The conversion checklist for Canadian service businesses

Run through this on your own site with a stopwatch and a phone. Most businesses find four or five obvious wins in twenty minutes.

The first five seconds

1. Say what you do and where, above the fold. "Commercial roofing across the GTA" beats "Excellence in every project."
2. Phone number visible without scrolling — and tappable on mobile.
3. Load in under 2.5 seconds on mobile data. Test on 4G, not your office wifi. Most Canadian traffic is mobile and a slow site costs you before anyone reads a word.
4. One primary action per page. Five equally weighted buttons is the same as none.

Trust, in the order people look for it

5. Reviews near the call to action, not buried on a testimonials page nobody visits.
6. Real photos of real work and real people. Stock photography of a smiling call centre actively reduces trust.
7. Licences, insurance, certifications, association memberships — displayed, not implied.
8. A physical address or service area. Canadians check whether you're actually local.
9. Answer the price question. "From $X" or a typical range beats silence. Hiding price doesn't create enquiries, it creates bounces.

The enquiry path

10. Cut form fields to the minimum. Every extra field costs conversions. Name, contact, and one open question is usually enough.
11. Say what happens next. "We reply within one business day" removes the main hesitation.
12. Offer more than one channel — form, phone, WhatsApp, text. People have strong preferences.
13. Test the form yourself monthly. Broken forms are astonishingly common and completely silent.
14. Reply fast. Response time inside five minutes dramatically outperforms an hour. This is a business process fix, not a website fix, and it's often the biggest one available.

The details that quietly add up

15. Fix mobile tap targets. Buttons under 44px are a daily source of lost enquiries.
16. Write for scanning — short paragraphs, real subheadings, bullets.
17. Remove the carousel. Almost nobody sees slide two.
18. Add a sticky mobile call bar. For service businesses this is frequently the single highest-impact change on the whole site.
19. Track everything — form submits, call clicks, WhatsApp taps. You cannot improve what you don't measure.

What to expect

Sites that have never been optimised commonly see 20–60% more enquiries from identical traffic. And because the lift applies to every channel at once, it lowers your cost per lead on Google Ads and Meta on the same day.

Our CRO service does this systematically with heatmaps, session recordings and proper A/B testing — but the list above is free and most of it you can action this week.

Quick answers