What a Small Business Website Needs to Turn Searches into Calls

The five-second test

Open your site on your phone, count to five, then put it down. Could a stranger say:

1. What you do?
2. Which area you serve?
3. How to call or book?

If any answer is no, fix the top of the homepage first. Use the words customers search ("water heater repair"), your service area, and a tap-to-call button.

Pages most local businesses need

• Home: what you do, where, and how to reach you.
• One page per main service: what the job involves, what affects the price, how long it takes, questions customers ask.
• Service area: the towns you really serve. If you write a page per town, make each one genuinely different (local details, jobs done there). Near-copies with only the town name swapped count as doorway pages (Google spam policies).
• About: who you are, licences you actually hold, how long you have been in business.
• Contact: phone, hours, address or service area, and a short form.

Write for people first

Google's own advice is to create helpful, reliable content made for people, not to rank (Google Search Central: creating helpful content). In practice: answer the questions you hear on the phone, use real photos of your work, and say plainly what you do and do not do.

Technical basics you can check yourself

• Mobile speed: run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score and the list of issues.
• Tap to call: the phone number is a link on mobile.
• Same NAP as Google: business name, address and phone match your Business Profile exactly.
• Unique page titles: each page's title says what the page is about and where.
• HTTPS: the address bar shows a padlock.
• Search Console: the site is added to Google Search Console so you can see which searches show it.
• Forms work: send yourself a test enquiry every month.

Go deeper

Already past the basics? Conqueror Capital's small business website checklist adds where to start, what Google actually asks for, and what does not help.