The same first pass we run, in an hour
A browser, your own phone on mobile data, and two free tools. This is genuinely the sequence we work through before quoting anyone, written out so you can run it yourself and decide whether you need anybody at all.
The phone test, which most sites fail
Start here, on your own phone, on mobile data with the shop wifi switched off. This single test finds more revenue leakage on contractor sites than everything else in this guide combined, and it takes four minutes.
On your phone, on mobile data
- Time how long from tapping the link until you can see and tap a phone number. Over three seconds is a problem, over five is the whole problem
- Check the phone number is real text and not an image, by trying to tap it
- Check nothing important is hidden behind a cookie banner or a popup you have to dismiss first
- Scroll the whole homepage and confirm nothing runs off the side of the screen
- Try to find your service area. If you cannot in twenty seconds, a customer will not either
- Find your license number. If it is not there, that is a trust problem in every state and a serious one in California and Florida
Because roughly all of your emergency traffic and most of your planned work traffic arrives on a phone, frequently on a poor connection. A site that is beautiful on a desktop and slow on a phone is a site that loses the calls that pay.
Structure, and what each page is for
Open your site on a laptop and write a list of every page. Then answer one question about each: which single search is this page trying to win.
Page by page
- Any page that cannot be assigned one search term is a page with no job. Note it
- Any two pages assigned the same term are competing with each other. One of them has to go or merge
- A services page listing more than three services is the most common single fault. Each of those services needs its own page
- Check every page title in the browser tab. If two are identical, or one says Home, that is a wasted signal
- Check that each page title reads the way a customer would search, not the way you would invoice
- Confirm you have an honest cost page for your highest ticket service. Most contractors do not, and it is the most valuable page available
The vocabulary check
- Read your page titles and ask whether a homeowner would ever type those words
- Load center, luminaire, receptacle and conductor belong in the body copy as credibility, never in the title
- Breaker box, light fixture, outlet and wire belong in the title, because that is what gets typed
- EVSE in a title is the clearest single sign that a site was written by an electrician rather than for a customer
The profile, where the fastest wins are
Google Business Profile
- Is it set up as a service area business, or does it show a street address you do not receive customers at
- Does the list of towns match the towns you actually cover and that your license allows
- Is the primary category Electrician, and are the secondary categories all accurate
- Is every service listed individually, including panel upgrades, generators and EV chargers
- Are the hours right, including after hours, and would a searcher at ten at night see you as open
- Are there at least ten real photographs, and is the newest one from this year
- Search your own business name and check for a duplicate listing you have never claimed
Reviews
- How many days since the newest review. Over ninety is a warning, over a year is a liability
- Do any reviews name a specific service, or do they all say great service
- Has every review been responded to, including the negative ones
- Read your own responses to bad reviews as a stranger would. Do they sound measured or rattled
Service area configuration. A storefront listing converted to a correctly configured service area business is usually the quickest measurable improvement available to a contractor, because it is a configuration problem rather than a competition problem.
Free tools, and what to look at in each
Two free tools, ten minutes each, and you have most of what a paid audit would tell you about a site this size.
Run your homepage and your highest value service page on mobile. Ignore the score itself and read the Core Web Vitals section. Largest Contentful Paint over about 2.5 seconds and any visible layout shift are the two worth acting on.
If it is not set up, set it up first, because it is free and it is the only source of what people actually searched before landing on you. Look at Performance, sort by impressions, and find terms where you rank between eight and twenty. Those are the nearly-there terms worth working on.
Search your three highest value terms in an incognito window with your location set correctly. Write down who holds the top three in the map results and the top three organic. Look at what their pages do that yours does not.
Search site: followed by your domain in Google. If the number of results is wildly higher than the number of pages you know about, you have duplication. If it is lower, pages are not being indexed at all.
Write everything down as you go and fix nothing until the hour is over. An audit that turns into a repair session halfway through stops being an audit, and you will end up having changed four things without knowing whether any of them mattered.
What to do with the list you just made
Anything from the phone test
A slow or untappable phone number costs you calls today. Everything else can wait a week. This cannot.
Profile configuration
Service area, categories, services and hours. Fast, free, and the change most likely to show up within weeks.
Splitting the services page
The largest structural change and the one with the longest payoff. One page per job, titled in customer language.
Review rate
Start asking at job completion. Nothing about this requires a website change and it compounds from the first week.
The nearly-there terms
From Search Console. Improving a page that ranks eleventh is far cheaper than creating one that ranks nowhere.
Questions about auditing
Do I need paid tools to audit my own site? 01
No. Everything in this guide uses a browser, a phone, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, all of which are free. Paid tools make competitive research faster and they are worth having eventually, but none of the checks that find the biggest problems on a contractor site require one.
How long does this actually take? 02
About an hour for a small site if you do not stop to fix things as you go. Write everything down first and fix afterward, because chasing each problem as you find it turns an hour into a weekend and you will lose track of what you have checked.
What if I find something I cannot fix? 03
Most of what this guide surfaces is configuration and writing rather than code. If you hit something genuinely technical, note it and move on. The free analysis on this site covers the same ground and will tell you which of the remaining items actually matter for your market.
The other three
Or let us run it and write it up
The free analysis is this same pass, done for you, written in plain English, with the three things worth fixing first. No obligation and no call required.