Nobody reads your website. They scan it for three things.

Open your homepage on your phone. Hand it to someone who has never seen it. Count to five, take the phone back, and ask them what your business does.

Most owners do not like the answer. They get something vague, because the page was built to be read and nobody reads it.

People scan. On a homepage they are scanning for three things, roughly in this order: what you do, whether you do it for someone like them, and how to start. If those three are not obvious in a few seconds, they go back to the search results. There is no penalty for leaving.

Your headline is doing the wrong job

Most local business homepages lead with a slogan. "Excellence, delivered." "Your vision, our passion." "Quality you can trust." These read like a mission statement because that is what they are, and a stranger learns nothing from them.

A headline has one job: tell a stranger what they would be buying. "Kitchen and bathroom remodels across the Inland Empire" is not poetry. It is also impossible to misunderstand, which is the entire point.

The test is simple. If your competitor could paste your headline onto their site without changing a word, it is not a headline. It is decoration.

Where you work should not live in the footer

Local businesses bury their service area at the bottom of the page or on a separate contact page. Meanwhile the first question in a visitor's head is whether you come out this far.

Put the area you cover in the first screen, in words people use. Not "serving the greater metropolitan region." The names of the places. Someone in Temecula wants to see Temecula.

One next step, not five

A lot of homepages offer a call button, a text button, an email link, a booking link, a quote form, a newsletter signup, a chat bubble and six social icons. Offering more ways to act does not increase action. It increases hesitation.

Decide which single action is worth the most to you, make it the loudest thing on the page, and let everything else be quieter. If a phone call is worth more than a form fill, the phone number should not be the smallest text on the screen.

Move the part about you further down

The section that starts "Founded in 2014, we are a family-owned business committed to..." is usually too high on the page. It is not that the story does not matter. It matters after someone has decided you might be able to help them, not before.

And trust does not come from adjectives anyway. It comes from proof: real photographs of real work, reviews with names attached, the actual street you were on last week. Three honest photos of a finished job will do more than a paragraph about your commitment to quality.

The squint test

Here is a check you can run in a minute. Step back from your screen until the text blurs, or just half close your eyes. What can you still make out?

It should be the headline, the area you serve, and the button. If what survives the blur is a stock photograph and a logo, the page is arranged for looking at rather than for being used.

Then do the five second test properly. Not with your partner, who already knows what you do. With someone who does not. If they cannot tell you what you sell and where you sell it, the problem is not traffic.