Trade contractor
Brightwork — +3.6× quote requests
A contractor with fifteen years of work behind them and a website that looked like it had been built in an afternoon in 2013. Good work, no proof of it.
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The situation
Brightwork is a contractor with fifteen years of finished work behind them and a website that undersold every bit of it. The site had been built once, cheaply, and left alone. It ranked for the company name and almost nothing else.
The work itself was the asset nobody could see. Photographs existed on phones, on a WhatsApp group and in the founder's camera roll — not on the website, which used stock images of unrelated buildings. A prospective customer had no way of judging quality before calling.
The commercial problem was the shape of the inquiries, not just the number. Every call started with a price negotiation because no cost information existed anywhere, so a large share of quoting time went to jobs that were never within range. Two hours of quoting a job at a third of your minimum is worse than no inquiry at all.
What the audit found
Stock photography instead of proof
The home page showed buildings the company had never touched. In a trade where the entire purchasing decision rests on trust, generic imagery signals either inexperience or something to hide.
No price signal anywhere
Withholding all pricing feels safe and is expensive. It guarantees that every inquiry, qualified or not, consumes the same amount of time before anyone can tell whether the job is viable.
One broken route to contact
A single contact form, which silently failed on mobile Safari due to a validation script error. That was roughly 40% of traffic hitting a dead end with no error message — the inquiries simply never arrived.
No pages for the jobs people search for
One page listed all services as a paragraph. Local searches are specific — a job type plus a place — and there was no page on the site that matched any of those searches.
What was broken
- The home page showed stock photography instead of their own projects.
- No indication of price range, so every inquiry started with a haggle.
- The contact form was the only route to a quote and broke on mobile Safari.
- No service pages, so local searches for specific jobs never matched.
What we changed
Their work, not stock
Twelve completed projects photographed and written up with scope, timescale and what it cost — the questions every caller asked anyway.
Price ranges published
Typical costs shown per job type. Fewer inquiries, far better ones, and no time lost to jobs outside their range.
A quote form for one thumb
Four steps, big targets, photo upload from the camera, and it saves progress if the signal drops on site.
The technical detail
The specific decisions behind the numbers, in plain language.
Twelve projects, properly documented
Each write-up covers the brief, scope, duration, materials, complications encountered and the actual cost band, with photography reshot at each site. These answer the questions every caller was asking, before the call.
Published price ranges
Typical cost bands per job type, with the factors that move a price within a band explained. Total inquiries fell slightly; inquiries inside the viable range rose 58%, and quoting time per won job dropped sharply.
A quote form built for a work site
Four short steps with large tap targets, direct camera upload for photos of the job, and progress persisted locally so a dropped signal on site does not lose the entry. It also works fully without JavaScript as a plain submission.
A page per service and area
Individual pages for each job type with genuine detail and local project references, marked up with structured data. Local search visibility rose 41% within three months.
Inquiries that cannot fail silently
Server-side validation, a delivery receipt to both parties, and an alert if a submission fails to send. The previous setup had no way of knowing it was losing inquiries, which is how it lost them for two years.
How it ran
Audit
Inquiry log reviewed by job type and value, form failure reproduced across devices, search gap mapped.
Content
Twelve sites revisited and photographed, write-ups drafted with the team, cost bands agreed.
Build
Site, service pages, quote flow with offline persistence, tracking.
Measure
Call and form tracking, search reporting, quarterly review of cost bands.
How we measured it
Measured across sixteen weeks post-launch against the prior sixteen, using call tracking and form submissions together so the phone channel was not attributed away incorrectly.
Quote requests rose 3.6×, from a monthly average of nine to thirty-two. Inquiries within the published budget range rose 58% as a share of the total. Local search impressions for job-type queries rose 41%.
The founder's own metric was simpler and more useful: time spent quoting work that never converted fell by more than half, because people were arriving pre-informed on scope and cost. Won-job value per hour of quoting roughly doubled.
quote requests
inquiries within budget
local search visibility
“People turn up already knowing what we do and roughly what it costs. The calls are shorter and they say yes more.”
What we took from it
- For trades, your own finished work is the most persuasive asset you own — publish it.
- Publishing prices does not lose you customers; it loses you the wrong inquiries.
- Test the contact form on a real phone, on a real network, every quarter.