Over the past few years I’ve looked at a lot of local business websites. Sometimes properly, sometimes just critically as I browse, and more than once while deciding whether a business was one I could actually help.
Different trades, different towns, wildly different sizes. Cleaners, care companies, builders, right up to businesses doing very well for themselves. And the strange thing is how often the same handful of problems shows up, no matter who I’m looking at. This post is about those problems, the ones I see again and again and, more importantly, what they quietly tell a customer. Here are some of the most common local business website mistakes, and how to avoid them.
Most of these sites aren’t bad, they’re just stuck
Here’s the pattern underneath almost all of it: the website feels like it was built for the business when it was smaller, and it never moved on from there. Nobody’s taken a real strategic look at it since. Nobody’s asked what information actually needs to be on it, or whether it still reflects who the business is now.
Usually it isn’t laziness. When a lot of these sites were built, the owner didn’t know where to start and it was all new to them. They didn’t have the right help at the beginning, or they weren’t in a position to pay for it back then. So they got something up, it did a job, and the years rolled on. The website might not be awful, it just wasn’t built strategically.
Let me show you what sticks with me most and then the wider pattern it belongs to.
The five cleaners and the one photo
I was once looking at local cleaning companies – five of them. Three were using the exact same photo. Not similar. The same stock image.
You can picture how it happened: someone went to a stock photo site, typed in “cleaner,” and picked the first result. (And to be fair, it may not have been the owner at all – it was quite possibly whoever they paid to build the site.) Here’s why it matters, and it’s got nothing to do with the photo being ugly. Think about how a customer chooses a cleaner. They’ve never used you and they can’t inspect your work before they book. So they judge you on the one thing they can see – your website. The care you’ve taken there is read as the care you’ll take in their home.
So when someone lands on a site with a first-result stock photo they’ve half-seen on two other companies’ sites, the unconscious thought is this: you assume you shouldn’t rely on them to do a good job. That’s a lot to hang on one image, but that’s exactly the point – these small signals add up, and the customer is adding them up whether they mean to or not.
It’s rarely just one thing
That cleaner’s photo never travels alone. Once you start looking at a site the way a customer does, you notice the rest, and every one of them is saying something. The logo’s gone a bit blurry, because it was saved at the wrong size. It’s the very first thing a visitor sees, and it’s fuzzy. The images are enormous and unoptimised, so the page takes an age to load and a lot of people won’t wait; they’ll be gone before they’ve read a word. (Google notices slow sites too, which is a whole other cost.) There are animations firing off everywhere, added for no reason other than that someone could, when all they really do is get in the way.
Then there’s the content. A blog with three posts on it, the most recent from two years ago which quietly makes a visitor wonder whether the business is even still going, or still cares. Copy that reads like you’re being talked at down the pub, rather than spoken to by someone you’re about to trust with real work. Pages still carrying the placeholder text that came with the template, never swapped out. Information that’s plainly out of date, sometimes with a little date stamp at the bottom giving the game away.
And the big one, underneath all of it: sites that don’t actually answer the questions the customer turned up with. They talk about the business, not the person reading. Do you cover my area? Roughly what do you cost? Can I trust you in my home? If the site doesn’t say, the visitor usually doesn’t email to find out – they click back and try the next result instead. Oh, and far too many of these still fall apart the moment you open them on a phone. Which is where most people are looking in the first place.
Individually, each of these is minor. You could shrug any one of them off. But they don’t come one at a time, they arrive in threes and fours, and together they tell the same story the cleaner’s photo was telling: no one has taken a proper look at this in a long time.
What about the businesses who are doing fine?
You might be reading this thinking of a bigger local business with a perfectly decent website. Fair. Plenty of successful businesses have a site that looks the part – they found other ways to grow, and good for them. But looking the part and pulling its weight aren’t the same thing, and a decent-but-unstrategic site is a lever they’re leaving untouched. That’s a whole post of its own, so I’ll leave it there for now.
What it all tells us
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. In all the years I’ve been looking at these sites, I’ve never once seen a business pulling significantly ahead of a competitor who’s putting the work in, while doing nothing themselves. Not once.
The businesses winning locally aren’t luckier. They don’t necessarily have bigger budgets. They just took their website seriously, treated it as something that needs attention and a bit of strategy, rather than a thing they ticked off years ago. Which is oddly good news. If the gap were about money or luck, there’d be nothing you could do. But effort and strategy? That’s closable. Anyone can start.
So here’s what I’d do
Go and look at your own website. Right now, before you close this tab. Look at it the way a customer would – someone who’s never met you and is deciding whether to trust you. Is the logo crisp? Do the photos look like you, or like a stock library anyone could have pulled? Does it load quickly on your phone? Does it actually answer the questions someone would arrive with? And when did you last update any of it?
You’ll probably spot one or two of these tells straight away. That’s not a reason to feel bad, it’s the first strategic look the site has had in a long time. And that’s exactly where it starts.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your website, that’s what a Digital Presence Assessment is for.