You have a website. You have good reviews. You have been in business for eleven years. And when someone in the next town searches for what you do, a company that started last year shows up above you. Here is usually why.
1. You have one services page instead of eight
Search engines rank pages, not businesses. A single page listing twelve services competes for twelve different searches at once and wins none of them. The fix is unglamorous: one page per service, each written to the question a customer is actually typing. "Water heater replacement" and "drain cleaning" are different jobs to a homeowner and they should be different pages on your site.
2. You never told Google where you work
Most local sites name their home city once, in the footer. If you serve nine towns, you need nine pages that each say something true and specific about working in that town — the neighborhoods, the housing stock, the permit office, the drive time. Not one template with the city name swapped, which search engines have been discounting for years.
3. Your site is slow on a phone
Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score, not the desktop one. Under 50 is common for local service sites and it is a ranking factor and a conversion problem at the same time. Most of the weight is uncompressed job photos — the very thing that sells the work.
4. Nothing on the page tells Google what kind of business you are
Structured data — the LocalBusiness markup that lists your address, hours, service area and review rating — is invisible to visitors and load-bearing for search. It is also missing from most contractor sites, because the template that built them was written for a blog.
5. The site has not changed since it launched
A site that has not been touched in three years reads as abandoned, both to a search engine and to the homeowner who notices the copyright year. This is the failure mode of the agency model: every change costs money and takes two weeks, so you stop asking, and the site slowly goes stale.
What to do about it
- 1.Check your mobile PageSpeed score. If it is under 60, that is the first fix.
- 2.Count your service pages. If it is one, that is the second.
- 3.List the towns you actually take jobs in, and count how many have a page. Usually zero.
- 4.Search your own business name and look at what shows up beside your listing.
None of this requires a rebuild to diagnose. It does usually require one to fix, which is the part everybody puts off.
