L.C Plumbing Services
A Gas Safe number nobody should have to go looking for. Luke works on his own out of Sawtry. He gave me the website first, and after he had seen it he handed me his advertising as well.
The decision
Luke is a sole trader, so nobody ringing him is picking between firms with a fleet and somebody on reception. They are deciding whether to let one man they have never met into the house while the heating is off. His own Gas Safe registration, number 964040, his own five out of five across Google and Facebook, and more than ten years on the tools answer that, and none of it was doing him any good if a customer had to dig for it.
So the registration number is printed as readable text near the top of the page rather than sitting as a badge down in the footer. A badge is only a picture, and anybody at all can save a picture, whereas the number itself is something a customer who has never met him can type into the Gas Safe register and check before they pick the phone up.
Six named testimonials
The testimonials on his site are six named customers rather than a row of anonymous initials and a county, which is the format that reads like something a web designer typed in on a wet Tuesday. If a person is willing to put their name next to what they said about your work, that name is half the value of the quote.
The line at the top of the site is “The plumber Cambridgeshire keeps recommending”, because what brings him a job is usually somebody else’s word, and the site is where that word gets checked by whoever was given his name.
Underneath sits an interactive map of where he genuinely travels, which is Huntingdon, Peterborough, St Neots, St Ives, Ramsey and Cambridge. The word “Cambridgeshire” on its own does not answer the only question the reader has, which is whether he comes out to their street. A map answers that in about a second, and it is also the part of the site meant to spare him the calls from places he does not cover.
Why a small site
One of the biggest things I have built is Farrel’s at London City Plumbers, which runs to seventy pages because he really does answer calls across fifty-eight postcode districts. Luke covers six towns. Fifty-eight postcode pages on his site would have meant most of them being written about places he does not go, and padding is the easiest thing in the world to produce and the thing Google has got best at spotting. He got a small site where every page is about something he does instead.
The advertising
That order was his decision, not a plan I sold him. He looked at the finished website, and some time after it went live he asked me to take on his ads too, which is the only recommendation in this trade that costs the person giving it real money. It is also the order I would rather things happened in, because a website is the one piece a client can judge for himself before he trusts anybody with spend going out every day.
The arrangement for the ads is the same one everybody gets. The campaign is built inside the client’s own account, the client funds it from his own card, and the figures belong to him. The only advertising numbers published anywhere on this site came out of one renovation client’s account, and there are none here for Luke, because nothing goes on a page of mine before the person who paid for it has seen it and said yes.
Luke’s review
On Google, where I cannot edit a word of it.
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.
Highly recommend! He designed a brilliant website for my business and is now helping me with my ads. He’s always very quick to respond to any queries, and his attention to detail is unmatched. Great service throughout!
Luke Claydon
The live site
Open lc-plumbing.co.uk and judge the site itself instead of my write-up of it. If you want the same order of things, tell me what you are registered for and the towns you travel to, and I will build you a preview before any money moves.
I built Luke’s site and I run his ads, so whichever you want, the reply comes from the same person.