Most contractor websites in Edmonton fail the same way. Not by being ugly, but by being written for other people in marketing instead of for a homeowner in Mill Woods with water coming through the ceiling. That homeowner has three tabs open and thirty seconds of patience. Here is the checklist for winning them, built from what we install on every site we ship.
The five things that win the job
Your trade and your area in the first sentence. “Residential electrician serving Edmonton, Sherwood Park, and St. Albert.” Not a slogan about excellence. The visitor is confirming they found the right kind of company in the right place, and they do it in one glance or they leave. This same sentence is what AI tools like ChatGPT lift when someone asks them to recommend a contractor, so it earns its place twice.
A phone number that works from a thumb. Big, at the top, tappable. Most of your visitors are on a phone, many of them standing in front of the problem they are calling about.
Proof a stranger can believe. Real photos of real jobs beat stock photography by a mile, even off a phone camera. If you have reviews, show them. If you are newer and do not have many yet, honesty outperforms invention: say how long you have been on the tools and what you stand behind. A visitor can smell a purchased testimonial, and worse, so can the AI tools deciding whether to recommend you.
Answers to the questions they were going to ask anyway. Do you give free estimates. How fast can you come. What areas do you cover. Do you handle insurance work. A short answers section does two jobs at once: it converts the human reading it, and it is precisely the format AI search tools quote when they answer questions about local services.
A way in for people who will not call. Some customers, especially for bigger jobs, want to type their problem at 10 PM. A short form, three or four fields, no essay. And whether they call or type, what happens in the first minute after decides whether you keep them, which is a whole subject of its own; we wrote about it in our missed call piece.
What you can skip
A blog you will never update, a gallery with forty near identical photos where six good ones would do, an About page that reads like a corporate history, animations of any kind, and anything the agency describes as making the site pop. None of it books jobs. Some of it slows the site down enough to lose them.
How to choose who builds it
Whoever you talk to, us included, ask these and watch what happens. Who owns the website when it is done, and what happens if I stop paying you? The only good answer is you own everything and nothing breaks. What exactly do I get for the price, in a list? Vague scope is where trades people get burned. Can I update my own site, or do I pay you every time a price changes? And what happens after launch, since a site nobody maintains slides slowly out of every ranking that matters.
Any honest shop answers those in plain language without flinching. Our answers, including our prices, are published on our services page and our FAQ, which is also where we explain why every client owns their site outright from day one. Compare us against anyone. That is what the checklist is for.