Why Most St. George Business Websites Don’t Work And How to Fix Your Website In 9 Simple Steps
1. Most business owners think they have a traffic problem…
They acutally have a “fix your website problem”
I’ve lived in St. George for 25 years and I’ve seen a lot of local businesses come and go over the years. Most of these businesses belong to honest people who work hard and genuinely care about their customers. The surprising part is that the business often isn’t the reason sales are slow. The website is.
Many owners assume they need more visitors. They buy ads, post on social media, or worry about search rankings. Those things matter, but they don’t matter much if the website isn’t doing its job.
Think of your website as your best salesperson. If that salesperson greets every customer with confusing information, never answers questions, and forgets to ask for the sale, hiring another salesperson won’t fix the problem.
Pretty websites don’t pay the bills. Clear websites do.
2. Problem: Your Website Confuses Visitors
You have about five seconds to answer one simple question.
What does this business do?
If visitors can’t answer that almost immediately, they’re likely to leave.
Business owners love clever headlines. Customers love clear ones.
Instead of writing something like “Building Better Digital Experiences,” tell people exactly what you do.
Example: “Web SEO for Small Businesses in St. George.”
Simple websites beat clever almost every time.
A good homepage also explains who you help and why someone should keep reading. Visitors shouldn’t have to scroll halfway down the page to understand your business.
Ask someone who knows nothing about your company to look at your homepage for five seconds. Close the page and ask them what your business specializes in. If they hesitate, your homepage needs work.
3. Your Website Doesn’t Build Trust | Trust sells. Lack of trust doesn’t
People don’t hire businesses because those businesses say they’re the best. Every website says that.
People hire businesses they trust.
Trust comes from proof.
Show reviews. Show real projects. Show your team. Use real photos instead of stock images whenever possible.
If you’ve been helping customers in St. George, say so and mention the city. If you’ve solved difficult problems, explain them. Real examples are more convincing than marketing slogans. Besides that, Google and AI’s love personal stories. That’s fresh content that they don’t have in their data bases.
Every page should answer the question running through a visitor’s mind, “Why should I choose you instead of someone else?”
4. The Website Advice Nobody Wants to Hear | Your Website Makes People Think Too Hard
Here’s an unpopular opinion: most of what businesses obsess over on their websites is a waste of time. Fancy animations. Clever taglines. That navigation menu your team argued about for three weeks. None of it matters if customers can’t find what they came for.
Customers don’t visit your website to admire your navigation menu, and yet businesses keep building sites as if they will. Every extra click, every vague label, every wall of text is a silent decision to push visitors toward your competitor.
So let’s be blunt: if your menu has more than a handful of options, you’re not organizing information. You’re hiding it. If your paragraphs run long, you’re not being thorough. You’re testing people’s patience. If your phone number isn’t visible (and clickable on mobile) in three seconds, you’re not “keeping things clean.” You’re costing yourself business.
Try this test, and be honest with yourself: open your website on your phone right now. Can you tell what the business actually does within seconds? Can you tap the phone number without hunting for it? Most business owners fail this test on their own site. They’re just too close to it to notice.
It might be time to fix your website.
Personal note as I wrote this: I just opened my SEO site and realized I needed to add a subtitle to the website title explaining very clearly what I do.
The uncomfortable truth is this: usability isn’t a nice-to-have or a design preference. It’s the difference between a visitor becoming a customer and a visitor becoming someone else’s customer. Simplicity isn’t the boring choice. It’s the one that actually converts.
5. Your Website Never Asks for the Business | Your website needs to sell your business for you
This mistake is surprisingly common. A visitor finishes reading a page and then…nothing.
What should they do next?
I have a “call to action” box I add to each website page that gives visitors a free month if they mention the website offer.
Every important page should have one clear call to action. Call. Request an estimate. Schedule an appointment. Get a discount for responding.
Don’t overwhelm visitors with six different buttons competing for attention. One clear next step usually performs much better than several competing choices.
A website should guide visitors naturally toward becoming customers.
6. Google Doesn’t Fully Understand Your Website | Once Google understands your website they will send you customers
A surprising number of local business websites never clearly tell Google (or their customers, for that matter) what they do or where they work.
Here is how to fix that: Use descriptive page titles. Create helpful service pages. Mention the communities and cities you actually serve. Connect your website to your Google Business Profile and use Local Business schema.
Good local SEO isn’t about trying to fool Google. It’s about making your website easier for search engines and potential customers to understand.
7. Don’t Chase Trends – Website trends come and go
One year every homepage has a video. The next year everything is oversized text and animated graphics.
Most local businesses don’t need the latest trend. They need a website that’s fast, easy to understand, and easy to use.
The principles that worked years ago still work today. Clarity. Trust. Helpful information. Simple navigation. A clear next step.
Remember, you don’t need to rank nationally. You just need to beat your local competitors.
If your website does those things well, it will outperform many websites that cost far more to build.
8. Most St. George business websites don’t fail because they’re unattractive
They often fail because they leave visitors with unanswered questions.
People want to know what you do, whether they can trust you, and how to contact you. If your website answers those questions quickly, you’re already ahead of many competitors.
Before spending thousands on a redesign, look at your existing website through your customers’ eyes. Remove confusion. Build trust. Make taking the next step easy.
A website doesn’t have to win design awards to become one of your best marketing tools. It simply has to help real people solve real problems. Do that consistently, and your website will start working much harder for your business.
9. How to Fix All Of These Problems
The good news is that most business websites don’t need a complete redesign. They need better communication. Better communication to their potential customers and to search engines.
Start with your homepage. Rewrite the headline so a first-time visitor immediately understands what you do, who you help, and where you work. Remove words that sound impressive but don’t explain anything.
Next, build trust. Replace stock photos with real ones. Add customer reviews throughout your website instead of hiding them on a separate page. Show completed projects, your team, your office, or your work vehicles. Real businesses look real.
Then simplify your pages. Every page should have one primary goal and one clear call to action. Don’t make visitors guess what to do next.
Finally, keep improving your website. Review it every few months. Update old information. Add answers to questions customers ask. Publish useful articles. Small improvements made consistently usually outperform one big redesign every few years. I often briefly work on a completed page before starting a new one. This works for me.
Reddit: r/smallbusiness – Small business owners – How do you do SEO for your business?
Question: Hello fellow small business owners! In this digital world, how do you manage SEO for your small business? Considering how time taking & boring it is, what is your approach? Is everyone hiring or buying low quality services from fiverr or other gig sites? Don’t you find it risky? What if the site gets penalized? How do you do manage the keyword research? I’m curious & would like to know differnet approach to it
A good answer: Citrous_Oyster
I run a web agency in the US and this is what I tell all my clients on how SEO works
It consists of 2 parts – on page SEO and off page SEO.
On page SEO are things you can do on the site itself. Like the design, content, load times, accessibility, blogging, etc.
Off page are things you do off the site. Like building backlinks to your site; citations, social media, guest posting on blogs, etc.
Together these comprise your SEO strategy. I am good at on page stuff like accessibility for screen readers and design and load times. My sites score 100/100 page speed score from google. Google likes my sites because they load instantly on mobile and we get extra ranking online because of it. My SEO partner Adam does the content, backlinks, curations, blogging, ads, etc. so my work in his hands makes a complete SEO strategy to regularly create relevant content about your services and building them efficiently so they load fast and make google happy.
SEO is not a short term flip of a switch and your ranking front page. It takes 6-12 months to see the effects of good SEO strategy. It’s a long term investment. For short term gains you run google ads to show up in relevant searches at the top and get seen by your clients at the point they’re looking for your services.
So SEO + ads + social media management is what makes a complete marketing strategy to maximize your reach online and be seen my as many customers online as possible.
If you don’t have an SEO guy, What I do is I do searches for my clients keywords in large city metro areas in a different state and open all the top ranking sites. I analyze the keywords they’re using and content, feed it into chatGPT and have it write new content based on that content from those pages and to pretend it’s a copywriter for websites. Then it gives me the content, I edit it to make it sound more human or change sentence structure, and add it to the site. I know what sections I need on a site and what order and what content I need and where to put the keywords. I do this for interior service pages called content silos as well. These content silos are pages dedicated to 1 service. That entire page is all about that 1 service.
This ranks #1 for “multiple sclerosis therapy Montclair ca”. These pages are how you rank for dozens and hundreds of keywords and have these pages ranking front page for any and every service your client offers. That + my designs + my expertise in making a site load instantly and score 100/100 on google page speed scores and satisfy all of google core vital metrics for ranking I can make a website rank front page.
I can do all that without being an SEO specialist. I focus on the fundamentals and what google wants to see. Sure traditional SEO helps like backlinks, blogs, guest posting, and content creation and outreach. But if you don’t have the budget for that then you can get by focusing on the stuff you can control on the page.
These content silos are also amazing for running ads to as well. They convert VERY well. Run an ad for interior painting services and send them to the interior painting services page. The user clicks on an ad for that and is taken to a page that talks all about it and they find exactly what they came there for. Most small business owners send ads to their home page. But when someone goes there they have to go looking for that service they clicked on the ad for. And if it’s not there they bounce. And then the business owner wonders why none of their ads are converting.
And if there’s a budget, I’ll use these guys to proofread my ai content and humanize it, edit it, and make sure we’re using the best keywords. Much more affordable than having content written. I’ll have AI put it together then pay them to edit it.
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