Red Isle WebOpen almost any trades website on the Island and you will find a page called Services, and on it a list. Walkways, patios, steps, chimneys, repointing, retaining walls. It is all true, and it would sit just as comfortably on the website of the outfit two towns over.
What the list cannot tell anybody is whether you are good at the work, which is the one thing the person reading it wants to know. The proof usually exists, sitting in the camera roll on a phone in a truck, hundreds of photos of finished jobs nobody outside the business has ever looked at.
Yes, and photos of finished jobs, with a few sentences about each one, now do more for a small business website than the services list does. Google has said for years that it favours pages showing first-hand experience over pages that describe a service in general terms. A page about one job you did yourself is about as first-hand as a website gets.
Why does Google care whether you show your work?
Google publishes a list of questions it tells site owners to ask about their own pages, and one of them is whether the content clearly demonstrates first-hand expertise, the kind that comes from having used a service yourself or having been to the place you are writing about. In 2022 they added a second E to E-A-T, the shorthand they use for judging quality, and that new E stands for Experience. The point of adding it was to tell apart people writing about a thing and people who have done the thing.
A services page cannot pass that test, and it is not the page's fault. "We install and repair asphalt shingle roofing" is a sentence that could sit on any roofing website in Canada, and close to that exact sentence does sit on most of them. A page about the barn roof you stripped in Bonshaw last October, with your own photos and a note about what you found under the old shingles, could not have been written by anybody but you.
Google ran a couple of big ranking updates this year and the people who follow those for a living came away saying much the same thing. Thin, templated pages lost ground, and pages showing genuine work held or gained. The bigger reason to bother, though, is the customer sitting at a kitchen table deciding between you and two other outfits. She wants to know whether you are any good, and a list of six trades cannot tell her.
What counts as showing your work?
Take six to ten photos of one job on your phone, roughly in the order the work happened, and put them on their own page with two or three paragraphs underneath. Where it was. What the customer wanted. What you ran into once you opened it up. How long it took. That is the whole format, and it does not need to be prettier than that.
Most people only photograph the finished job, and the before shot is the one that does the most for you. A finished cedar deck is a nice photo. Put it beside the rotted-out thing that was there in April and people can see what you did.
If the job was in Souris, put Souris on the page. That is a specific true detail that helps somebody picture you working near them, and it is also how your name gets attached to a place in search results and in AI answers. I wrote about how AI assistants pick which businesses to name a week or so back, and the short version is that they are hunting for exactly this kind of specific, consistent evidence.
Ask the customer before you post anything shot inside their house. Most people say yes, and a fair few are pleased to be asked.
"Nobody's going to read a page about a barn roof"
That is mostly right, and the page still earns its place. Most visitors will scroll the photos and never read a word underneath, which is fine, because the photos were the point. The one person who does read all of it is the person about to spend eight thousand dollars and trying to work out whether you are the one. There is only one of him, and he is the one writing the cheque.
The other reader is Google, and now the AI answers sitting on top of Google. Those do read the words. A page of specifics about one job in one named town is the sort of thing they can pull an answer out of. Six words on a services menu is not.
The good news
You already have the photos, which is most of the job done. Almost every tradesperson I have met has hundreds of those pictures and no idea what to do with them, and you do not need a camera, a photographer, or a copywriter to turn a dozen of them into the best page on your website. Three or four jobs is enough to start with. Add one when you finish something you are proud of, which for most people works out to a few times a year.
If your site is a services list and nothing else, that is a fixable problem and a smaller job than folks expect.
That is the kind of site I build at Red Isle Web, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee, built around the jobs you have done. Have a look at my work, or send me a note and I will tell you which of your jobs I would put up first and what to shoot next time you are on one.