Guide
What a buyer decides about your website before they scroll
Somebody lands on your site from a search on their phone, at the point in the day when they have decided to deal with the thing. They are not reading. They are running four questions in a few seconds, in a fixed order, and if any of them fails they go back to the results page and try the next one. None of the four are about how good you are at your job. This is the written companion to our website test, which scores a page against exactly these judgements.
The four questions, in order
The order matters more than the list, because a failure early makes everything after it irrelevant. A beautiful proof section does nothing for a visitor who already decided you do not do their kind of work.
- Is this the right kind of business? Answered by the first heading, in about a second. Not your name, what you do, and for local work, where. This is the single most common failure and it is the most expensive.
- Is it real and still trading? Answered by peripheral vision, not by reading: a phone number, an address, hours, recent-looking dates. A stale copyright year reads as a closed business faster than any amount of good copy repairs.
- Can I do the thing I came to do? One obvious action. Call, book, or ask. If the only route is a contact page two clicks away, a meaningful share of people never take it.
- Is there any reason to pick this one? Only reached if the first three passed. This is where reviews, named clients and specifics earn their place, and it is the only question most websites are actually written to answer.
Why the heading does most of the work
If you change one thing after reading this, change the first line of your homepage.
The most common headline on a local business website is the business name, sometimes with a tagline underneath. To the owner it is obvious what the business does. To a stranger who arrived from a search, it is a name they have never heard, attached to nothing.
- Name the trade in the reader's words. What they typed, not what your industry calls itself.
- Name the place, if you serve one. A local visitor is checking whether you cover them before anything else.
- Add the qualifier that filters. Same day, by appointment, commercial only, no callout charge. Filtering out the wrong customers is a feature, not a loss.
- Keep it a sentence a person would say. If you would not say it to someone at a counter, it is not a heading, it is a slogan.
| What the heading says | What the visitor learns | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Beaulieu and Sons | A name, and nothing else | Back to the search results |
| Quality service since 1994 | This could be any business in any trade | Back to the search results |
| Emergency plumbers in Laval, same day | The trade, the place, the urgency, all at once | They look for the phone number |
The phone number is a bigger deal than it looks
For a local business, the phone number is not contact information. It is the conversion button, and it fails in three specific ways that are all invisible to the owner, because the owner already knows the number.
It is in an image. Common on older sites and on anything designed as a graphic. It cannot be tapped, cannot be copied, cannot be read by a search engine, and cannot be enlarged by someone who needs to.
It is text but not a link. On a phone, that means the visitor has to memorise it, leave, open the dialler and type it. Every one of those steps loses people, and the fix is a single attribute.
It only appears in the footer. Which means it exists for people who already decided, and is invisible to everyone still deciding.
What actually counts as proof
Question four is where most of the effort goes, and most of that effort goes into the wrong things. Proof is anything a stranger cannot dismiss as something you wrote about yourself.
- Counts: reviews with names attached, named clients, photographs of your own work, a real address, a person's face, specifics about jobs you have done.
- Does not count: "trusted by hundreds", stock photography of an office nobody works in, badges nobody recognises, adjectives about your own quality.
- Counts more than people expect: saying who you are not for. A business that turns work down reads as a business with enough work, and it is the fastest credibility you can buy with a sentence.
- The order matters here too: two specific reviews beat twenty generic ones, because the specific ones cannot have been written by you.
The nine checks, and why those nine
Our website test scores a page out of 100 across nine fixed rules. They are deliberately mechanical: a rule gives the same page the same score every time, and there is nothing for a model to invent. They map onto the four questions above.
| The check | The buyer question behind it |
|---|---|
| The first screen says what you do | Is this the right kind of business |
| The phone number is text, not a picture | Is this real, and can I act on it |
| The phone number is tappable on a phone | Can I do the thing I came to do |
| There is an obvious way to book or ask | Can I do the thing I came to do |
| Getting in touch takes no hunting | Can I do the thing I came to do |
| A real business is visible behind the site | Is it real and still trading |
| Nothing on the page looks abandoned | Is it real and still trading |
| Someone other than you vouches for you | Is there a reason to pick this one |
| The page is not heavy before it starts | Do I get to judge any of this before I give up |
How to run this on your own site properly
Not by looking at it. You cannot see your own site cold, because you know what it says.
- Score it mechanically first. Run the website test and fix everything it fails. That is the floor, and it is all fixable in an afternoon.
- Then get a real four seconds. Show the homepage to someone who does not know the business, on a phone, for four seconds. Take it away and ask them what the business does and where. Their answer is your heading's real score.
- Do it on a phone, on data, not on your desk. Most local traffic is mobile and often on a poor connection. A page that is fine on a laptop can fail question one entirely on a phone because the heading sits below a full-screen image.
- Fix in the order of the four questions. Heading first, then the evidence you are real, then the action, then the proof. Fixing question four while question one fails changes nothing.