Websites for general contractors in San Diego

There is a conversation I have had many times with contractors, and it always starts the same way: the website looks dated, so it needs replacing. Then we look at it and the design is fine. What is wrong is that six pages of pleasant paragraphs never once say what the business does, where it does it, or who it does it for.

A redesign will not fix that. A rewrite will.

What the website is actually for

A general contractor’s website is almost never the first contact. It is the second. Somebody got your name from a neighbour, a truck, a yard sign or a search result, and now they are checking you before they dial.

That reframes everything. The site is not persuading a stranger from nothing. It is removing doubt from someone who is already most of the way there, which is a far easier job and a completely different brief. The questions it has to answer are small and concrete: is this a real, licensed business; do they work near me; have they done something like my job; how do I reach them right now.

The trade hub covers where the website sits relative to everything else, and the short version is that it is the second thing to fix, after the phone.

The licence number, and where it goes

California requires a licence number on anything advertising contracting work. A website advertises. The number therefore belongs on the site, and specifically in the footer of every page rather than on a separate credentials page.

Two reasons. A careful homeowner looks for it, and finds it faster in a footer than in a menu. And it is one of the details that distinguishes a real contractor’s site from a lead broker’s landing page — which matters both to readers and to the systems deciding what to show them.

If the licence does not exist yet, the answer is to build the site and hold it on a private address until it does, in the way described on the framing page. Publishing a vague site that avoids saying what the business does wastes the months you are waiting.

Photographs, and the catalogue problem

This is the part contractors most often want to skip, and it is the part with the largest effect.

A homeowner deciding whether to call is looking for evidence that you have done their job before. A photograph of a finished kitchen you actually built is that evidence. A photograph of somebody else’s finished kitchen is not, and readers are far better at detecting the difference than most builders assume. Catalogue imagery signals a company with nothing of its own to show.

Four or five jobs, photographed properly, is enough. Bright morning light, the room tidy, a wide shot and two close ones. It takes a Saturday and it outperforms every other change available.

Say where you work

Contractors habitually write that they serve San Diego and the surrounding areas, which is precise enough to be true and vague enough to be useless.

A homeowner in Chula Vista wants to know whether you come to Chula Vista. A search engine is trying to work out which local queries you belong in. Both are served by naming the places you actually travel to, and neither is served by a phrase that could describe any contractor in the county.

The caution is to be honest about it. A page claiming a city you have never worked in is thin and reads that way, which is why our city pages are built around real service areas rather than a list of every municipality in the county.

What to write, page by page

One page per kind of work you want more of. Not per service you can perform — per work you want more of. A contractor who is happy doing additions and indifferent about bathroom remodels should have a serious page about additions and a paragraph about bathrooms.

Each of those pages does the same four things: says what the work involves, says what it typically takes in time, shows a job you have done, and gives the reader something to do next. That structure is repetitive by design, and repetition across a site is a feature rather than a failing — it is what lets a reader arriving on page eleven know where they are.

What to do when the site is finished

Nothing dramatic. Add the number to your Google Business Profile so both carry the same details, and use the same phone number and address everywhere without variation. Put the review link into the wrap-up of every job. Then leave it alone for a quarter and look at which pages people actually read.

The pages that get read, and the pages that do not

Once a site has been live a quarter, the pattern is consistent across contracting businesses. The home page and one or two work-type pages carry nearly all the reading. The about page gets a glance. The rest is largely unvisited.

That is useful information rather than a disappointment. It says where to put the effort: deepen the pages people actually reach, and stop adding pages nobody asked for. A contractor who discovers that the bathroom page is getting read three times as often as the additions page has learned something about their market that no plan would have predicted.

Speed, plainly

A contractor site does not need to be fast in a technical sense. It needs to open before a homeowner standing outside with one bar of signal gives up.

That mostly comes down to photographs. A gallery of enormous unprocessed images is the single most common reason a trade site feels slow, and resizing them is a half-hour job with a large effect. Everything else — the framework, the hosting arrangement, the clever animation — matters far less than the size of the pictures.

The demos show the other pieces that sit around a site — the CRM in particular, once enquiries start arriving. When you want to talk about what yours should say, start a project.