Before I ran my own studio, I worked in UX at a SaaS company, watching how real users get stuck on interfaces that look fine from the builder's chair. That habit hasn't left me — I still can't look at a site without clicking every button the way an actual visitor would.
So when a flooring contractor in Illinois asked me to look at his site before deciding whether to rebuild it, I did exactly that. He has real 5-star reviews on Google, Yelp, and Houzz. He didn't need a rebuild. He needed someone to actually click around.
A few things I found in about twenty minutes:
Not his contact form. On desktop, that's a dead end for anyone who'd rather fill out a form than call a stranger. Easy fix, but it was quietly costing him leads every single day it sat like that.
Several headlines on the page were just large paragraph text, not actual H1/H2/H3 tags. Search engines use that structure to understand what a page is about — so this wasn't just a readability issue, it was working against him showing up in local search.
He has genuine 5-star feedback across three platforms, and none of it lived on his own homepage. That's not a small miss — research from Northwestern's Spiegel Research Center found products or services with reviews convert at up to 270% higher rates than those with none, and Harvard Business School research found each additional star on Yelp correlates with roughly a 9% revenue increase. He had the reviews. He just wasn't using them.
It's kind of remarkable — what a few simple tweaks can do to improve a business's visibility.
None of this needed new code, a new platform, or a redesign. It needed someone to go through the site the way a visitor actually would, not the way a builder template assumes they will.
If yours has been nagging at you, I'd be happy to take a look.
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