Contractors & trades
Nobody hires a contractor from one website. They get three names, open three sites, and decide which two to call. Your site isn't trying to close the job — it's trying to survive that comparison, and most contractor sites lose it in the first fifteen seconds.
Where it goes wrong
A homeowner opening your site is asking three things, in this order: are you real, do you do my specific job, and what happens if it goes wrong? Most contractor sites answer none of them above the fold, and a surprising number never answer them at all.
The most common failure is the least obvious: a company that does five trades with one page describing all of them. Somebody searching for a bathroom remodel doesn't want a paragraph about your commitment to quality that also mentions bathrooms. They want a page about bathrooms — and so does the search engine deciding which result to show them.
The second most common is stock photography. A kitchen that's not yours, on a site selling your workmanship, is a strange thing to lead with and homeowners notice more than people think. Your worst real photo outperforms the best stock one.
What works instead
None of these are design decisions. They're structural, which is why redesigns that only change how a site looks rarely change how it performs.
License number, bonded and insured status, on every service page and not just in the footer. In a trade where the first question is whether the contractor is legitimate, that is not fine print — it's the answer to question one.
One page per thing you actually sell, each written to its own job. It matches how people search and it gives you somewhere specific to send a lead. A single "Services" page trying to rank for six trades ranks for none of them.
Surprise costs, permit hassle, and subcontractors passing blame. These are what homeowners are actually afraid of. Naming them on the page is disarming precisely because almost nobody does it.
Reviews pulled from Google with the source attached, not testimonials retyped into the design. Real project photos with the town named. Anything a visitor could verify is worth more than anything they have to take on faith.
Positioning
Small crews tend to apologize for being small. A remodeler I built for could only run one job at a time, and the instinct was to keep quiet about it. We did the opposite and made it the central promise on every page: your job is the only job, every day, until it is finished.
Framed as capacity, it's a limitation. Framed as attention, it's the single thing a homeowner most wants and the large outfit down the road can't honestly claim. Nothing about the business changed — only whether the website said it out loud.
Most contractors have one of these. It's usually the thing you've been treating as a weakness.
The work
Builds in this sector, each written up in full.
Modern Home Remodeling — Residential remodeling, Phoenix. A licensed remodeler selling five trades from a website that described none of them. It had three pages and 843 words of content, with no page for kitchens, bathrooms, additions, outdoor living or windows. The rebuild added nine pages and about 4,900 words: a services hub, a page per trade, and rewritten About and Contact pages. The full case study is here, including the parts that aren't finished yet.
Manufab — Metal fabrication and powder coating. A licensed remodeler selling five trades from a website that described none of them. It had three pages and 843 words of content, with no page for kitchens, bathrooms, additions, outdoor living or windows. The rebuild added nine pages and about 4,900 words: a services hub, a page per trade, and rewritten About and Contact pages. The full case study is here, including the parts that aren't finished yet.
Straight answers
For anything you genuinely want more of, yes. If you do a trade twice a year and would rather not do it at all, leave it as a line on the services page. Pages you don't want leads from are pages you'll not maintain.
For most contractors it matters more than the website, because the map pack sits above every organic result for local searches. The two work together — a profile with photos and reviews, and a site that backs up what the profile claims.
Often the structure is the problem and not the design, and structure can be fixed on an existing site. You will get told which one you're looking at before any work starts.
Yes, and for a contractor that's usually most of the work. What I need from you is the detail only you have — how you actually run a job, what goes wrong, what you refuse to do. Generic trade copy is what everybody else already has.
Send your site and the trades you want more of. You will get a straight read on why the comparison is going the other way — within one business day, and including “your site is fine, the problem is elsewhere” if that's the answer.