Swan Ops
Our builds

Fifteen things go wrong with a small business website. Here's all fifteen, answered.

Below are three complete trade websites — a builder, a sparky and a plumber. You can open any of them, click through every page, and check the code underneath. Every number on this page is measured from those builds. None of it is estimated.

Builder

Karri & Co

Extensions, renovations and knock-down rebuilds across the Perth metro.

Four job-type pages. Four projects written up properly.

Open the site
Electrician

Northline Electrical

Faults, switchboards, safety switches, rewires and EV chargers.

Six fault-type pages. Licence number on every one of them.

Open the site
Plumber and gas fitter

Tapwell Plumbing & Gas

Blocked drains, burst pipes, hot water and gas — round the clock.

Six job pages and twelve suburb pages.

Open the site

These three businesses don't exist. We built them to show the work, so the licence numbers, the addresses, the reviews and the jobs are all made up — and each site says so on itself. They're blocked from search on purpose, because an invented builder has no business turning up in Perth's results against builders who are real. Everything else on them — the code, the structure, the speed, the way they behave on a phone — is exactly what we build for a paying client.

Under the bonnet

What Google actually receives.

A search engine never sees the design. It reads the code. Here is what it gets from each of the three — measured from the built files, and checkable yourself in about twenty seconds.

Karri & Co
Pages, each with its own title and description
17
Meta description, written by hand (characters)
188
Kinds of structured data across the site
9
Trade declared in machine-readable terms
GeneralContractor
Stylesheet for the whole site, compressed
10 kB
Tap-to-call links on the home page
5
Third-party scripts
0
Image files to download
0
Broken internal links
0
Northline Electrical
Pages, each with its own title and description
18
Meta description, written by hand (characters)
196
Kinds of structured data across the site
10
Trade declared in machine-readable terms
Electrician
Stylesheet for the whole site, compressed
9 kB
Tap-to-call links on the home page
7
Third-party scripts
0
Image files to download
0
Broken internal links
0
Tapwell Plumbing & Gas
Pages, each with its own title and description
32
Meta description, written by hand (characters)
194
Kinds of structured data across the site
10
Trade declared in machine-readable terms
Plumber
Stylesheet for the whole site, compressed
9 kB
Tap-to-call links on the home page
4
Third-party scripts
0
Image files to download
0
Broken internal links
0

Check your own, while you're here

Open your website, right-click anywhere on the page and choose View page source. Then search that text for ld+json. If nothing comes back, Google is guessing at what trade you're in. Search for description next — if what you find reads like it was written by the theme rather than by a person, that's the sentence showing under your name in the results.

We're not going to tell you what we think is wrong with your site on a page you didn't ask for. Have a look yourself. If you'd rather someone did it properly, that's the Health Check.

The list

The five that decide whether the phone rings.

For a local service business these five do most of the damage. The other ten are underneath.

  1. Poor mobile experience

    Nearly every trade enquiry arrives on a phone, usually held in one hand, often outside. So a call button stays within thumb reach on every page and at every scroll position, and the targets are sized for a thumb rather than a mouse pointer.

  2. Slow loading speed

    Each page is built ahead of time as finished HTML, so the server does no thinking when someone opens it. There are no stock photos to fetch, no font pulled from Google, no chat widget and no tracker. The page is readable before a single line of JavaScript has run — switch scripting off and the whole site still works.

  3. Unclear service descriptions

    One page per job, not one page listing everything. Someone with a burst pipe at eleven at night lands on the burst pipe page and reads about burst pipes — not a services menu they have to sort through first.

  4. Weak SEO and low Google visibility

    Google is told in plain machine-readable terms that Northline is an Electrician, where it works and when it opens. It is not left to infer the trade from the wording. Every page carries its own title, its own description and a breadcrumb trail, and the sitemap lists the lot.

  5. No clear call to action

    The phone number is a link, not a picture of a number. It sits in the header, in the footer, in the sticky bar and beside every service — between four and seven tap-to-call links on the home page alone, depending on the build.

And the other ten.

  1. Outdated or unprofessional design

    Each of the three has its own typefaces, its own colours and its own layout. None is the other two with the logo swapped.

  2. Confusing navigation

    A short, flat menu. Everything is one or two taps from anywhere, and the trail back is marked up so Google shows it in the result.

  3. Broken links or forms

    Zero broken internal links across all three builds — measured across every page of the built output, not spot-checked.

  4. No trust signals

    Licence numbers on every page, jobs written up with what actually happened, and reviews shown as text rather than a badge image.

  5. Missing contact information

    Phone, service area, hours and ABN in the footer of every single page. Nobody should have to hunt for the contact page.

  6. Poor-quality images or text

    No stock photography at all. The artwork is drawn as vector, so it stays sharp on any screen and weighs nothing. The words are written for the trade, not spun.

  7. Security problems

    HTTPS from the first request. No CMS and no plugins, which means nothing to patch and nothing that quietly breaks six months after handover.

  8. No analytics or conversion tracking

    On a live build, tracking goes in on day one — you should know which page produced the call. These three are demonstrations and deliberately run none, which their privacy pages say outright.

  9. Accessibility issues

    A skip link, real headings in order, everything reachable by keyboard, the page language declared, and motion that stands down when the visitor has asked their device to reduce it.

  10. Visitors leave without contacting the business

    Which is the one that actually costs money, and it is the sum of the other fourteen. A visitor who can read the page on their phone, understands the job, and can see the number without looking for it, rings.

Want yours built like that?

Properly built. Properly looked after. Start with a free chat, or have us go through your current site and tell you exactly what's costing you calls.

See the Health Check