A small business website has five jobs: get the call, answer the questions people ask before they ring, prove you’re real and good, filter out the enquiries you don’t want, and back up word of mouth. A site that does those five brings in work, whatever it looks like.
When someone asks us to review their website, the first thing they usually say is that it “looks dated”. Sometimes it does. But a dated look is rarely why a site isn’t bringing in work. The sites that underperform are almost always failing at one of those five plain, unglamorous jobs.
Looks matter because they affect trust, and trust is one of the jobs. It’s just not the only one, and it’s not the first.
Below are the five, in the order a typical customer runs into them, with a quick self-audit for each. Grab your phone and check your own site as you read.
1. Get the call (or the booking, or the sale)
The whole point of the site is that somebody contacts you. Everything else supports this.
Most of your visitors are on a phone, and Google now uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking too. So the test has to happen on a phone, not on the big monitor in your office.
What we see go wrong: a phone number that’s an image (you can’t tap it), a “Contact” page as the only route to get in touch, a booking button that opens a third-party system in a new tab with no explanation, or a form that silently fails because the site’s email isn’t set up properly.
Self-audit:
- On your phone, can you call the business in one tap from the first screen of the homepage?
- Is there a clear way to get in touch from every page, not just the contact page?
- Fill in your own form today. Did the enquiry arrive, and how long did it take?
- If you take bookings, does the button say what happens next (“Book online, takes 2 minutes”)?
If the form test fails, fix that before anything else. A broken form looks exactly like a quiet month. Our guide to contact forms people actually finish covers the details.
2. Answer the questions people ask before they ring
Customers do a lot of homework before they contact anyone. They’re trying to work out whether you do the thing they need, in their area, at roughly a price they can live with, and soon enough to matter.
If your site doesn’t answer those, they don’t ring to ask. They go to the next result, whose site does.
The questions are usually boringly predictable. Do you service Alstonville? Do you do small jobs? Do you bulk bill? Can I bring my dog? Do you have parking? How far out are you booked? Your phone and inbox already tell you what they are. Write them down for a fortnight and you’ll have the list.
Self-audit:
- Does each main service have its own page explaining what’s included, who it’s for and what happens first?
- Are the towns or suburbs you cover written out in text, not just shown on a map image?
- Is there some guidance on price, even “most jobs fall between X and Y” or “quotes are free”?
- Are your hours, response times or lead times stated somewhere obvious?
You don’t need to publish a full price list. You do need to stop people guessing.
3. Prove you’re real and you’re good
A stranger is about to let you into their house, their mouth, their finances or their event. Before they do, they want evidence.
Proof on a small business site is mostly specific, checkable detail: your licence number, your ABN, a street address or service area, your name and face, photos of actual jobs, and reviews they can verify on Google. Vague claims like “quality service you can trust” do nothing. Everyone says that.
Real photos carry more weight than people expect. A stock photo of a smiling man in a hard hat tells the visitor you didn’t have a photo of yourself. If you can, get a few proper shots of you, your team and your work. Our commercial photography is set up for exactly this sort of short on-site shoot, but decent phone photos beat stock every time.
Self-audit:
- Is there a photo of a real person from the business on the homepage or about page?
- Are your licence numbers, registrations or memberships shown where they’re relevant?
- Can a visitor find recent reviews, ideally with a link to your Google profile?
- Would someone know within 10 seconds which town you’re based in?
4. Filter out the enquiries you don’t want
This one surprises people. A good website should put some people off.
If you don’t do jobs under $500, say so. If you only work in the Ballina, Lismore and Byron shires, say so. If your practice has a waitlist, or you don’t take Medicare referrals, or your minimum order is 20 units, say so. Every bad-fit enquiry you avoid is a phone call you don’t have to return and a quote you don’t have to write.
The aim isn’t to be blunt or unfriendly. It’s to be clear, so the people who do get in touch are the ones you want.
Self-audit:
- What were your last five enquiries that went nowhere? Could the site have told them earlier?
- Do you state your service area, minimum job size or who you don’t work with?
- Does your contact form ask one or two qualifying questions (suburb, type of job, timeframe)?
5. Back up word of mouth
In regional towns, a big share of new work starts with a recommendation. “Use Sam, he did our deck.” The person hearing that then looks Sam up.
At that moment the website’s job is simply to confirm the recommendation. It should be easy to find by searching your business name, it should look like it belongs to a business that’s still trading, and it should make the next step obvious. A site with a 2019 copyright line and a Facebook feed that stopped two years ago raises doubts at exactly the wrong moment.
Self-audit:
- Search your business name on your phone. Does your site come up first, with the right phone number?
- Is there anything on the site that’s visibly out of date (old staff, old offers, old dates)?
- If someone was told “they’re great with heritage homes”, would they find that on your site?
The site we built for Tallowood Carpentry in Lennox Head is a good example of the type: a local name people hear about, so the site’s job is to confirm who they are and what they do, and give you a number you can tap.
Scoring your site
Go back through the audit questions and count the “no” answers.
A few “no” answers scattered across the five jobs usually means the site needs some content work, not a rebuild. Most of these fixes are words, photos and a couple of buttons.
If job 1 failed (the call or form doesn’t work properly on a phone), fix that this week, whatever else you decide.
If you’ve got “no” answers across three or more jobs, and the site is also hard for you to edit, that’s when a rebuild starts to make sense. If that’s where you are, how much a website costs in Australia will help you set a realistic budget before you start getting quotes.
When we design a small business website, these five jobs are the brief we start from, before any colours get picked. And if you’re not sure which of your problems are real, we offer a free website review through our website ownership page.