What a local business website needs before it needs anything else

Most local business websites I am asked to look at are not missing pages. They are missing five specific things, and every one of them sits between a person deciding they are interested and that person actually booking.

This is for salons, clinics, studios, shops and trades. If you have a website and the phone is quieter than it should be, start here rather than with a redesign.

1. What you do and where, in the first line

Someone lands on your site from a search or an Instagram profile and gives you a couple of seconds. The top of the page has to answer what you do and where you are, in plain words.

"Sports massage in Walthamstow" beats a clever tagline every time. If your headline could belong to a business two hundred miles away, it is not working hard enough.

2. Prices, or the shape of them

This is the one people resist most and it is the one that changes the most.

You do not have to publish a full price list. "Treatments from £45" or "Most kitchens we fit come in between £8,000 and £14,000" is enough. It filters out the enquiries that were never going to book, and it stops the right person leaving to go and find someone who does say.

Every enquiry that opens with "how much is it?" is an enquiry your website could have handled without you.

3. One obvious way to book

Not a phone number in the header, a form at the bottom, a WhatsApp link in the footer and a booking system on a different page. One.

Pick the way you actually want people to come in and make it the loudest thing on the page, repeated at the top, the middle and the end. Every extra option is a decision you are asking a stranger to make.

4. Proof from people nearby

Reviews matter more for local businesses than almost anything else on the site, and they work hardest when they sound local and specific.

Two or three real reviews that name the treatment, the job or the area beat twenty generic five star quotes. If your reviews live on Google, pull the best ones onto the site as well. Nobody is going to go looking.

5. A reason to stay in touch if they are not ready

Most people who visit a local business website are not booking today. Without a way to keep in touch, that visit is worth nothing.

It does not have to be a fancy lead magnet. A short guide, a seasonal checklist, an offer for first time customers, anything that is worth an email address. Then a handful of emails that turn up over the following weeks so you are still there when they are ready.

This is the piece almost every local business is missing, and it is the one that compounds.

Do these before you spend on ads

Local ads work. They work far better once the five things above are in place, because ads only ever make more people see the page you already have. A page that does not answer the price question does not start answering it because you paid for the traffic.