The problem
The challenge
Burstow Property Services is Lee's business, a family firm in Welton, just north of Lincoln. Lee and his son Joe do paving, decking, fencing, pergolas, gates and garden buildings across Lincoln and the villages around it.
Their customers rate them highly. When we found Lee in October he had 40 Google reviews, every one five stars, and most of them mention Lee or Joe by name.
Google Maps didn't reflect that. On 12 October we searched "landscaper" from the middle of Lincoln, a few miles south of his yard. Lee wasn't in the top 20. The business in first place had one review, and the one in second had none. Reviews count for a lot on Maps, but Google also has to understand what a business does and where it works, and the website is one of the main places it looks.
His website, on Wix, didn't give it much to go on. Paving, decking, fencing and the rest shared one page, a couple of lines each. The homepage was "Fencing & Landscaping" over a photo of a pergola and a log cabin, with one button: Contact Us. There was no phone number at the top of the page. And the About Us and Gallery links in the menu both went back to the homepage, so anyone who clicked them to see more of his work got nowhere.
Our approach
What we did
Lee didn't ask us for anything. We built him a new site first, from the photos on his old site and the reviews his customers had left on Google, and then sent him the link. If it was no good, he'd lost nothing by looking.
The headline says what he does and where: "Fencing & landscaping in Welton." His number is the first button. Beside it is a wall of his own job photos, and under it his rating: 5.0 from 40 Google reviews.
The reviews are the strongest thing he has, so they're used all the way down the page. There's a full reviews section with every one of them, word for word, and two more sit beside the quote form, where someone deciding whether to get in touch will read them.
Each of his six services gets its own card, with a photo of a job he's done and a quote button. The jobs section is laid out like photos pinned to a board, each labelled with what it is: an aluminium pergola, a lit garden, a porcelain patio, a composite deck, a gravel driveway.
The areas section names Welton, Lincoln and ten villages around them, next to his Google listing on a map. That's for the customer wondering whether he'll come out to them, and for Google working out where he works.
On a phone, a Call Lee bar stays pinned to the bottom of the screen. The quote form sends enquiries straight to his Gmail.
Lee took the site on in late October and asked for two things: his own logo in the header, and one patio we'd labelled sandstone changed to porcelain. Tom made both, moved his domain across, and it went live on www.burstowpropertyservices.co.uk on 27 October.
