Trying to build the website yourself on WIX, Squarespace, or GoDaddy to save money because you think web designers are too expensive and you can do this on your own.  The TV and YouTube commercials say it's so easy!  Yep, you’ll save a bit of money in the short-term while costing your business potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long-term. This is called “jumping over dollars to save dimes”.  Don't do it.

You're in the trades.  You know what happens when a homeowner accepts the lowest bid.  They get shoddy work that someone like you has to fix!  The same applies to websites.  When you go the low-cost route so many corners get cut (that you don't know are being cut) that it renders your pretty website totally ineffective at getting found and generating new clients.  This is insane, and many contractors will go months even years without taking any action then one day they are struggling for work and can't figure out why!

Amazing content establishes you as an expert in your field.  Instead, contractors will slap a generic paragraph or two repeating the same lines every other contractor preaches on their website.  This tells a customer how and why you’re exactly the same as every other contractor saying the same things.  Why should they hire you?  What are you really doing differently?

Are you listing all of your services you offer on one page of your website?  When you do this Google and other search engines don't think you're important for ANY of those services.  It's far more effective to create individual "landing pages" on your website for each service you offer.  This exponentially increases your ability to be found.

So many contractors have photos that are poorly organized, not properly resized for the web, and not properly optimized for search engines.  Your photo quality and how they are organized and presented are critically important.  If you have a "Gallery" page on your website you're already doing this wrong!

Look, you don't have to be posting annoying shit on your Facebook Page everyday or tweeting out your daily play-by-play on Twitter.  You should however, have a professional looking presence on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Houzz, and a few others important to a contractor.  You just don't want your social media profiles to look like ghost towns.  Can you at least post project photos once or twice per week?  Perfect!

There are areas around your location you probably want to service and those you don't.  For most contractors, it's a good strategy to target wealthier, affluent, and more established neighborhoods where the residents likely have the means to hire you.  Do you know if your website is targeting those areas?  It's probably not!

The "calls-to-action" on your website prompts a visitor to take action and request an estimate or schedule a consultation.  If your call-to-action is weak or hard to see you're not tapping your websites potential.  Strong, well-placed calls-to-action generate more leads, period.  If you only have a "contact us" page it's not enough!

The older your website is the more likely it's not mobile friendly or "responsive".  This means a bad user experience for your visitors on mobile phones and tablets and a decreased likelihood that your website will ever be found in search engines.  Your website MUST be mobile friendly and look great on all devices.

Every dollar you spend buying leads from HomeAdvisor or Angie's List or some Pay Per Click scheme is a dollar that should have been spent building up your own rock-solid web presence.  Your website done right will enhance every method of advertising you do and eliminate your need to rely on these types of services.