The local business website checklist

Most local businesses we speak to don't need a bigger website. They need the eight or nine basics done properly, because the gap between a local site that generates enquiries and one that doesn't is almost never design — it's whether these are in place.

Free, do this week

• 1. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. For local searches this often matters more than the website itself. Real address, exact opening hours, categories, services, and at least ten genuine photos. Half-finished profiles lose to complete ones consistently.
• 2. Put your phone number in the header of every page, as a tappable link. Not an image, not only on the contact page. Many local enquiries are a phone call made outdoors on a phone.
• 3. Say where you are and what you cover, in plain words. "Norwich and across Norfolk" beats a list of thirty village names, which reads as spam to a customer and to Google.
• 4. Test the contact form today. Submit it and confirm the email arrives in a mailbox someone reads. Broken forms are far more common than anyone expects, and they fail silently.
• 5. Make name, address and phone number identical everywhere — website, Google, Facebook, directories. Inconsistency undermines local trust signals.
• 6. Ask five happy customers for a Google review. A short personal message works; a link or QR code makes it easy. This is the highest-return local marketing available and it costs nothing.

Content, worth real effort

• 7. One page per service. A single page listing eight services will lose to eight pages each answering one question. This is the most reliable local search improvement there is.
• 8. Unique titles and descriptions per page. Not the same line repeated site-wide. Each should describe what's on that page, in the words a customer would type.
• 9. Answer the questions you're asked on the phone. Price guidance, how quickly you can come out, whether you cover their area, what happens on the day. People search for these before they call.
• 10. Show real proof. Named testimonials, photographs of your own work, actual numbers. Anonymous quotes and stock imagery both read as invented.
• 11. Prices, or at least a floor. "From £X" filters out the enquiries you can't serve and dramatically improves the ones you get. The reluctance is understandable; the results still favour it.

Technical, get it done once

• 12. Test the site on a phone on mobile data, standing outside, not on your office Wi-Fi. If it isn't useful within about three seconds, oversized images are usually the cause and compressing them is an afternoon's work.
• 13. Make sure Google can see it. A sitemap, a robots file that isn't blocking crawlers, and the site verified in Search Console. Sites launched with staging settings still in place are invisible and look fine to the owner.
• 14. Add local business structured data — your name, address, phone, hours and area served in a form search engines read directly. Small job, meaningful effect on how you appear.

What this looks like done

A completed Google profile with a steady flow of reviews. A fast site that works one-handed on a phone. A page for each service, each answering one real question with a price floor and proof. A phone number one tap away on every screen. A form that reliably reaches you. That set-up outperforms a far more expensive site without it, every time.

What it costs to have done

Items 1–6 are free and yours to do — nobody needs to charge you for them. If you'd rather not, our five to six page website at £1,250 covers items 7 to 14 as standard, including structured data, per-page titles and Search Console setup. For a single, well-made page with the same basics, that's £495.

If you're in Norfolk and choosing between quotes, the questions to ask a Norwich web designer is the companion to this list. And if the real problem is the admin behind the business rather than the website, start with the seven signs you've outgrown spreadsheets.

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