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FIELD GUIDE 18
The website lead checklist
Your website is not costing you leads because it looks bad. It is costing you leads because it does not do one job well.
Most service business websites are built as brochures and then judged as salespeople. A brochure describes. A salesperson moves someone to the next step. The gap between those two is where the leads go.
The three fixes, in order
Say what you do and where, above the fold
In plain words, visible without scrolling, on a phone. Not a slogan. "Emergency electrician, Bristol and Bath" is a better headline than anything a copywriter will charge you for.
The location half is the most commonly missing piece on service business sites, and it is the half that qualifies the visitor instantly.
Show proof immediately
Reviews, photographs of real completed work, recognisable clients, years in business, accreditations.
Real photographs of your own work outperform every other kind of proof for a trade or home service business, because they are the hardest thing to fake and the easiest thing to judge.
Make contacting you effortless
A tappable phone number, a three-field form, and both repeated at the bottom of every page.
Every additional step between wanting to contact you and doing it costs you a share of the people who wanted to.
The audit
Do this on your phone, not your desktop
- Can a stranger tell what you do and where within five seconds?
- Is there a tappable phone number without scrolling?
- Does tapping it actually start a call?
- Is there proof visible before the second scroll?
- Does your form have three fields or fewer?
- Does the form send an instant confirmation?
- Is there a contact option at the bottom of every page, not just the contact page?
- Do you name the towns you cover, explicitly, somewhere findable?
- Is there one page per service, or one page listing them all?
- Does anything cover the screen before the visitor has decided anything? Chat bubbles, popups, cookie walls.
SCORE IT HONESTLY
Eight or more yeses and your website is doing its job. Fewer than six and the problem is almost certainly not traffic, which means buying more of it will be expensive and disappointing.
The things that feel important and are not
- A carousel or slider on the homepage. They test badly almost everywhere they are measured.
- An "our values" section above the fold. Nobody is choosing an electrician on values before they know what you do.
- A long About page as the second link in the menu. Useful, but not before services and proof.
- Stock photography of people in headsets. It actively reduces trust for a local business.
- A blog with three posts from 2022. It signals abandonment. Either commit or remove it.
FIG. 03 · SOURCES, CHECKED 2 AUGUST 2026
Every number above was traced to its primary source before publication. Where a widely repeated figure could not be verified at the source, it was cut rather than repeated.
- VerifiedMethod rather than statistics This guide is an audit you run against your own site, which is more reliable than any industry conversion benchmark. The related guides on the 50ms first impression and the three-field form carry the sourced research.
RANKTHREAD
One job, done properly
The websites that generate leads for service businesses are rarely the prettiest ones. They are the ones where a stranger on a phone can tell what you do, believe you can do it, and reach you in one tap.
RANKTHREAD
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