Your Flooring Website Gets Forwarded. What Shows Up?

I won’t sell anyone a monthly fee for work they can’t see.

Plenty of people in my line do exactly that, and some of them are doing honest work behind the invoice. I’ve just never worked out how to hand a flooring contractor a bill for a month of improvements he has no way of checking on.

Solar owners put the same worry to me at the end of a call, usually as a question about what happens to the site the day they fire me.

So I don’t. And because I don’t, the same question turns up on nearly every sales call I take, usually from the quiet one in the room who has been letting his brother do the talking.

“Does any of this stuff actually matter, or is it just something you people sell?”

Fair question, and I’ve never once answered it properly. I get about thirty seconds before the conversation moves along to something else, and the honest answer splits in two.

One half is housekeeping your customer will never feel. The other half is a set of tags that decide what your address turns into the moment it gets forwarded, and 71.5% of flooring sites carry them, against 75.7% of everything else I audit, which puts this trade 39 of 47.

Most of it she will never feel

A fair chunk of what gets sold as technical work is housekeeping. It’s real, it’s worth doing once, and the woman deciding whether to call you will never feel a single bit of it.

Your code can be tidy in ways that nobody alive is ever going to thank you for. I do that work and I bill for it once, but I don’t pretend it’s the reason her call comes in on a Tuesday.

So when a stranger phones your office and blames your quiet week on something invisible, ask him which invisible thing he means, and see how specific he gets.

A therapist asked me to price a rebuild on exactly that reasoning, and I wouldn’t quote it, because her problem was sitting somewhere else.

Do you know which parts of your website were built for her, and which were built for a machine?

One piece of it she does see

Something on that same list isn’t technical at all. It’s a photograph and one line of writing, and she meets it before she has ever met your website.

Picture a kitchen at nine at night. She has spent an hour on her phone looking at floors and she has landed on yours.

She doesn’t call. She copies your address, sends it upstairs to her husband, and adds three words on top of it. “These guys?”

His phone buzzes on the nightstand, and whatever arrives on that screen in the next second is your entire pitch to him. You don’t get a second one.

Open Graph tags decide what he gets. Write them and a floor appears on his screen. Leave them out and he gets your address typed across the message as plain characters, which tells him nothing at all that he didn’t already have.

He isn’t going to tap it. He’s in bed, he’s got a book, and he types “sure” back because there’s nothing there worth having an opinion about.

Your whole appearance in the conversation that decided it, and it was a line of gray text.

How many of those conversations happened about you last month, in rooms you were never in?

Your trade runs on the forward

Think for a moment about where your work honestly comes from, and be honest with yourself about the answer.

A builder gives your name to a homeowner. A woman texts her sister the address of the shop where she got the oak. A designer drops your page into an email with two other options sitting underneath it.

None of those people are searching for you. They’re arriving with a recommendation already attached to them, which is the warmest kind of visitor you’re ever going to get.

And the only thing you hand them in that moment is the one item on the technical list you’ve never once seen with your own eyes.

Those tags cost nothing and take an afternoon, which is why that one gap bothers me more than anything else I found in the trade.

”My customers are older, they don’t do that”

I hear this one a lot, and it’s wrong in a way that quietly costs a shop real money.

The woman paying for the floor is often being helped by a daughter who does everything on a phone. She’s the one collecting the three quotes, she’s the one sending them into the family group chat, and she’s the one who forms an opinion about you before her mother has seen anything.

So your link gets forwarded whether your customer is nineteen or eighty. The forwarding is being done by someone else on her behalf.

That’s one of four excuses I get for a blank link preview, and I’ve ranked all four of them, best first.

Which of those two people do you think is going to make the shortlist?

Why nobody catches this

Nobody skips it deliberately. Those tags live in a part of the page no owner has ever opened, and they make no noise whatsoever when they are absent.

WordPress runs 39.1% of the flooring sites I opened, and it will fill them in on its own once someone tells it to. On the sites I open, nobody ever told it to.

Your builder isn’t lazy, either. He handed over a site that worked, and every part of the page a human being could look at was correct on the day he finished.

This part isn’t on the page a human being looks at. It only exists in the second where your address is traveling between two people, and nobody has ever been standing there to watch it happen.

2,457 flooring businesses went into my sample across 24 markets, and 1,835 of them had a site I could open and check. Nothing else I checked in this trade came out as weak as this.

What it looks like when it’s right

You can see it done properly without hiring anybody at all. Take the address of any flooring company whose website you admire, paste it into a message to yourself, and watch what turns up.

The good ones send a room. A finished floor, in daylight, with the company name sitting underneath it and a line saying which town they work in.

The flooring sites I keep as examples all pass that test, because I check that before I’ll put a single one of them in there.

Then do the same thing with your own address, and with your hardwood page, and with whichever page you send to commercial clients.

So does the invisible stuff matter?

Most of it, not to her. One piece of it is the only version of your business that two people ever look at together while they are deciding about you, and it costs one afternoon of someone’s time.

I can’t tell you what yours looks like from where I’m sitting. You can find out in under a minute, and flooring is the trade I build for, so I’d far rather you went and found out for yourself than took my word for any of it.

Send your own address to one person tonight and watch what lands on their screen.

Then answer the thing nobody ever says out loud on those sales calls. If a stranger is only ever going to see one piece of your website, which piece are you willing to let it be?