Getting found and getting called
You are not competing to be the best. Somewhere earlier than that you are competing to be found at all, and to be reachable in the ninety seconds after the homeowner decides. Most of what decides this happens before they have any opinion about your work.
How much this weighs when I read a company the way a homeowner does: 21 out of 100.
What gets read
- Which listings carry your name, and whether they agree with each other
- Whether your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear
- What a search engine can read about the business behind the scenes
- Every route a homeowner has to reach you, and what happens on each one
What owners ask me about this
- Why does a competitor show up when I do not?
- Usually not because their work is better. Search engines are reading signals you cannot see from inside the business: how consistently your details appear across the places that list you, how complete your listing is, how recently anything about you was updated. They may simply have tidier records. That is a fixable thing, and it is fixable without spending anything on advertising.
- Do directory listings still matter?
- Not the way they did when people browsed them. They matter now because they corroborate you. When a dozen sources agree on your name, address and phone number, a search engine treats those details as confirmed. When four of them carry an old address from before you moved, that confidence drops, and so does how often you are shown. Nobody is reading those listings. Something is.
- How fast do I need to answer a new enquiry?
- Faster than feels reasonable. The homeowner did not send that enquiry only to you, and the honest reason the first responder usually wins is not that they are better, it is that they are first and the others have not replied yet. If enquiries reach you while you are up a ladder, the fix is rarely trying harder. It is changing what happens in the hour you cannot answer.
- Is my phone number really a problem?
- It can be the whole problem. A number that rings out, a voicemail nobody clears, a form that sends to an inbox you stopped reading, a mobile listed in one place and a landline in another. None of that shows up as a lost job in any report you look at, because the enquiry never arrives. You cannot count what never reached you, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for years.
Everything above is the general case. Yours has names in it.
From here I can't see where you stand on this, or which rival is ahead. Chalkline Reports reads your own company the way a homeowner does.