The questions your website was never written to answer
Every site has services, about and contact. Customers arrive wanting something none of those three pages covers.
Websites get built around what a business wants to say. Who we are. What we offer. Why choose us. Get in touch.
Customers arrive with something else entirely. They have one specific worry, and they are scanning for it.
When they cannot find it, they leave. They do not fill in the form to ask. Most of them just go.
The questions nobody thought to answer
These are real ones, from real trades. None of them appear on the websites of the businesses that get asked them weekly.
- Do I need to be home while you work?
- Is there parking, and do I pay for it?
- Will you move the furniture or should I?
- Can you work around the dog?
- How much mess will there be, and who clears it?
- Do you take card, or is it cash and bank transfer only?
Notice what they have in common. None of them are about whether you are good at your job.
People are booking a disruption, not a service
This is the thing that is easy to miss after fifteen years in a trade.
You think you are selling a rewire, or a clean, or a haircut. The customer is arranging a day off work, a dog in another room, and a stranger in their house.
Their questions are about the day, not the work. Your website is about the work.
How to find yours
Three places to look, and none of them need software.
- Your last two weeks of messages. Tally what people asked.
- The first five minutes of a job. What does the customer ask you on the doorstep? That is a question they wanted answered before you arrived.
- Your own reviews. When someone thanks you for something specific, that was a worry they had beforehand.
The doorstep one is the most useful and the least used. Write down the next ten.
Where to put the answers
Not on a separate page called Questions that nobody visits.
Put them where the worry happens. Parking goes next to the address. Furniture goes next to the description of the job. Payment goes next to the price.
A question answered in the right place stops a message. The same words on a page nobody opens do nothing at all.
This is the same gap we wrote about in your website answers five questions and customers have fifty, looked at from the customer's side of the door.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.