same gap in cities that are otherwise doing fine.

Errands like that make up the maintenance list nobody hands a new owner, and not one of them arrives with a due date on it.

Which of the three do you think your own homepage flunks? I have a guess, and it is not the meta description.

What a form actually buys you

A phone call happens on your customer’s schedule and on her nerve, meaning she has to be free, willing to talk to a stranger, and ready to explain her problem out loud to a person she has never met.

A form asks for none of that courage. She types four lines while sitting in a waiting room, and you answer at seven the next morning with her name and her number already in front of you.

The follow up is where the money hides. A missed call gives you a number and nothing else, while a filled in form hands you a name, a problem, and a written record you can pass to whoever handles your quotes.

How many of last month’s missed calls did you actually ring back? Be honest with yourself on that one.

The Raleigh owners who hire me hardly ever need to be found better than they already are. They need somewhere for a stranger to leave a name and a number without having to pick up the phone.

One thing tonight

Here is the dare, and it takes about a minute.

Open your own homepage on your phone and try to hire yourself. Not look at it, hire yourself. Get from the top of the page to a box where you can type your name and what you need, and count how many taps it takes you to get there.

Do it outside, off wifi. This city builds solid websites and then loses them the moment a customer opens one on a phone.

If you can’t get there at all, you already know what the woman on the sofa did next.

If you would sooner I ran it for you, my free website audit ends with a list of every place I got stuck.