Most trade websites are written like a brochure and read like one. The person looking at yours is usually standing in front of the problem, on their phone, with a couple of other tabs open. They are trying to work out one thing: can this bloke do my job, and will he turn up.
So that is what the site has to answer, in the first screen, before anything else. Everything below is the stuff that actually moves the needle for trades, based on the sites I have built and what people click on once they are live.
Built for: Builders, Carpenters, Plumbers, Electricians, Roofers, Bricklayers, Concreters, Plasterers, Painters, Tilers, Fencers, Landscapers, Arborists, Handymen, Demolition contractors.
Nothing sells a trade like the work. A gallery of jobs you actually did, in suburbs people recognise, does more than any amount of writing. Stock photos of a smiling tradesperson in a clean shirt do the opposite: people have seen them on fifty other sites and they stop believing the rest of the page.
Your licence number, your insurance, and how long you have been going. Put them on the page, not buried in a PDF. It costs you nothing and it is the single quickest way to look like the safe choice next to a competitor who has hidden theirs.
Half the enquiries a tradie loses are people who could not tell whether you come out their way. Name the suburbs. If you will travel further for the right job, say that too, in plain words.
A quote form asking for name, email and 'message' gets you a message that says 'need a quote'. Let people attach a photo of the leak, the crack, the fuse box, and you can price half of them without leaving the ute. That one change saves more time than anything else on this list.
Because word of mouth still ends in a search. Someone gives a mate your name, and the mate googles you before they call. If nothing comes up, or what comes up is a dead Facebook page from 2019, that recommendation goes cold. A site is often not there to find you new customers so much as to stop you losing the ones you have already been handed.
Not to start. For most trades, the big wins are a Google Business Profile that is filled in properly, a site that loads fast on a phone, and clear suburb and service wording on your main pages. That gets you into the map results, which is where trade work actually comes from. Blogging can come later if you want it, and honestly, for a lot of trades it never needs to.
$199 to set up, then $59 a month. The monthly covers hosting, the domain, security, backups, content updates when you need them, and me picking up the phone. There is no separate bill for small changes. The monthly runs on a 12-month minimum term, then month to month: $199 does not come close to covering a bespoke build, so the rest of it is spread across the first year rather than charged up front.
12 Bar Digital, Largs North, Adelaide, South Australia. (08) 7077 0985. hello@12bardigital.com.au