Photographs of your own jobs beat everything else
The single biggest difference between a site that converts and one that does not is real photography. Stock images of hard hats and blueprints tell a homeowner nothing. Twelve properly shot jobs, with before and after shots, tell them you can do the loft conversion they are pricing up.
You do not need a photographer. A modern phone on a bright day is fine. Shoot every job as you finish it, get the whole elevation in frame, and grab a couple of detail shots of the work you are proud of. Ask the client for permission to use them and note the town so you can caption it honestly.
- Wide shot of the finished job, taken from where a passer-by would stand
- The same angle before you started, if you remembered
- Two or three close-ups: brickwork, a joint, a finished bathroom corner
- A one-line caption with the town, the scope and roughly how long it took
One page per service, one page per area you actually cover
A single page listing everything you do will not rank for anything. Someone searching 'extension builder Chesterfield' wants a page about extensions in Chesterfield. Give the search engines something to match.
Be honest about your radius. If you work within 25 miles of your yard, build pages for the six or eight towns you genuinely travel to, and write each one properly: jobs you have completed there, the sort of housing stock you deal with, any local quirks like conservation areas or a council that is slow with building control sign-off. Thin pages that swap the town name in and out get ignored by Google and irritate anyone who reads them.
Make contact obvious and answer fast
Homeowners ring three or four trades. The one who answers, or rings back within the hour, usually gets the job. Put a tap-to-call number in the header on mobile, repeat it at the bottom of every page, and add a short enquiry form: name, number, postcode, what they need, and a photo upload. Ten fields will kill your enquiry rate.
Set expectations in writing. A line saying you return calls the same working day, or that you are on site until four so evenings are better, stops people writing you off when you do not pick up. If you cannot handle the calls yourself, a call answering service is typically 30 to 100 pounds a month and pays for itself on one job.
Speed, mobile and the basics that quietly cost you leads
Roughly three quarters of these searches happen on a phone, often on patchy signal in a driveway. A site loaded with huge unoptimised images will lose visitors before it loads. Compress your photos to under 300KB each, and aim to have something readable on screen within about two seconds.
The rest is housekeeping that takes an afternoon and matters more than most people expect. Get your Google Business Profile claimed and filled in, because for local searches it often outranks your own site. Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear.
- A proper domain and email address rather than a Gmail or Hotmail one
- Your company number and VAT number if you have them, plus your insurance cover
- Trade body membership only if it is current and genuine
- A privacy notice, since you are collecting names and numbers
What it costs and what to expect
A decent small site for a trade business typically runs somewhere between roughly 800 and 3,000 pounds depending on how many pages, how much writing is needed and whether photography is included, with hosting and maintenance often 15 to 50 pounds a month. Cheaper template builds exist and can work if you are disciplined about the content.
Results are not instant. New sites usually take three to six months to gain traction in local search, longer in competitive city markets. If someone promises page one in a fortnight, walk away. The build is the starting point; the enquiries come from keeping it fed with new jobs and replying quickly when the phone rings.