Prowna

Your website

Your best advertisement is already standing in the street.

5 min read

The short answer

Siding is the one trade whose finished work is visible from the sidewalk, so demand arrives by street rather than by search term. Name the streets you have worked in, and the neighbor who admired it can find you.

Think about how your last three jobs actually arrived. Not the ones from the ad — the good ones. Somebody drove past a house for a few weeks, thought about their own, and eventually did something about it. Siding is the only trade here whose finished work stands in public permanently, at eye level, in front of everybody who walks a dog down that street.

Which means your demand does not arrive one customer at a time from a search box. It arrives in clusters, around a house you have already finished, weeks after you left. And it arrives with a problem attached: the neighbor knows the house perfectly and does not know your name. Nothing on the building says who did it, the van is long gone, and the sign — if there ever was one — came down at handover.

One finished house on a street, and the neighbors who notice it over the following weeks the house you did notices it notices it later later DEMAND ARRIVES BY STREET, NOT BY SEARCH BOX they know the house — they do not know your name
One finished house on a street, and the neighbors who notice it over the following weeks DEMAND ARRIVES BY STREET they know the house, not your name the house you did notices it notices it and then searches the trade, and finds whoever bought the ad
Demand spreads along a street. The neighbor knows the house and not the company.

What that person actually types

He does not type your company name, because he does not have it. He types the trade and his town, or the trade and his neighborhood, and — this is the part worth noticing — quite often he types the street or the subdivision, because the house is the thing in his head. Then he lands on whoever bought the ad, and the job your own work created is handed to a stranger.

So the fix is not a better headline. It is being findable by PLACE. A page per neighborhood you genuinely work in, named the way local people name it, with photographs of houses that look like the houses on that street — the same era, the same roofline, the same problems.

How to do that without it becoming spam

There is a bad version of this and everybody has seen it: forty near-identical pages with the town name swapped, generated in an afternoon. It reads as spam to a human immediately, and search engines have spent years learning to treat it as exactly that. It also fails at the only job that matters, because the neighbor is looking for recognition, not keywords.

Five things a local page needs to be worth having. Our own reasoning, from how demand reaches this trade.
The honest versionWhy it works on a human
One page per area you have really worked in — three or four, not fortyEvery one of them can carry real houses. A page with nothing specific on it convinces nobody and helps nothing.
Photographs of the housing stock, not close-ups of materialHe is trying to answer “would that look right on mine”. Only a whole house on a similar street answers it.
The problems particular to that area, namedPost-war houses with the same detail, a subdivision where every gable is the same, a street where wind comes off open ground. Local knowledge is unfakeable.
What you charged, as a range, for a house of that typeThe neighbor’s real question is whether this is a ten or a thirty thousand dollar conversation. Answering it stops him postponing for a year.
A line inviting him to say which house he sawIt turns an anonymous visitor into a conversation you can actually have, and it tells you which of your jobs is doing the selling.

The last row is worth more than it looks. When somebody says “I saw the gray house on Elm with the new gables”, you have learned two things: which job is generating inquiries, and that the caller has already decided he likes the result. That is a warmer lead than any form fill, and it exists only because you invited the sentence.

That last block is not a website line, and it belongs in the piece anyway, because the sign and the page are the same strategy in two forms. One catches the neighbor at the moment he is looking at the house; the other catches him three weeks later when he finally sits down with a phone. Doing only one of them wastes the other.

What this replaces

It replaces the material catalogue as the front of the site. The manufacturer already has better photographs of their own product than you will ever take, and every competitor is showing the same ones — which is why they persuade nobody. What no manufacturer can show, and no competitor bothers to, is a house on a street somebody recognises, with a number beside it and an honest sentence about what was found underneath.

Want the website version of all this?

We build it, whole, before you pay anything. You change what you like and decide afterwards.