You've run on the phone and word of mouth for twenty years, and it's gone quiet.

For twenty years the job came from a neighbour, a builder you'd worked for, or the sign on the ute. That was the whole system and it was a good one, because the person recommending you had already done the vetting.

What changed is the step before the call. Someone gets your name from a mate, and then they look you up. That look takes about four seconds and it happens before anybody rings. If there's nothing to find, or what's there looks like it was built in 2015 and forgotten, the recommendation has to survive that. Sometimes it doesn't.

So the work hasn't dried up. The introduction just has a checkpoint in it now that it didn't used to have.

The website is the part everybody can see, so it takes the blame. Somebody sells you a new one, it looks better, and six months later the phone rings about the same amount.

That's because a website is one of three things, and it's the middle one. In front of it is how anybody finds you and what they think before they arrive. Behind it is what happens after somebody gets in touch. Buy the middle on its own and the other two carry on as they were.

This is the honest reason so many trades have paid for a site and felt nothing change. It wasn't a bad site. It was one third of the job.

Someone in your area types the work and a suburb into their phone. What comes back is a map, a few businesses with review counts, and then the links. If you're not in the map you're not in the running, no matter how good the site is.

Then there's the bit nobody talks about. The businesses that get chosen are usually not the cheapest or the closest, they're the ones that look like they'd turn up on time. That judgement is made on your Google profile, your reviews and the first screen of your site, and it's made in seconds.

One of our clients had a customer tell him exactly why he'd rung: "You had a very impressive website, so I thought geez, this bloke must be switched on." That was an ex chief engineer, buying a three phase EV charger install. He had no way to judge an electrician, so he judged the only evidence he had.

Most trade websites are the same five pages with different photos. Home, about, services, gallery, contact. That's a brochure, and a brochure ranks for your business name and nothing else.

What actually gets found is specific. The service you do, in the suburb you do it in, written like somebody who's done the job. If you cover eight suburbs, that's eight pages worth having, and they should each say something true about that suburb rather than being the same page with the name swapped.

That last part matters more every year. Pages that are ninety per cent identical to each other rank for a while and then stop, because the day somebody in that suburb writes a real page, the copy loses.

Answer a web enquiry within five minutes and you're around 21 times more likely to qualify it than if you answer at thirty. That's from the MIT and InsideSales lead response study, and the businesses they audited averaged 42 hours.

Nobody misses those five minutes because they're lazy. You're under a house, on a roof, or driving. That's exactly why it can't depend on you.

So the enquiry lands on your phone the second it arrives, and something texts them back straight away whether you're free or not. Then it follows up in a few days if you haven't heard, and asks for the review after the job's done. None of that requires you to remember anything.

Take a quiet week. Say four people found you, two rang and got voicemail, one filled in a form that went to an inbox you checked at nine that night, and one went to the bloke whose site looked more organised.

Two of those four were probably real jobs. If your average job is two or three thousand dollars, that quiet week cost you more than the whole system costs for a year. And you'd never see it, because a job you never heard about doesn't show up anywhere.

That's the part that makes this hard to act on. The loss is invisible. The only evidence is that it's quieter than it used to be.

Usually a good thing, and if there are parts of it you actually like we'll keep those rather than throw them out on principle.

The question isn't whether it looks alright, it's whether it does anything. Does it catch an enquiry or just show a phone number. Is there anything on it that could rank for the work you do. Do your reviews appear anywhere on it. Does anything happen after somebody sends a message.

Plenty of the sites we look at are perfectly nice and answer no to all four.

We hear that constantly, and usually the story is the same. You paid a setup fee, you paid a monthly, you got a four page site and a report you didn't read, and after a year the site had exactly the same four pages it launched with.

That's not bad luck, it's the product. A subscription website is four or five pages and about four hours a month of attention, and four hours a month cannot write the content that would get you found.

Two things worth asking anybody, including us. What does an extra page cost. And what happens if I leave in month three. Get both in writing.

You shouldn't need much. We do the looking, and the questions we ask are about your business rather than about websites, so you don't need to know any of the words.

Realistically it's half an hour to talk it through, then photos of your work if you've got them, and a decision. Everything after that is our problem.

And the point of the whole thing is to take work off you rather than add it. If it needs you to log in and maintain it, it'll stop getting done within a month, same as it does for everybody.

Not a package price, and I'd rather explain why than pretend. A sole trader covering one town and a company with staff covering a region need the same thinking and a very different amount of building, so one published number would be wrong for one of them and I'd be the one choosing which.

What I can tell you is that you get a number on the first call rather than after three meetings, and that if it's too early for you, that's what you'll be told. If money's tight right now, put it into your Google profile and your reviews first. That costs time rather than money and it matters more than a website does at that stage.

Above it, four things move the number. How many services you actually sell and how many areas you want to be found in. Whether there's a brand already or one has to be made. Whether you've got a CRM worth keeping, because if your pipeline already lives somewhere and works, we'd keep it rather than sell you another one. And whether anything needs building that isn't a website.

The monthly isn't the website either. It's the CRM with every enquiry in it, a business number that stays yours, the follow ups, the review requests, the site hosted and looked after, and someone to ring when you need something changed.

Priced against what those pieces cost separately, a business running them properly across separate subscriptions is usually somewhere between $700 and $1,300 a month across ten or more bills. Most of the individual ones are under $200, which is exactly why nobody adds them up.

And the number is fixed before any work starts. If the scope changes we say so before we do it, not on the invoice afterwards.

No lock in and no minimum term. If it isn't doing anything for you, you say so and it stops.

What we won't do is promise you thirty leads in thirty days. Anybody who does is optimising for the promise rather than for your business, and Google and Meta change enough that nobody can honestly guarantee an outcome.

What we will say is what we're doing and why, and show you what came of it, including when the answer is not much.

We look at your business first and tell you what we find. What a customer sees when they search for your work in your area, whether your site catches anything, your Google profile against whoever's ranking above you, your reviews, and what happens to an enquiry once somebody sends one.

Then a call, where you get told what we'd fix first and in what order. Sometimes the honest answer is that the fix is small and you don't need us for it.

If it's bigger than that, we'll say so, and you can decide.

If you're flat out and turning work away, you don't need this yet and we'd rather say so than sell you something.

If you're starting out and every dollar counts, the monthly will hurt and it's the wrong time. Get some reviews and come back.

And if what you want is the cheapest possible website, there are people who will do that for a hundred a month. It's a real product and it isn't this one.