What 39 top-ranked Grand Rapids trade websites have in common: HTTPS and tap-to-call on almost all, a text link on none

Search "what should a contractor website include" and page one is a domain registrar, a federal agency and a few small agencies, each with a bulleted list of must-haves. The lists are reasonable. They are also written from the armchair: not one of them opens a real contractor site to see whether the must-haves are actually there on the sites that win.

That is a fixable gap. Google Maps already tells you which trade sites in Grand Rapids are winning. All you have to do is look at them.

What the checklists say, and what I checked instead

The generic lists agree on a core: a phone number you can tap, a contact form, a page per service, reviews, an about page, a blog, a privacy policy, a fast mobile layout. Some add "SEO" as a line item, which is like adding "be good" to a recipe.

Take one page-one result, a marketing agency's "12 elements every site must have" (contractorsmarketingpros.com, read 15 September 2026). Its first element is an "above-the-fold phone number, tap-to-call on mobile"; its seventh is "service pages for every service, every city"; the rest run through a trust bar, a reviews carousel, financing, a speed target and a sticky mobile footer. It is a sensible list. It also cites no sample: the one statistic in it arrives without a source, and no real contractor site is opened to see whether the winners actually do any of it.

Rather than write a fortieth version of that list, I measured it. On 15 September 2026, between 17:15 and 17:21 UTC, I fetched one home page and one robots.txt for each of the 40 businesses Google Maps ranked in its first ten for four searches in Grand Rapids: plumber, roofing company, HVAC company and electrician. 39 answered; one electrician's site timed out and is not counted. Then a script checked each home page for the things the checklists say you need.

Two caveats up front. This is the HTML the server sent, not what a browser renders afterwards, so anything a script injects later is invisible here. And it is one reading on one day. Both are stated again in the receipts below.

The checklist, measured on 39 sites

The "what it does" column is my read as a builder, except where it quotes Google. The counts are the measurement.

Element	Of 39	Plumbers · Roofers · HVAC · Electricians	What it does	Verdict
HTTPS	39	10/10 · 10/10 · 10/10 · 9/9	Encrypts the connection; the browser shows a padlock instead of "Not secure". Google's page-experience self-assessment asks "Are your pages served in a secure fashion?" and adds "There is no single signal" (developers.google.com, read 15 September 2026). In my experience it is also the one item every host now gives away, which is why it is universal.	Table stakes
Tap-to-call (tel: link)	32	9/10 · 7/10 · 9/10 · 7/9	On a phone, the number is one tap from ringing. Without it the visitor copies digits into the dialler, and some will not bother. Builder's opinion.	Table stakes
robots.txt	36	8/10 · 10/10 · 9/10 · 9/9	Tells crawlers which paths to skip. Four of the 36 name an AI crawler; none blocks one site-wide.	Table stakes (see below)
Service-page link (at least one)	30	9/10 · 7/10 · 8/10 · 6/9	A page per service gives Google a page to rank for "water heater repair" instead of hoping the home page covers it. Median 5 service links; one mega-menu had 71.	Middle
Any structured data (JSON-LD)	32	8/10 · 8/10 · 10/10 · 6/9	Google's definition: "a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content" (developers.google.com, read 15 September 2026). On a contractor site it is often just a page-builder default, which is why the next row is smaller.	Middle
Business-type schema node	23	5/10 · 6/10 · 7/10 · 5/9	A node that says "this is a Plumber (or HVACBusiness, RoofingContractor, Electrician) at this address with this phone". The deliberate version of the row above.	Middle
Contact form	26	7/10 · 7/10 · 7/10 · 5/9	A second way in for the people who will not call. Thirteen top-ranked sites make you phone or email.	Middle
Privacy-policy link	23	6/10 · 7/10 · 7/10 · 3/9	Discloses what the site collects. Legally sensible on any page with a form or a pixel; visibly optional to 16 of the 39.	Middle
Blog / news link	23	5/10 · 6/10 · 7/10 · 5/9	Somewhere to publish pages that are not services. Sixteen sites rank in the first ten without one.	Middle
FAQPage schema	8	3/10 · 3/10 · 0/10 · 2/9	A marked-up question-and-answer block. Answers the questions a caller would ask, on the page, in a form machines can read. No HVAC company on page one has one.	Open door
Tap-to-text (sms: link)	0	0/10 · 0/10 · 0/10 · 0/9	One tap opens a text to the business. Same idea as tap-to-call, for the customer who is at work and cannot take a call. One line of HTML.	Open door

Table stakes. HTTPS is on every site. Tap-to-call is on 32; the seven without it are spread across every trade, so it is not a trade habit, it is an oversight. If your site lacks either, fixing it does not put you ahead of anyone, it stops you being behind.

The middle. Everything from service pages down to the blog sits between 23 and 32 of 39, which is another way of saying a clear majority has it and a real minority ranks fine without it. HVAC companies are the most thorough group: all ten carry some structured data, seven of ten have a blog, seven a privacy link. Electricians are the thinnest: three of nine link a privacy policy, six of nine carry any schema. If you are an electrician, the bar in your trade is lower than the table's overall column suggests.

Open doors. No site in the sweep lets you tap to text it. Eight have an FAQ block, and zero of the ten HVAC sites do. Neither costs anything beyond the copy, and the copy is the part I write anyway.

Thirty-nine sites, four trades, and not one of them will let you text it. That is not a hard thing to be first at.

Easy to get wrong

Three defects turned up that no checklist warns you about, because they are the kind of thing you only see when you look at the actual HTML.

A home page with no <title>. One of the 39 serves a home page with no title tag at all. The browser tab shows the URL, the search result shows whatever Google improvises, and the single most-read line of the site is blank. This is a site that ranks in the first ten anyway, which tells you how much reviews and proximity are carrying it.

The wrong city in the title. Two home pages carry a different city in their title than the one they rank in. Usually this is a business that started in a neighbouring town, grew into Grand Rapids and never updated the one line Google quotes back to searchers. Both rank in the first ten regardless, but the first thing a Grand Rapids searcher sees is a town they did not search for.

Robots files that are not robots files. Three sites answer /robots.txt with HTTP 200 and a web page. A crawler asking for the rules gets a home page dressed as a text file. It is harmless in the sense that no rules means no restrictions, but it means the site's host is serving its "not found" page with a "found" status, and that habit tends to show up elsewhere too.

One more number that is not a defect so much as a weight. The median home page in the sweep is 202 kB of HTML before a single image or script loads; the heaviest is 1,173 kB. HTML alone does not decide speed, but a megabyte of markup on a home page is a page-builder's fingerprint, and the speed reading shows where that ends up on a phone.

What a $999 build includes, against that table

Here is my Starter Site, and the Business Site above it, laid against the same rows. Honestly: the Starter tier does not include a blog or a page per service.

Element	Starter Site · $999	Business Site · $2,499
HTTPS	Yes	Yes
Tap-to-call	Yes: lead form + click-to-call is in the tier	Yes
Tap-to-text	Not a line item on either tier. It is one link, and I add it on any build where the number takes texts.
Contact form	Yes	Yes
Correct title, city included	Yes: on-page SEO + Google setup	Yes: copywriting + on-page SEO
Business-type schema node	Not in the tier	Yes: local schema
Page per service	No: 1–3 pages total	Yes: 5–8 custom pages
Reviews on the site	Not in the tier	Yes
Analytics	Not in the tier	Yes
Blog	No	No
FAQ block	Not a line item on either tier. It is copy, and I write the copy, so ask for it.
Privacy policy page	Not a line item on either tier; a page with a form should have one, so raise it when we scope.

Both tiers are a fixed price and a date in writing, and you own everything at the end. If you already have a site and want to know where it sits on the first table before spending anything, the Site & Business Audit is $750 one-off: a written report in three business days, 190-plus checks per page, which is a longer version of the script that produced these counts.

How to decide

Three questions, in order.

1. Does your number ring when tapped on a phone? Open your own site on your phone and tap the number. If nothing happens, you are one of the seven, and it is the cheapest fix on this page. Any tier covers it, and so does a competent fifteen-minute edit to your current site.

2. Do you want to be found for each service, or for the business? If you are a two-person outfit that does one thing, a 1–3 page Starter Site with the right title and a tap-to-call link covers the table stakes and most of the middle. If you sell four or five services and want Google to have a page to rank for each, the Starter is the wrong tier, and I will say so on the call; 30 of the 39 sites you are up against link to service pages, median five.

3. Do you want the open doors? A text link and an FAQ block are the two things nobody on page one has. Neither is a budget question. If you want them, say so at scoping and they go in.

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Common questions