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Methodology

For: owners, marketers, and analysts working with local home-service businesses.

Why this exists

Most website graders answer a technical question: is the site fast, indexable, accessible, and well structured? Those things matter. They are not the whole business question.

A local contractor does not lose a job because a meta description is 12 characters too long. A contractor loses a job when a homeowner cannot tell what the company does, cannot tap the phone number, cannot finish the form, cannot book a slot, or never hears back. The website is one visible part of a larger revenue system that continues into the phone, CRM, booking calendar, estimate pipeline, follow-up, reviews, referrals, and reactivation.

The Website Revenue Leak Scorecard is a diagnostic framework for that larger system. It asks:

Where could this contractor be losing customers or revenue?

It does not claim to measure the whole business. It separates what a public website can prove from what only the owner can answer.

Diagnostic principles

1. Follow the customer, not the checklist

Every check maps to a customer-journey stage or a supporting system. The report leads with the three biggest revenue leaks, not a wall of equally weighted findings.

2. Observe before inferring

A finding is only as good as its evidence. The framework uses four states:

  • VERIFIED — directly observed or safely tested.
  • STRONG SIGNAL — evidence strongly suggests a problem, but the outcome cannot be proven.
  • OWNER DATA REQUIRED — cannot responsibly determine from public information.
  • NOT APPLICABLE — the check does not reasonably apply to this business, market, or configuration.

"Not observed" is not the same as "the business does not do this."

3. Do not penalize invisible business processes

A website score cannot know whether estimates are followed up, how fast the phone is answered, or whether old customers are reactivated. Those are revenue opportunities to investigate, not website failures. They never reduce the website score.

4. Make optional tactics optional

Spanish access, SMS, chat, financing, video, memberships, tiered packages, paid priority, and content freshness can be valuable in some markets and irrelevant in others. The framework scores only what the audit configuration says is relevant. N/A checks are removed from the denominator, and category weights are normalized so the score remains out of 100 without inflation.

5. Weigh by likely revenue impact

The score is not a count of best practices. It is weighted toward the things that most often stop a ready buyer:

  • Can the visitor understand the offer?
  • Can they become a lead?
  • Does the visible experience support a fast, qualified continuation?
  • Is there enough trust to act?
  • Can they actually use the site on a phone?
  • Can a qualified local buyer find the page?
  • Can the business measure what happened?

6. Diagnose, do not prescribe-and-deploy

This repository diagnoses. It may output structured recommendations, but it does not deploy bots, modify client websites, send messages, connect production accounts, create workflows, or manipulate CRM records. Remediation belongs in a separate system.

What this is not

  • Not a guarantee of revenue lift.
  • Not a substitute for CRM, call-tracking, booking, or financial data.
  • Not a full SEO audit, accessibility audit, or legal compliance review.
  • Not a reason to publish a named client's private data.
  • Not a score that can be compared across rubric versions without saying so.

The north star

The output should be useful to a plumbing, HVAC, roofing, or electrical contractor within one read:

  1. What is the biggest observable leak?
  2. What did we actually see?
  3. Why could it cost jobs?
  4. What should change first?
  5. What can only the owner tell us?

If a finding cannot answer one of those questions, it probably does not belong in the report.

Next: Revenue Leak Framework — the 12 journey stages.