A contractor pays two thousand dollars for a website. It looks good. It goes live. Six months later it has produced nothing, and the assumption is that websites don't work for this trade. The website worked exactly as built — it just wasn't built to be found.
A website and a lead source are two different purchases
Most web designers sell you a brochure. It has your logo, some photos, a contact form, and it accurately represents your business to anyone who already knows your name. That's a legitimate product, and if a customer has your card in their hand it does its job.
What it does not do is bring you someone who has never heard of you. That requires the site to rank for what people search when they have the problem you solve — and ranking is a structural property of the site, decided before a single pixel is designed.
The four failures we see over and over
- One page listing every service. Google can't rank a page for eleven different things at once, so it ranks it for none of them.
- No service-area pages. If you drive to nine towns and only name one, you're invisible in the other eight.
- Load times over four seconds on mobile. Half your visitors leave before the page paints, and Google notices.
- A dormant Google Business Profile. The map pack sits above every organic result, and most contractors have never touched theirs since setup.
What to ask before you pay anyone
Ask which keywords the site is being built to rank for, and ask to see the research behind that list. Ask how many pages you're getting and what each one targets. Ask what the mobile load time will be. If the answers are vague — or if the conversation keeps returning to color palettes — you're buying a brochure. Decide that on purpose rather than by accident.