Before you pay for a contractor website, ask it for a quote on your phone.
A web company has sent you a mock-up: a stranger in a hard hat, a slogan, a contact page. Your next customer will see it on a phone, in the yard or kitchen they want fixed.
The short answer
A contractor's site has one job: turn a visit from a phone into a quote request.
- Before you pay, check six things.
- The quote form works with one thumb.
- The site names the places you work.
- The photos are of your own jobs.
- It links to your Google reviews.
- It loads fast on a phone.
- And the domain is registered to your business.
- Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of a site. 1
- In 2022, 84% of Canadians had internet through a mobile data plan. 2
The quote request, tested with one thumb
Ask for what you need to price the job and call back: a name, a phone number, the address, what they want done, and photos if they have them.
The detail
Google's guide for web developers says to let people type their name in one box, and to drop any field you don't need. 3 Every extra box is one more reason to give up halfway.
Find it the way a customer would You
Search your business name on your phone and tap through.
The detail
The quote button should be on the first screen, not under a slideshow.
Tap the phone number You
It should start a call. A number that's part of a picture can't.
Fill the form in with one thumb You
The phone box should bring up the number pad, which is one setting on the form. 3
The detail
Each box should keep its label while you type. A grey hint inside the box that vanishes when you start isn't a label. 3
Check you never have to aim You
web.dev recommends tap targets of about 48 device-independent pixels, spaced about 8 pixels apart. 4
The detail
If you have to zoom in to hit a button, so will a customer.
Have the builder test on the phones your customers carry A professional
Google's form guide stresses testing on the devices most common for your users. 3
The detail
A mock-up that looks fine on their big screen tells you nothing about a phone. Ask for an iPhone and an Android, not a desktop browser made narrow.
Send a test request, and time the reply You
Find out where it lands, who sees it, and when someone answers.
The detail
A form that emails an inbox nobody checks loses the job as surely as a broken one.
Name the places you take jobs, in words
A homeowner wants to know at a glance whether you come out to them. Put the towns and neighbourhoods you work in on the home page and beside the quote form, as text, not only on a map.
Then make the list match your Google Business Profile.
The detail
Google lets a business that goes to its customers list up to 20 service areas, and says the whole area shouldn't stretch past about 2 hours' drive from your base. 5 It doesn't allow a radius, and if customers don't come to your shop or yard, it says to take the address off the profile. 5 Distance is one of the three things Google weighs in local results, beside relevance and prominence. 6
Example
- Your Renovation Co. works out of Airdrie.
- The quote page says "Airdrie, Crossfield, Cochrane and north Calgary", the footer says the same, and so does the profile's service-area list.
The detail
Someone in Okotoks knows to ask first.
Your own jobs in the photos, named for what they show
A stock photo tells a homeowner nothing they can check. Before-and-after shots from your own jobs show the work, and the kind of work you take on.
- Name each file for the job, not the camera: Google's own example prefers a short, descriptive name to IMG00023.JPG. 9
- Give each photo a line of alt text that says what's in it, like "Cedar fence and gate, back yard", and keep keywords out of it. 9
- Put each photo beside the words about that job. Google says images belong near relevant text. 9
- Ask the web company where the photos in the mock-up came from.
The detail
If the answer is a stock library, ask what it would take to use yours.
Link to your Google reviews. Don't paste the stars.
The reviews a homeowner trusts are the ones you can't edit. Put a link to your Google reviews right beside the quote button.
The detail
Google counts how many reviews you have toward prominence in local results, 6 so asking every customer for one helps on Google's map as well as on your own site.
Copying reviews onto your own pages with star markup won't put stars beside your site in Google.
The detail
Google's rules say a business that controls the reviews about itself can't get the star feature from LocalBusiness or Organization markup. 10 If a web company promises search stars from your own testimonials, ask which rule they're reading.
Fast enough, by Google's own lines, on a phone
Test the phone result, not the office Wi-Fi.
The detail
PageSpeed Insights, Google's free tool, reports phones and computers separately, and its field data comes from real visits over the previous 28 days. 11
| Measure | What it means on the phone | Good | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint 11 | How long until the main thing on the page shows | 2.5 seconds or less | Over 4 seconds |
| Interaction to Next Paint 11 | How quickly the page reacts when you tap | 200 ms or less | Over 500 ms |
| Cumulative Layout Shift 11 | How much the page jumps while it loads | 0.1 or less | Over 0.25 |
A page passes when at least three visits in four, counted on phones and computers separately, meet all three lines. 12
The detail
Before you sign, ask the web company for the phone result on a site they've already built.
The domain, in your business's name before the first invoice
Look the domain up yourself before you pay anything.
The detail
For a .ca, CIRA's WHOIS lookup shows the registrar and the expiry date, and for a corporation it shows the registrant's name by default. 13 For a .com, ICANN's lookup shows the current registration data, straight from the registry or registrar. 14 The registrant should be your business, not the web company and not the person who built it.
What the domain and the site cost each month, and what upkeep should cover, are on our cost and maintenance pages.
Where we fit
We build and run your website with your name on everything, and as part of Care your Google profile is claimed in your name.
The detail
Keeping it current comes with Your brand's “Kept current and well reviewed” step. From Otto's “New leads, by text” step, every enquiry from your website gets a reply by text in your name, after hours and when you're busy. If a builder plan and an afternoon with this list get you there, we'll say so.
Sources
- Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices, Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Canadian Internet Use Survey, 2022, Statistics Canada, The Daily, 2023-07-20. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Payment and address form best practices, web.dev (Google). Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Accessible tap targets, web.dev (Google). Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Manage your service areas for service-area & hybrid businesses, Google Business Profile Help. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, Google Business Profile Help. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Manage your Business Profile photos & videos, Google Business Profile Help. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Image SEO best practices, Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Review snippet (Review, AggregateRating) structured data, Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- About PageSpeed Insights, Google for Developers. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- Web Vitals, web.dev (Google), 2020-05-04. Read 2026-10-30. Back
- WHOIS Domain Name Lookup, CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority), 2021-06-03. Read 2026-10-27. Back
- ICANN Lookup: registration data lookup tool, ICANN. Read 2026-10-27. Back
Checked on 2026-10-30.
