A site that gets the call when
someone's boiler packs in at 7pm.

What usually goes wrong

The five things we see on almost every trade website we audit.

Trades have a different customer from a café or a salon. The customer is often in a small crisis — water on the floor, lights out, radiator not firing — and they want to dial a number, not fill in a form. The site either helps that happen or it doesn't.

1. 01

   Your van says 'call 07…' but your website says 'fill in this form'

   Someone sees your van at the lights, remembers the name a fortnight later when a pipe bursts, Googles you on their phone, and the first thing they see is a photo of a boiler and a "Get in touch" button that opens a four-field form. The muscle memory is dial, not type. They close the tab and call the next plumber in the results.

   The fix is embarrassingly simple: phone number, giant, in the hero, tap-to-call on mobile, visible on every page. Every trade site we build has this. Forms are for people who want a quote; the phone is for people who want a plumber within the hour.

2. 02

   Spending £12 a click on 'emergency plumber' ads that go nowhere

   A trade runs Google Ads for "emergency plumber Shipley" at £8-15 per click. The ad lands on the homepage, which lists fourteen services, shows three photos of happy kitchens, and hides the phone number under a fold. Clickthrough to call happens maybe 3% of the time. For every 100 clicks at £12, that's £1,200 spent to book three jobs — and most trades never work this out.

   Emergency traffic needs its own landing page: one promise, one number, one photo, no navigation. Conversion on a well-built emergency landing page runs 20-30%. Same ad spend, seven times the work. Our Pro tier includes service-area landing pages for exactly this.

3. 03

   Call tracking that was never set up

   You know you spent £200 on Google Ads last month. You don't know how many of the twelve jobs you did came from those ads. So you either turn the ads off (and wonder if the work dries up) or keep spending blind. Most trades we audit can't attribute a single booking to a single marketing channel.

   A tracking number (through CallRail, Infinity, or Hallo-style) on each landing page lets you see which traffic sources actually ring. The main office number stays primary in your schema so Google's knowledge panel isn't confused. This is a 30-minute setup that saves three-figure-a-month mystery spend.

4. 04

   Gas Safe / NICEIC number hidden in a 10px footer

   Your Gas Safe number is your licence to work on gas. Your NICEIC number means a third party has actually checked your electrical work is safe. These are your strongest trust signals — and they're also legally required to be displayed in your advertising. Gas Safe Regulations 2018 specifically say the number must appear when offering gas work.

   Most trade sites have the logo as a 40px image in the footer linking to nothing. We put the badge above the fold, at proper size, linking directly to your entry on the Gas Safe or NICEIC register. Compliance, trust, and SEO signal all at once.

5. 05

   Reviews that are text-only when they could be before-and-after photos

   A plumber with 20 text testimonials loses every time to a plumber with 15 reviews plus before/after photos — new boiler install, drain cleared, bathroom finished. Customers converting on trade sites are nervous they're being ripped off; the single strongest signal is visible proof of work done well.

   We build a photo-per-job section into every trade site — your phone shoots, you upload, we compress and format. After a year you have thirty of them. It's the single highest-return content investment a trade can make, and it costs nothing per job after the habit sets in.

Why this is harder than it looks

The six things most trade-site builders don't know to check.

Trade websites have different technical priorities from cafés or salons. A slow restaurant site is annoying; a slow plumber site on a panicked customer's phone at seven in the evening is the difference between a booked job and a lost one.

• LocalBusiness + Service schema

  Google ranks local trades by geographic signals. The structured-data markup that tells Google "we cover BD17, BD18, BD16, LS28, with a 15-mile radius from BD18 4BY" is called Service.areaServed with explicit PostalAddress entries. Most trade sites have zero of this. We generate the full schema from your service areas automatically; it's the single fastest way to rank for "plumber in Bingley" if you actually cover Bingley.

• Emergency intent vs research intent

  Someone searching "emergency plumber near me" at midnight wants to dial. Someone searching "how to bleed a radiator" wants to read for ten minutes. They need different landing pages. Most trade sites have one homepage for everything, which optimises for neither. Your site needs emergency pages (one number, big, no navigation) and research pages (calm how-to content that captures someone who will call you next week). We split them on every build.

• Call-tracking number placement

  Tracking numbers let you see which channel produces which call, but they break Google's primary-number matching if you drop them on your main homepage. Correct practice: the real office number stays primary in your schema and on the canonical about page; tracking numbers only replace the display on ads-landing pages. Done wrong, you can confuse Google and lose rankings. We set this up so the two never conflict.

• Tap-to-call with proper fallbacks

  The tel: URI scheme dials the number on mobile. On desktop, it opens FaceTime or Skype, which is useless. Every phone link on every trade site we build is mobile-tap-to-call, desktop- shows-the-number-to-copy — tested on iOS Safari, Android Chrome, and five desktop browsers. This is the kind of thing most agencies don't bother verifying.

• Review + AggregateRating schema

  That "4.9 ★ from 47 reviews" badge you see in some Google results doesn't come free. The site has to declare an AggregateRating under LocalBusiness schema, with the rating value and review count, sourced from real reviews. Done right, your listing visually beats competitors at a glance. Done without real reviews, Google flags it as spam and drops the site. We sync it from your actual Google Business Profile reviews, so the numbers are always honest and always fresh.

• Job-photo compression at scale

  After a year of trades, you'll have 40+ before/after photos. Uploaded raw from a phone, that's 200MB of page weight on the gallery page alone — customers on 4G get a blank screen for 15 seconds. Every photo we ingest becomes WebP with JPEG fallback, auto-srcset for resolution, max 500KB at full quality. Your 40-photo gallery loads as fast as a single raw phone photo would.

What we measure

Before we hand your site over.

Trade-specific commitments. Every site ships with a one-page report for your records. If any metric fails, we fix it before launch.

Tap-to-call tested

iOS Safari + Android Chrome + 5 desktop browsers

Every phone link works or we don't ship

Mobile LCP

Under 2.5s on simulated 3G

A leak-in-progress customer can't wait

Service area schema

Every postcode you cover, machine-readable

Google ranks you for each one

Gas Safe / NICEIC badge

Above the fold, linked to register entry

Compliance + trust signal

Review/Rating schema

Synced from your real GBP reviews

Stars show in search results

Emergency landing page (Pro)

One number, no navigation, no scroll

25%+ call conversion on paid traffic

Time to first launch

48 hours from paid order to live site

From checkout to subdomain

What's included

Every trade website, baseline.

• Tap-to-call phone number in the hero

  Giant, above the fold, sticky on mobile scroll. The first thing a panicked customer can touch. Works on every device we test.

• Service area pages with proper schema

  A page per postcode you cover, with LocalBusiness + Service schema so Google ranks you for each specific area. Five on Essential, twenty on Pro.

• Before-and-after job gallery

  Upload photos from your phone, we compress and format. Each job becomes one card. After six months you have a portfolio no text testimonial can match.

• Gas Safe / NICEIC / APHC badge above the fold

  Proper size, proper link to your register entry. Compliant with Gas Safe Regulations 2018 advertising requirements. Visible trust signal on every page.

• Emergency-ready CTA

  Beyond the hero phone number: a sticky bottom bar on mobile with tap-to-call, visible throughout scroll. On Pro, a dedicated emergency landing page for paid traffic.

• Google Business Profile integration

  We claim, verify, and optimise on day one. Opening hours sync from your site, photos upload in batch, services match your site categories.

• Review request automation

  Post-job email prompting the customer to leave a Google review. One prompt, no spam. Review + AggregateRating schema syncs back so your star rating shows in search results.

• Hosting, SSL, domain renewal

  We handle the boring infrastructure. Domain registered in your name — if you leave we hand you the code and the export, no lock-in.

Pricing

Two tiers. Fixed prices. No contracts.

One-off build fee. £15/month hosting after the free period. Cancel any time and we send you the code — no lock-in.

Prefer to scope it before paying? Start a five-minute brief instead →

Accepted payment methods

Questions we get most weeks

What trades actually ask before they start.

If yours isn't answered here, email hello@pacavita.com — reply inside a working day, most weeks inside an hour.

• How fast can you actually build a trade website?+

  Essential sites go live within 48 hours of your brief arriving. Pro sites take 5 to 7 days because of the additional service-area pages, emergency landing page, and call-tracking setup. Tap-to-call and basic schema are live on day one either way.

• Do you integrate call tracking without breaking Google rankings?+

  Yes. We use the standard practice: your real office number stays primary on the canonical about page and in LocalBusiness schema. Tracking numbers only replace the display on paid-ad landing pages, never on your main pages. Google's local ranking signal stays intact.

• What if I add a new service area after launch?+

  Send us the postcode, we add the area page inside a working day. Postcode goes into your Service.areaServed schema automatically. Most trades add two or three areas in the first six months as the work spreads.

• Do you give me a phone number, or do I keep my own?+

  You keep your own. We never put a number on your site that isn't yours. If you want call tracking on top, we set up a tracking layer that forwards to your real number — you still answer from the same phone, you just get attribution reports.

• Will my Gas Safe or NICEIC number display properly?+

  Badge appears above the fold, at legible size, linked directly to your Gas Safe or NICEIC register entry. That meets the Gas Safe Regulations 2018 advertising requirement and doubles as a strong trust signal. Most trade sites get this wrong — 40px footer logos that link nowhere.

• I run Google Ads — can you build landing pages for those campaigns?+

  Yes. Pro tier includes a dedicated emergency landing page designed for paid traffic: one number, one photo, no navigation, no scroll to the CTA. Conversion on these typically runs 20 to 30% vs 3% on a homepage. We can also build per-service landing pages (emergency boiler, blocked drain, no hot water) as bolt-ons.

• What happens when I start getting Google reviews?+

  We wire Review + AggregateRating schema from day one. Once your GBP has reviews flowing, your star rating can appear in search results — the orange stars you see on some competitor listings. You need real reviews to make this work (we don't fake anything); the review-request flow helps those come in naturally after each job.

• Can you take over my existing trade site without losing Google rankings?+

  Yes. We migrate your content, set up 301 redirects for every old URL, keep your existing domain live throughout, and rebuild your schema properly. Rankings usually hold; on audited cases they've gone up because the new site's Core Web Vitals are faster and schema is complete. The 48-hour window still applies once we have access.