Buyer’s guide · Website types
A 5-to-10-page digital business card. It ranks for your name and your home city. What it is, what it can and can't do, and who it fits.
The brochure site: what it is, what it can and can't do
A brochure site is a digital business card. Five to ten pages: a home page, an about page, a contact page, a gallery, and a list of your services.
It describes your business to someone who already found you. For a lot of contractors, that is genuinely all a website needs to do.
What it ranks for is narrow by design: your company name and the city your office sits in. For a search beyond that, like a service in a specific town, a brochure has no page built to compete.
- Brochure site
- A small website (about 5 to 10 pages) that describes your business. Like a paper brochure: well suited to someone who already knows you, and not built to get found by someone who doesn't.
Where a brochure is the right fit
For the right business, a brochure is enough, and there is no reason to pay for more. Its strengths are real.
- Cheap — the lowest-cost site you can put up and keep online
- Fast to build — a few pages, live in days, not months
- Easy to maintain — less to update, less that can break
- Fine for a referral business — if work comes word-of-mouth, people search your name, and a brochure answers that search
- A real address online — an owned page, better than a social profile you don't control
If your phone rings from referrals and you are not trying to grow into new towns, a brochure does the job. More site than that would be reach you are not using.
What a brochure isn't built to reach
A brochure's limits are limits of structure, not quality. They show up the moment you want work from beyond your home city.
Buyers who don't know your name don't search it. They search a service plus a place, like "roof repair in [town]" or "kitchen remodel near me."
Showing up for that search takes a page about that service in that town. A brochure has one flat services list and no town pages, so there is nothing for that search to match.
- No dedicated town pages — nothing to rank for a town other than the one your office sits in
- No dedicated service pages — each service shares one list instead of having a page of its own
- A narrow reach — a handful of name searches, rather than the hundreds of "service in town" searches buyers type
- Little for AI to read — when someone asks an assistant for a contractor, there is no page deep enough to be the source it cites
More than half of the contractor sites we scanned had no dedicated location pages at all (MEASURED). Most of them are brochures. The limit is structural: a page that was never built can't rank.
Who a brochure is for
A brochure fits one kind of business well and another poorly. The line is simple.
It fits you if: you run on referrals, you serve one town, and you want a clean, owned place online for people who already heard your name.
It's the wrong fit if: you want work from towns you don't dominate yet, or you want to earn leads from search instead of renting them.
If that second one is you, the brochure isn't the rung. The next step up is the standard site, the smallest site built to rank. For the full ladder and what each tier should cost, see what a contractor website should cost.
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