Every other business we write for has a door. You have a boundary — a shape on a map that only you know the edges of — and until somebody knows whether their street is inside it, nothing else on your website matters to them. Most mobile sites answer it with the words servicing greater Auckland, which is not an answer. It is an invitation to ring somebody else and ask them instead.
One person, at an address, needing something done there. Every row below is a place the job stops — and the last one is the row nobody else on this site has, because you are the only business here that can lose money by winning an enquiry. Around two thirds of searches like these now end without anybody clicking through to a website at all, so a good part of this happens before your site is involved, which is why the first thing we usually sell is not a website.
A car that will not start in a driveway in Massey. A dog that has to be done at home because it will not travel. A house being cleaned between tenancies in Beachlands. The work is defined by where it is before anybody has thought about what it costs, and that is not true of a single other kind of business on this website.
Almost nobody searching for you leaves the location out. It goes in as the suburb, as near me, or as the words that comes to you. That is the difference between this and every trade page we have written: a plumber is searched for by problem, and you are searched for by place. What answers the place gets read.
The names under the map come from Google Business Profiles rather than websites. Yours can be set to service areas instead of a street address, so you appear where you work without publishing where you sleep — and a great many mobile businesses have never changed that setting, or have no profile at all. It is a day of work. What that involves, and what it costs.
They are in Whitford, or Riverhead, or up the coast, and they are now guessing whether that counts. Half of them guess no and never make contact — you will never know they were there. The other half ring and ask, which is a phone call you have to take, mid-job, to answer a question a sentence on a page would have answered for everyone at once.
A callout fee, a minimum charge, a rate past a certain point, or nothing at all — every one of those is fine, and being told at the end is not. Somebody who reads the travel charge on the page before they ring has already accepted it. Somebody who hears it on the doorstep has been quoted twice, and the second number is the one they repeat to other people.
A park within a hose length. Power. A tap. Room to get the ramps down. The gate unlocked and the dog inside. Somebody over eighteen at the property. None of this is difficult and all of it is invisible to a customer who has never booked your kind of work before, so it either goes on a page or it gets discovered in a driveway.
This is the part that is felt rather than typed. Who actually arrives, whether it is the person in the photograph, whether the vehicle is marked, whether they need to be home for it. It is a bigger question for a house than for a shop, and it is asked most quietly by exactly the people who are least comfortable asking it out loud.
Every appointment you make is one somebody has to be at their own house for. A four-hour window is a morning of leave; a vague one is a whole day. The mobile businesses that get booked ahead of cheaper ones are usually the ones that give a real window, confirm it, and send a message when they set off — none of which is a website feature, but all of which the website can promise on your behalf.
Out of area and quoted anyway. A job your gear will not do. No park, no power, nobody home, or a dog that was never going to allow it. That is an hour of driving and a tank of petrol paid for out of the next job, and it is the loss that belongs to you alone — every other business on this site loses a customer, and you lose an afternoon by winning one.
Four of these exist to stop the wrong job being booked, which is not something we would write on a page for a salon or a clinic. The tier beside each is the tier it starts at, and it matches our pricing exactly.
Not a radius and not a region. The actual list, in the words people use for where they live, with anywhere you will go for the right job marked as such and anywhere you will not left off. It is the page that ends the phone call before it happens, and it is the single most useful thing on a mobile website. Keep it honest: a suburb on this list is a promise to drive there.
Your rates as you actually quote them, plus the travel side said in the same breath — callout, minimum, anything past a bridge or a certain distance. If the number genuinely depends on what you find, publish the range and say what moves it. A range with a reason attached gets believed; a page with no number on it gets closed and replaced with somebody else's.
Parking, power, water, access, the gate, the dog, whether someone has to be home and for how long. Dull to write, and it is the page that pays for the site. Every wasted trip you have ever made was a fact on this page that nobody told the customer, and putting it in writing turns it from an awkward doorstep conversation into something they read and agreed to.
The address is the first field rather than the last, because it is the one that decides whether the rest of the form is worth filling in. Out of area, and it says so on the spot and offers the number anyway in case it is worth an exception. In area, and everything after it can be specific. This is a five-minute build decision and it is the difference between a diary and a to-do list.
A photograph that looks like you, how long you have been doing it, what the vehicle looks like coming up the drive, and what you hold — licence, registration, insurance, whatever your work actually requires. It is the page that gets read by somebody deciding whether to be at home for it, and it is almost always missing from the sites of people who would pass any check you asked for.
Not a list on one page. A page each for the four or five jobs that make up most of your week, because that is what people search for and a dedicated page per service is the strongest thing you can do for local search. It is also where you say plainly what you do not do, which saves a drive.
Real jobs at real addresses, taken on your phone, with the number plate or the house number kept out of shot. Twenty of those beat any photograph of a clean van that somebody else owns. For a business with no premises this is the closest thing you have to a shopfront, and the customer knows the difference between your work and a stock library immediately.
Only for the places you genuinely work, and only where there is something true to say about each — how often you are out that way, what you tend to get called for there, how the travel charge lands. Half a dozen real ones are worth more than forty thin ones, which age badly and read as spam to a person and to a search engine alike. This is the one page on the list where doing it lazily is worse than not doing it.
Eight is the Standard tier, with the last one sitting in Lead Engine because of what it involves rather than because of its length. A one-van operation usually does not need all of them on day one — start with the areas, the pricing and the access page, which is Essential, and add the rest when there is something real to add. We would rather build four pages that are finished than eight that are half-written.
All six are decisions somebody made once, in a hurry, years ago, and nobody has looked at since. None of them needs a new van, a new price or a new brand to fix — they are sentences on a page and a setting on a listing.
Wider Wellington, all of Canterbury, the whole Waikato. It is written to sound generous and it reads as evasive, because everybody who lives at the edge of one of those knows perfectly well that it might not include them. The word greater is doing the work of a list, and it is not able to.
If your listing has a street address on it and you work out of a house, that address is on the internet, on a map, with your name against it. Google lets a service-area business hide it and still appear across the places it works. The setting takes a minute. Almost nobody who needs it has found it, and it is part of the $395.
Thirty kilometres is not thirty minutes. A circle over Auckland includes a harbour crossing at eight in the morning and excludes somewhere twenty minutes down a motorway, and a customer cannot see the circle anyway. Areas by name match how people think about where they live, and how they type it.
Kept off the site so the price looks lower, then explained to every caller individually. It is not a saving, it is the same conversation repeated for years, and it makes the first quoted number feel like a starting position. Published once, it is simply a term of business and nobody argues with it.
Forty area names on one page, or forty near-identical pages, for places you would not really drive to on a Tuesday. It reads as spam to a person, it is treated as thin content by a search engine, and when somebody in the fortieth one rings up you either take a job you did not want or tell them no. Cover what you cover.
If it is not worth loading the van for, that has to be findable before somebody books it — a minimum charge, a smallest job, or a plain sentence about what is not worth a callout. Without it the enquiries you would rather not have look exactly like the ones you want, right up until you are parked outside.
If the coverage page is the only thing that is actually wrong, say so when you get in touch and we will look at that on its own. It is often an afternoon rather than a website, and we would rather tell you that than sell you eight pages you did not need.
Somebody with a shop gets to be judged on the shop. You get judged on a phone, by a person deciding whether to leave a gate unlocked for you. Every row below is something you already have and are probably not showing.
A photograph that looks like the person who turns up. Whether the vehicle is signwritten or is a plain ute, which is worth saying out loud so nobody is surprised. Whether they need to be there, and what happens if they cannot be. It costs one page and it answers the question that stops the most bookings on this kind of website.
Insurance, a licence, a registration, a certificate, a check — whatever your work actually requires, named as you would name it, with nothing added. We will put on the page exactly what you tell us you hold and nothing you do not, and we will ask you to confirm it before it goes live. Half the operators we speak to have all of it and mention none of it.
Your own before-and-afters, taken on your phone, with plates and house numbers kept out of frame. Somebody trying to picture you at their place is helped far more by a slightly untidy real driveway than by a studio photograph of equipment nobody owns. Keep them recent and prune them, because an old gallery quietly advertises the business you used to be.
We build the site around your words. We do not invent a qualification, an area you do not serve, a guarantee, or a claim about how your work compares with anybody else's, and we will say no if we are asked to. You are the one accountable for that under the Fair Trading Act and under whatever licensing your work needs, not us. Anything on the site that makes a claim is signed off by you before it goes live.
Something about the reviews is the most common reason people give for not contacting a local business, ahead of price, and with no premises to look at they carry more of the weight than usual. We will make asking take ten seconds and put the link where you will find it in the van. We will not write one, buy one, or set up anything that filters the unhappy out on the way. Skyward has no reviews either — we are asking our first clients for one in writing, as part of the deal.
Every hour you are earning is an hour you cannot pick up, and unlike a shop there is nobody else there to do it. So the enquiries stack up until the end of the day, get worked through at seven, and a proportion of them have already rung the next name on the map. That is not a staffing problem and it is not a discipline problem. It is what the job is.
What we build for that is an intake flow, and it is deliberately not a chatbot. There is no language model in it. That is the whole point rather than a limitation: it cannot invent a price, promise a Thursday you have not got, or agree to an address you would never drive to, because there is nothing in it capable of composing a sentence it was not given.
It asks a short set of questions you have written, in the order you would ask them — and for this kind of business the first one is the address, because that is the question that decides whether the rest of it matters. If they are outside the areas you gave us it says so on the spot, politely, and gives them your number anyway in case it is worth an exception. If they are inside it, it goes on and asks the things you would have asked: what the job is, what is there, when they can be home.
It says on the first screen that it is an assistant rather than a person, every time, to everybody, and it carries your phone number on every step so anyone who would rather speak to a human can stop and do that immediately. Around eighty-five per cent of people say they would rather deal with a person than with AI, and that figure has been going up rather than down. We are not going to argue with them, and we are not putting a robot in front of your customers.
We spend this whole page asking you to publish your travel charge, so it would be a poor look not to publish ours. Most studios here quote plus GST or do not say which, and at fifteen per cent that is not a rounding difference. Every figure below is what you would pay. Nothing is due until you have seen a real working homepage for your business and said yes to it.
The map result, claimed, verified, categorised and filled in properly, in a day — set up as a service-area business, so your areas are listed and your home address is not. No website needed and nothing ongoing. For a lot of one-van operations this is the whole job for now, and it is where we would start.
Up to four pages. For one van: the areas you cover, what it costs including travel, what has to be there when you arrive, and how to book. Live in seven days from the point we have your content.
Up to eight pages, including a page for each thing you do and a page about who turns up. This is the one most mobile businesses want, because the jobs get searched for one at a time rather than as a list.
A page for every service and every area worth the drive, a local search campaign at launch, the missed-enquiry assistant for twelve months and three months of the care plan. This is the tier that was designed for a business like yours rather than adapted to it.
Hosting, domain, security, backups, unlimited small edits done within two days — which for you is usually an area added, a rate changed or a run dropped — a monthly tune-up of the Google profile and a report in plain English. No lock-in, cancel whenever, and you still own the site. Pay yearly and two months are free: $1,690.
Added to a site we have built. Set up around your areas, your access questions and your hours, then tuned each month as you learn what people actually ask at half past six. Not sold on its own.
All prices are New Zealand dollars with GST included and nothing added at the end. Websites are half after you have seen your free homepage and said yes, the balance on launch. We do not discount off-menu — if the budget will not stretch we will move you down a tier or start you on the profile instead. Our first ten clients get $500 off any website in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review when we are done, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a sale. The full price list.
Not a position on Google. Nobody can sell you one. Where you appear depends partly on where the person searching is standing — which for a business without an address is more of the answer than usual, and is nobody's to hand out — and partly on a system that is not published and changes. Anyone guaranteeing you a place in the three is guessing with your money.
Not coverage you do not have. A page about an area does not put you in it. We will build a page for anywhere you genuinely work and will not write one for anywhere you do not, because a page that wins a job you then turn down costs you more than the job was worth and leaves somebody telling people about it.
Not a full week. We have no way of knowing what your diary does next and no honest basis for a figure, so there is not one anywhere on this page. What we can tell you is what will be true at the end: the areas will be named, the travel charge will be published, the access questions will be answered before you drive, and all of it will belong to you.
Not claims about your qualifications or your work. We put on the page what you tell us you hold and nothing else, and we will decline to invent a licence, a guarantee or a comparison. That is yours and you are the one accountable for it.
Not reviews. See section 04. We make asking easy and we go no further than that, in either direction.
Not a lock-in. You own the site, the domain and the content, and you have the logins on day one. The care plan is monthly and can be stopped whenever you like without the site going anywhere.
And not experience we have not had. Skyward is new and there are no clients yet, in any industry. The mobile site in section 09 is one we invented and built ourselves so that there was something to look at — it is not a job we were hired for and it is labelled as such on every screen of it. What is on this page is how the search result is put together, what the pages have to answer, and where coverage and booking fail — all of which you can check against your own week while you read it — not a record we do not have.
No. A business that travels to its customers can be listed by service area instead of by street address, so you show up across the places you work without your home being on a map with your name against it. That is a setting on the Google listing and a decision about what goes in the footer of the site, and we would set both up that way unless you told us otherwise.
The trade-off worth knowing: you are then relying on the areas being right, because there is no pin doing that job for you. Which is most of what section 03 is about.
It is doing something a website cannot, and it is missing two things it cannot do. The first is anybody who never looks there — they open a map, read three names and pick one, which is the $395 job rather than the website one. The second is that it is not yours: the page, the audience and the reach belong to somebody else and the rules change without warning.
We would not ask you to stop. We would ask you to own the page people land on after it, so that the areas, the prices and the access questions are answered somewhere that cannot be taken away or buried.
Fewer than you have been told. One for each place you genuinely work and have something specific to say about — usually somewhere between four and eight — beats forty near-identical ones, which age badly, read as spam and win you jobs at the far edge of a map that you then have to decline.
If we cannot write a paragraph about an area that would be untrue of the one next to it, that is the sign it should not be its own page. We will tell you that rather than bill you for it.
Then publish what does not depend on it. The callout or minimum, the travel charge, the rate, or the range with the reason attached. Somebody who reads a range and a reason believes it. Somebody who reads nothing assumes the top of what they have heard, and rings the business that gave them a number.
If your work genuinely cannot be priced before you see it — plenty cannot — say that in a sentence, say what you charge to come and look, and say whether it comes off the job. That is a real answer and it is treated as one.
$2,450, full stop. Every figure on this site includes GST and nothing is added later. It is worth asking every other quote you get the same question — at fifteen per cent the difference is not a rounding error, and a quote that does not say which it means cannot be compared with one that does.
Not for a client. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, in any industry, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to somebody who spends all day being judged on whether they turned up when they said they would. We have built one for a mobile business that does not exist — it is in section 09, finished, and you can open it on your phone right now.
What we do instead is build your homepage first, properly, for nothing, before any money changes hands. You look at a real working page for your own business and decide from that rather than from somebody else's portfolio. If it is not good you walk away owing us nothing, which is a more useful test than a testimonial. How that works.
Everything above this is a claim about a website you have not seen. This is the page, finished, and it is built on the argument this one has been making: the boundary before the sales pitch, the travel charge printed rather than produced on the doorstep, and the access questions answered before anybody drives anywhere. Nobody is behind it. We invented a mobile mechanic so that we could build the thing properly instead of waiting for permission to build it.
The business, the person, the van, the thirty-eight suburbs and every figure on that page were made up so that there was something to build. Open it and a black band sits across the top of the screen saying exactly that, and it stays there the whole way down. The page is marked noindex, so it cannot surface in a search for somebody's actual mechanic. The phone number is fictional, the email address ends in .example — a domain reserved so that it can never belong to anybody — and nothing typed into its form is sent or stored.
The lines in quotation marks on that page are sample text, and each one says so directly underneath itself. Skyward has no reviews of its own, and yours are yours to earn rather than ours to write. Take the page as a sample of the work and nothing further: if any of it reads to you like a customer, we have written it badly.
Yours would not look like this one, and it should not. A mobile mechanic is not a dog groomer and neither of them is a driving instructor — what is worth arguing over here is the boundary, and somewhere else it is the standing appointment or the photograph of yesterday's job. What carries across is the method: work out the single thing the person came to find out, put it first, and take everything else out of their way. The rest of the concept builds are indexed on the homepage — the trades, and a physiotherapy clinic built to be used rather than read. Worth opening if you want to see how far apart sites built by the same studio can be.
Whatever kind of local business you are, the method does not change — find out what people type, answer it properly on a page of its own, and make the next step obvious.
Including the service-area setting that lists where you work and hides where you live. What is in a listing, what goes wrong in one, what the day involves and what $395 does not buy.
The opposite geography and a different problem entirely: somebody who has already decided, has been putting it off for six weeks, and never gets as far as a time in the diary.
Written for the ten seconds between somebody liking the work and getting a name in the diary, which is a handover rather than a search — and for the price list that decides it.
Answered inside the search result and often never reaching their own site at all, which makes the listing the shopfront and the menu the website. It has its own page now.
Send us the business name and the areas you actually work. We will look at what is already out there under your name — including whether your listing is publishing an address you would rather it did not — then build you a real, working homepage, not a mock-up or a template with your logo dropped on it, and send it to you. If you do not like it, that is the end of it and you owe nothing. No deposit before the demo.
Josh reads these himself. Nothing is passed to a salesperson, because there is not one. Text is usually easier than a call if you are on the road all day.
That's with Josh now. He'll have a look at what is already out there under the business name and come back to you on it — within a working day, usually the same morning.
Nothing is committed and no deposit is owed. If it turns out the Google listing is the only thing worth fixing, he'll tell you that instead. And if it's urgent, ring 022 584 0585 rather than wait.