Every few weeks someone tells me a version of the same thing. “We have a website. We paid for it. Nobody calls from it.” Sometimes they add “we tried ads” or “my nephew did the SEO.” What they really want to know is whether the site is broken or whether it just needs more of something.

Most of the time it is neither. The site is not broken. It is just not connected to the way people actually look for a plumber, a remodeler, a pool company, or a shop. Here are the three things I look at before I say anything else. You can do the first two yourself in about twenty minutes.

1. Does Google know what you do, and do you know what Google thinks you do?

Open Google in a private window and search for your trade plus your town. “Deck builder Bethel Park.” “Pool service South Hills.” Are you on the first page? Does your Google Business Profile show up in the map box? If you are not there, your website is not the first problem. The map box is where local calls come from, and it runs on your Business Profile, your reviews, and whether your name, address, and phone number match everywhere they appear online.

Then the part almost nobody does. Google gives every site owner a free report called Search Console. It lists the exact searches that showed your site, how many people saw it, and how many clicked. Most owners have never opened it. When I open one for the first time, the same pattern shows up nearly every time: the site already appears for two or three searches the owner never wrote a page about, and it is missing for the one search they care about most. That is not a mystery. That is a to-do list.

2. What happens in the first five seconds on a phone?

Pull up your own site on your phone, not your desktop. Most of your visitors are on a phone, usually standing in a driveway or sitting at a kitchen table, and they decide in a few seconds whether to keep reading or go back to the search results.

Three things I look for:

• Is the phone number a tap-to-call link at the top, or is it plain text buried in the footer?
• Can they tell in one screen what you do and where you do it? “Kitchen and bath remodeling in the South Hills” beats “Welcome to our website.”
• Is there one obvious next step? A quote form with four fields, or a “call now” button. Not a menu of nine pages.

Then time the load. If the site takes more than three or four seconds on a phone, a chunk of visitors leave before they see any of it. That is usually oversized photos or a page builder doing too much, and it is fixable in an afternoon.

3. What happens after someone reaches out?

This is the one that surprises owners most, because it has nothing to do with the website. Somebody fills out the form or calls. Then what?

I ask three questions. Who gets the form email, and how fast do they see it? What happens to a call you miss while you are on a job? And do you know, for last month, how many people contacted you, where they came from, and how many turned into work?

The usual answers are “it goes to my inbox somewhere,” “they leave a voicemail or they don’t,” and “no idea.” A missed call that gets an automatic text back within a minute (“Sorry I missed you, I’m on a job. Text me what you need and I’ll call back by 5.”) saves jobs that would otherwise go to the next name on the list. And a simple monthly count of contacts by source tells you whether any of this is working, which is the only honest way to decide what to spend money on.

Why these three, and not “more SEO” or “run ads”

Because they are in order. Ads pointed at a site that fails check two burn money. SEO work on a site that fails check three sends leads into a hole. Fix the plumbing first, then turn up the water.

None of this needs a rebuild. Most of the time the fix for each check is small: claim and clean up the Business Profile, write the two pages Search Console says you should have, put the phone number where a thumb can reach it, set up the missed-call text. Then look at the numbers again in a month.

If you want me to look

I do a free Numbers Look for Pittsburgh business owners. You give me read-only access to your Google Search Console (it takes two minutes and you can revoke it any time). I send back one page: three things you already rank for that you never write about, and one thing people search for that your site does not answer. No pitch on the page. If it is useful, you will know what to do next, with or without me.