What Should a Contractor Website Include?

The homeowner has three bids for a kitchen remodel. One is on a printed form with carbon copies. One is a PDF. One is a text message with a number in it. She and her husband are at the table at 9 p.m. with all three, and a laptop, and they are doing what every remodel customer does before signing a check with five figures on it: looking each contractor up.

This is where a contractor's website earns its keep. The bids are close. The decision will be made on trust, and trust will be built or lost in the next twenty minutes by a website. She wants to know the company is licensed and insured, because her brother-in-law told her a story. She wants to see kitchens like hers, finished. She wants to know whether she can pay it over time.

The contractor with the best website is the one whose site answers every question she would ask if she were willing to call at 9 p.m. Everything below is that list. The home service pillar covers what all trades share; this guide is about the contractor's planned, high-ticket, compared-against-two-others job.

Here is what a contractor website should include, page by page, with what each is for. A general contractor or remodeler usually lands between twenty and thirty-five pages; the page count guide explains the counting.

Notice that "Services" as a single page is not on the list. "We do kitchens, baths, additions, decks, and more" ranks for none of those and reassures nobody. Each job type is its own page with its own title, projects and estimate button. The service page guide has the template.

Most contractor sites put the license number on the about page, in the footer, in gray. The homeowner is looking for it on the first screen, because it is the first thing she was told to check. Put it there: license number, who issued it, "fully insured" with the carrier named, years in business, and a link to verify. Repeat the line under the headline on every page, because she may land on a project page from a search and never see the home page.

This answers the question before it is asked, which is the whole craft of a sales page, and it separates you from the unlicensed competitor with the low bid without saying a word about him. A homeowner who sees your license and then cannot find his has done your closing for you. Warranty belongs in the same place; "one-year workmanship warranty, in writing" is worth a page of adjectives. The credibility checklist lists the rest of the proof that belongs near the top.

The gallery is where the homeowner goes second, after the license line, and where she stays longest. Most contractor galleries are a grid of forty thumbnails with no captions. That is a photo dump. A gallery that sells is a set of project pages, each a small story: the house, the problem, what was done, how long it took, what it looked like after. Twenty photos on a page about one kitchen in Alamo Heights beat two hundred in a grid.

Before-and-after pairs are the most persuasive content a contractor can publish, because they show judgment, not just craft. Shoot the before on the first walkthrough, from the spot you will shoot the after. Shoot the after in daylight with the counters cleared. A phone is fine. A stock photo of a kitchen you did not build is not, and homeowners now reverse-search galleries that look too good.

Each project page ranks on its own for "kitchen remodel Alamo Heights" or "screened porch addition Boerne," and it gives the estimate conversation something to point at. "Here is one like yours" closes more bids than any brochure. Our work page is built the same way for a different trade.

A contractor's website has one conversion that matters: the estimate request. How many you get depends on how the request is designed, and most are designed to lose.

Contractor SEO is not a trick. It is a shape. Google has to look at the site and understand what you build, where, and that the pages agree with each other. The shape that works has three layers and links between them.

The top layer is the job-type pages: kitchen remodel, bathroom remodel, home addition, outdoor living. The second layer is the town pages, one per place you want to be the local choice, each linking to the job-type pages and each saying something true about that town: the housing stock, the permit process, the projects you have done there. The service area page guide is the how-to. The third layer is the project pages, each linking up to its job type and its town. A crawler following links from a project page to a town page to a job page learns the whole business, and a homeowner following the same links finds one more reason to call.

This is what long-tail SEO means for a contractor: winning "screened porch addition Fair Oaks Ranch" with a page about exactly that, instead of fighting everyone for "contractor near me." It is also why a contractor site should be built to grow. Every finished job is a new page, and every new page is another search you can win. The local SEO guide covers the map pack, which matters less for a contractor than for an emergency trade but still fills the phone.

Ten items. Most contractor sites have three. The site with all ten wins the kitchen-table comparison more often than its bid alone would. We build sites for construction and remodeling companies on this structure, and a free home page mockup shows what yours would look like before you decide anything.