The most common complaint I hear
It arrives in almost the same words every time. The leads are all price shopping. We're not the cheapest so we're not converting. And the business saying it is usually right about the symptom, which is why it's worth taking seriously rather than treating as a mindset problem.
The bit that's almost never true is the cause. It gets described as something arriving from outside, a market full of tyre kickers, a category that's gone cheap, customers who don't value quality any more. Sometimes that's real. Far more often, I go and look at the advertising and find the business has been asking for price shoppers in writing, at its own expense, for months.
Here's a recent one, described without enough detail to identify anybody. The newest ad opened with a price. Three older ones carried the same line inviting people to message for an instant estimate. The lead magnet promised a number by text in thirty seconds. And across eight pages of website, not one mention of any of the things that actually separate a good job in that trade from a bad one. Not one.
That business is not being found by price shoppers. It's recruiting them, and paying for the privilege.
People compare on whatever you give them to compare
This is the whole mechanism and it isn't complicated. Somebody who needs work done and doesn't know how to judge it will find some way to choose. They have to. And they'll use whichever axis they've been handed, because it's the only one they can actually operate.
If the first thing they meet is a number, you've told them the decision is about the number. They'll get two more numbers and pick. That isn't them being cheap, it's them doing the only comparison available with the information they were given. When I went through thirty one trade businesses one by one, this was the single most common shape of the problem. 
What we found auditing 31 Australian trade businesses
Picture three quotes on a kitchen table. If the reader can't evaluate the specification, the method, the materials or the guarantee, then all three documents are effectively blank except for the last line. So the last line decides it. Not because price is what they care about most, but because it's the only line they can read.
This isn't a metaphor. For somebody who has never bought this before, the specification genuinely is illegible, and the only line with an agreed meaning is the one at the bottom.
The instant estimate is usually the most expensive thing on the site
It seems generous, which is why it spreads. Nobody likes waiting for a quote, so a business that can produce a number quickly feels like the helpful one. And the tools that generate those numbers are sold on exactly that promise.
But look at what it does to the conversation. Before you've said anything about how you work, you've established that this is a purchase that can be priced without understanding the job. That's a claim, and it's a claim that flatters the cheapest operator in your market, because the cheapest operator can make it honestly and you can't.
It also selects for the wrong person at the wrong moment. Somebody who wants a number in thirty seconds is, definitionally, not yet ready to have a conversation about anything else. You've built the fastest possible path for the least committed visitor, and usually no path at all for the one who's been researching for three weeks and wants to know whether you'll do it properly.
I'm not saying never give a price. Published prices can be a genuine kindness and I've argued for them elsewhere. What is your monthly actually for? The question is whether the number arrives before or after the reason.
You need to give them a second axis
The fix isn't hiding your price, and it isn't calling yourself premium. Anybody can write premium on a website and it costs nothing, which is exactly why it convinces nobody.
What actually changes the comparison is naming the things that make one job different from another, in enough detail that a stranger could use them to interrogate somebody else's quote. That last part is the test. If what you've written can't be turned into a question the reader could ask your competitor, it isn't a differentiator, it's an adjective.
Every trade has these and most of them are invisible from the outside. The preparation that gets skipped. The part that fails in three years if it's done the quick way. The approval that either was or wasn't obtained. The thing that has to happen underneath, before the visible part goes on, that nobody will ever see and nobody can check afterwards.
Write those down and something useful happens. The reader now has a second axis, and on that axis you're not the expensive one, you're the one who explained it. The buyer who only ever wanted the cheapest still goes to the cheapest, and that's fine, because you were never going to win that job at a margin worth having. Saying plainly which work you want is the other half of this. The jobs you don't want are the ones you're asking for The one who was nervous and didn't know what to ask now has a reason to call you specifically.
That's the same argument as the one about the website deciding which jobs you get asked to quote, from the other end. It isn't about how many enquiries arrive. It's about what they've already decided by the time they do.
Read your own advertising as a stranger
Half an hour, no tools, and you can do it on your phone. The point is to meet your own business in the order a customer meets it, which is almost never the order you built it in.
- Find the first number
Go through your ads, your profile and your homepage and find the first number a stranger encounters. If it's a price, or a promise about how fast they'll get one, that's the axis you've chosen. Everything after it is being read in that frame.
- Search your own pages for the words that matter
Pick the six things that genuinely separate a good job from a bad one in your trade. Now search your website for each of them. Nine times out of ten at least half return nothing at all, which means the argument you make on the phone every week exists nowhere a customer can find it.
- Ask whether a stranger could use it as a question
Take whatever you do say about quality and ask whether it could be turned into a question the reader could put to your competitor. Committed to excellence can't be. We do this specific thing before that specific thing, and here's what happens if you skip it, can be.
- Ring three people who didn't go ahead
Not to sell to them, and say so. Ask what they ended up doing and how they picked. The answers are uncomfortable and worth more than any report, and roughly a third of the time the reason has nothing to do with price at all.
What this doesn't fix
Being honest about the limits, because this argument gets oversold. Some markets really are price-led at the bottom end, and no amount of good writing turns a fifteen minute job into a considered purchase. If what you sell is genuinely undifferentiated and the customer genuinely knows what they're getting, price is a reasonable way to choose and you should compete on cost, or move up into work where it isn't.
There's also a version of this that's a capacity problem in disguise. If the good enquiries do arrive and they go cold before anybody rings them back, that isn't positioning, and rewriting the website won't touch it. Why ads stop working for trade businesses
But when a business tells me the market has gone cheap, and the first six words of its own ad are a price, the market usually isn't the thing that changed.
Should I take the prices off my website then?
Usually not. A published price is often the most respectful thing on a site, and taking it away to seem more considered mostly just costs you the people who were checking whether you were in their range. The question isn't whether the number is there, it's whether the reason is there first. A price on a page that explains what drives it reads completely differently from the same number on a page that doesn't.
Isn't naming what makes a good job just telling my competitors how to sell against me?
In theory. In practice the ones who could act on it already know, and the ones who don't know aren't reading your website closely enough to learn. What you're really risking is somebody copying your words, which happens and is survivable, because the business that has to copy an explanation of its own method is not usually the one winning the work.
My leads genuinely are all price shoppers. What if the positioning is fine?
Then the honest next question is where they're arriving from. A channel that rewards the cheapest option will deliver people shopping on price no matter what your website says, and that's a distribution problem rather than a writing one. Worth separating the two before rewriting anything, because they have completely different fixes.