GETTING FOUND, LAYER 1
Can a machine read your site? Six checks for a contractor, no software needed
Before anyone searches for you, a machine has to be able to read your site. Not admire it. Read it. This is the first of five layers of getting found, and it is the one most contractor sites fail without anyone noticing. Here are six checks you can run from your truck, and the fix for each.
A note on what this is. There are no scores here and no numbers. Each check is a yes or a no, and a no is a job for a weekend, not a company.
Check 1: is there one page per job?
Open your site on your phone. Count the pages. If there is a home page and a "services" page that lists everything, a machine reads that as a company that does one thing called "services." It cannot tell the machine what a mini split is or that you repipe houses.
The fix is a page per job you want calls for. "AC not cooling." "Water heater." "Panel upgrade." "Roof leak." One plain answer on each. This is also what the search engine shows when someone types those words.
Check 2: is your name, address and phone the same everywhere?
Look at the bottom of your site, then at your Google Business Profile, then at your Yelp listing. Same name, spelled the same? Same phone? Same address? A machine that finds "Aire Frio Miami LLC" on one and "Aire Frío Miami" on another treats them as two companies, and trusts neither.
- The legal name as it reads on the license, on every page.
- One phone number, the one that rings the truck or the system.
- The address, or "we come to you" if there is no shop, said the same way everywhere.
- The license number, in the footer and on the about page.
Check 3: does the phone number dial?
Tap the number on your site from your phone. If nothing happens, the number is a picture of a number. Half your callers are on a phone in a parking lot. The number has to be a link that dials, on every page, and the booking button has to open a real calendar.
Check 4: does it load in a second?
Open the site on your phone with the Wi-Fi off. Count. If the truck photo is still loading when you reach three, the photo is too big. Photos from a phone are ten times bigger than a page needs. Shrink them before they go up. A slow page is a page the machine reads less of and the customer never waits for.
THE CARD BEHIND THE PAGE
Check 5: do the pages point to each other?
From the AC repair page, is there a link to the neighborhoods you serve? From the Hialeah page, a link back to the jobs? A machine finds pages by following links. A page nothing links to is a page it never reaches. Every job page should link to the area page and the contact page, and the other way around.
Check 6: does Google have you at all?
Type your company name into Google. Then type site: followed by your web address, with no space. The first shows whether your profile and your site come up together. The second shows which pages Google has stored. If a job page you wrote is not in that list, the machine has not read it yet, and nothing in the other four layers can help it.
None of this needs software you buy. It needs a weekend, a phone, and someone who will make the changes. The layers above this one all depend on it.
What this layer is for
Layer one does not win you a job. It makes you legible. When the customer searches, the machine can say who you are, what you do, where, and how to reach you. Then the next layers decide whether it says your name first. And when it does, the call comes in, and the sixty seconds after that are a different job.
Questions we get asked about this
Do I need to rebuild my site for this?
Usually not. Most sites fail on one page per job, the phone as a link, and photos that are too big. Those are edits, not a rebuild. A site that a machine cannot read at all, because it draws itself in the browser after loading, is the one case that needs a real change.
What is structured data, in plain words?
A hidden block on each page that states the facts: name, address, phone, hours, services, license. A person never sees it. A search engine and an AI read it first. It is how the machine knows you are a company and not a blog post about one.
Which check should I do first?
The name, address and phone check. It takes ten minutes and a mismatch hurts every other layer. Then one page per job, one job at a time.
Related
Want us to run the six checks with you?
Bring your web address to a 30-minute call. We will go through the six on the screen and tell you which ones are a no, and what fixes them.