Web Design in Columbus, Ohio

A site that loads fast and makes the next step obvious.

Most small business sites lose the customer somewhere between the hero and the phone number. Either the page takes six seconds to load on a phone, or the visitor cannot tell in three seconds what you do and where you do it. We build sites that answer both questions immediately and then get out of the way, on foundations clean enough that the search work has somewhere to land.

Core Web Vitals Conversion copy Mobile first Forms and tracking Schema

Under 2.5s

Target mobile load on every page we ship

Monthly

Reporting tied to calls, not positions

1 per trade

One business per category in the city.

Web Design Experts

100+ sites built and Ranked
$ 3 Million in Ad Spend
4.9 star on google

Get a practical website Plan

Tell us what you want to grow. We will review your website, search visibility, lead flow, tracking, and the clearest next steps.

We learn what growth means

Your services, goals, competition, current website, and what a better lead looks like.

We review what is holding leads back

Website design, SEO structure, Google Ads readiness, AI search clarity, and conversion tracking.

You get a clear path forward

Plain English recommendations, realistic priorities, and no confusing agency language.

The site is where the money is won or lost

Every other thing we do sends traffic here. If the page is slow, confusing, or asks for eleven fields before it will let someone contact you, the ranking work is paying for visits that go nowhere. Design decisions on a lead generation site are conversion decisions first and taste decisions second.

Speed

Decided in seconds

Most local searches happen on a phone, often on cell data, often while the person is standing in the problem. A site that takes six seconds to paint has already lost to the one that took two.

Clarity

Three second test

What you do, where you do it, and how to reach you should be readable without scrolling. Most sites bury all three under a stock photo and a sentence about passion for excellence.

Foundations

Built to rank

Clean heading structure, proper schema, crawlable navigation and a page per service. Retrofitting this onto a site that was built without it costs more than doing it right once.

Map stacking, shown on a grid

A single average position hides the truth. We scan a nine point grid across your
service area so you can see exactly which suburbs you own and which ones you
have never appeared in.

AVERAGE GRID RANK
19.4 1.3
GRID POINTS IN TOP 3
0 of 9 9 of 9
CALLS FROM MAPS
44 175
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Profile insights

Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile.

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Grid scan history

Every scan since we started, suburb by suburb.

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Call log, scored

Tracked calls tied back to the map listing that produced them.

What is included

Six workstreams aimed squarely at the map pack. Each one has an output you can
point at in the dashboard.

01

Design and build

Custom layout built for your trade, not a template with your logo dropped in. Designed mobile first because that is where most of your traffic already is.

Custom design Mobile first Your brand
02

Conversion copy

Every page written to move someone toward calling. Clear headline, real proof, one obvious next step, and the objections handled before they are asked.

Headlines Proof Objection handling
03

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Image compression, lazy loading, minimal scripts and proper caching. Speed is checked on real mobile connections, not just on a desktop test.

LCP CLS Caching
04

SEO foundations

Heading structure, schema markup, internal linking, XML sitemap and clean URLs built in from the start rather than added afterwards.

Schema Structure Sitemap
05

Forms and tracking

Contact forms that submit fast and route where you want them, with Google Analytics, Search Console and call tracking wired up before launch.

Forms GA4 Call tracking
06

Launch and handover

Migration, redirects from the old URLs, SSL, and a walkthrough of how to edit your own content. All logins in your name.

Redirects SSL Training

Reviews are a ranking factor, not a vanity metric

Volume, recency, rating and whether you reply all feed the map pack. A business with 180 recent reviews and an owner who answers them will outrank a better company with 40 reviews from 2021, every time.

We automate the ask after every completed job, route unhappy customers to you privately first, and draft a reply to every review that lands.

88%

Read reviews before calling a local business

3 mo

How quickly a review starts losing weight

2x

Reply rate lift when the owner answers

Job marked complete

The request goes out by text within the hour, while the work is still fresh.

Unhappy customers routed to you

A private form first, so problems reach you before they reach Google.

Every review answered

We draft the reply, you approve it. Google reads the replies too.

What the first six months actually look like

A standard build runs three to four weeks. Bigger sites with a page per service and per suburb take longer, and we will say so before you pay.

WEEK ONE

Discovery and structure

Your services, your territory, your competitors, and what a good lead looks like. Sitemap and page structure agreed before any design starts.

EXPECT TO SEE

A sitemap you have signed off

WEEK TWO

Design

Homepage designed first and reviewed, then the inner page templates once the direction is locked.

EXPECT TO SEE

Designs to react to, not a finished site

WEEK THREE

Build and copy

Pages built, copy written, forms wired, schema and tracking installed.

EXPECT TO SEE

A staging link you can click through

WEEK FOUR

Review and launch

Your revision round, speed testing on real devices, redirects mapped, then live.

EXPECT TO SEE

The site live on your domain

Six months on, four trades

A single average position hides the truth. We scan a nine point grid across your
service area so you can see exactly which suburbs you own and which ones you
have never appeared in.

Roofing

Columbus and Dublin
6 months
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1.3

Avg grid rank, from 19.4

175

Calls a month, from 44

189

Reviews, from 61

HVAC

Westerville and Powell
8 months
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9 of 9

Grid points in top three

132

Booked jobs a month

4.9

Rating, from 4.3

Plumbing

Hilliard and Gahanna
5 months
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#1

Emergency plumber, 3 suburbs

89

Calls a month, from 21

62%

Calls now from Maps

Landscaping

New Albany and Delaware
7 months
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7 mi

Ranking radius, from 2 mi

64

Quote requests a month

3.8x

Return on retainer

Built for home service companies

Every trade searches differently. A burst pipe is an emergency search on a phone at
11pm, a kitchen remodel is six weeks of research on a laptop. We build the strategy
around which one you sell.

Roofing

Storm season spikes, high ticket, insurance driven

HVAC

Two hard seasons, maintenance plans in between

Plumbing

Emergency intent, mobile, decided in minutes

Electrical

Trust and licensing questions dominate

Landscaping

Seasonal, visual, review and photo led

Garage doors

Broken spring today, replacement next month

Pest control

Recurring contracts, fast response wins

Remodeling

Long research cycle, portfolio is the pitch

Wwb Design questions we get every week

If yours is not here, call and ask. We will give you a straight answer even if it means telling you not to hire us.

Yes. The domain, the hosting account and the site itself are all in your name. If you stop working with us you keep everything and nothing needs to be handed back.
WordPress, unless there is a reason not to. It is easy for you to edit, it does not lock you into a proprietary platform, and it does not fight the SEO work the way some site builders do.
Yes, and we will show you how. Text, images and new blog posts are straightforward. If you want structural changes we would rather you asked us so the layout does not break on mobile.
Depends on the foundations. If the current site loads reasonably fast and the structure is sane, optimizing it is cheaper and faster than starting over. If it is a slow builder site with no page structure, a rebuild costs less than fighting it for a year.
Two rounds. One after the homepage design, one at the end before launch. That is enough to get it right and few enough that the project actually finishes.
Not if the migration is done properly. Every old URL gets redirected to its replacement, the content that was ranking gets carried across, and Search Console is watched for a month afterwards. Skipping that step is how businesses lose their traffic in a rebuild.

What makes a website generate leads instead of just looking good

A site can win a design award and still take three calls a month. The Nerds SEO builds websites for Columbus, Ohio service businesses around one job: turn the visitor who already needs you into a phone call.

One clear action on every page

Call, or fill in the short form. Not a newsletter, a chat widget, a quote builder and a social row competing for the same tap. Every page we build has one obvious next step, repeated at the top and the bottom.

Designed for a phone first

Most of your traffic is on a phone, often standing next to the problem. Tap to call in the header, legible text without pinching, and forms you can finish with one thumb.

Fast enough to keep the visitor

Page speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor. We build lean, compress the images, and skip the plugin stack that makes a homepage take six seconds to appear.

Timeline. A standard service business site takes four to six weeks from kickoff, most of which is content and photography rather than design. You see it on a staging link before anything goes live.

Web design and SEO built together, not one after the other

Most rebuilds lose rankings because the site was designed first and handed to an SEO afterwards. Structure, URLs and page copy are search decisions, and they get made while the site is being built.

The search work that happens during the build

  • A page for every service you sell. Not one Services page listing nine things nobody can rank for.
  • URL structure set once. Clean, readable, and mapped before the first page is designed.
  • Headings written for search. Real page copy from the start, not lorem ipsum swapped out later.
  • Schema and local markup on launch day, matched to your services and Central Ohio service area.
  • Redirects mapped page by page. Every old URL pointed at its replacement before the switch.

Why rebuilds usually lose rankings

Pages get merged, URLs change, copy gets shortened for the design, and nobody maps the redirects. Traffic drops the week after launch and takes months to recover. It is avoidable, and it is entirely a planning problem.

How The Nerds SEO runs a build

Week one: plan and sitemap

Services, target searches, page list, URL map and what the old site should keep.

Week two: copy and structure

We interview you, then write the pages. Real copy drives the layout instead of the other way round.

Week three to four: design and build

Homepage and one service page approved first, then the rest built to the same system.

Launch week: redirects and tracking

Redirects checked line by line, call tracking and analytics live, Search Console verified same day.

The pages every service business website needs

Most sites we replace have four pages and a contact form. The page list below is what it takes to answer a customer's questions and give Google something to rank.

Homepage

What you do, where you do it, why you over the next contractor, and one way to get in touch. It is a signpost to the service pages, not a place to explain everything.

A page per service

Process, scope, what is and is not included, pricing context and proof from real jobs. These are the pages that rank and the pages that take the calls.

Service area pages

One per suburb you genuinely serve, written only where the market differs. Housing stock, permit quirks and jobs you have completed there.

Proof pages

Completed work with before and after photography, reviews, licence and insurance details. This is the section that closes the visitor who is comparing three quotes.

Contact and booking

Phone, short form, hours, service area and response time. No captcha maze, and no form that asks for a budget range before you have spoken.

Your photography, not stock

Photographs of your trucks, your crew and your finished work outperform stock imagery every time. We will tell you exactly what to shoot, and shoot it with you if you want.

Yours to keep and edit

Built on WordPress with Elementor, on hosting in your name. You can edit your own text, and no part of the site is locked behind a monthly platform fee.

Maintained after launch

Updates, backups, uptime monitoring and security patching, plus the small copy changes you will want in month two. A site nobody maintains breaks quietly.

Measuring a website by the calls it produces

A new site should be judged on enquiries, not on whether everyone in the office likes the colours. We install the tracking that answers the question before the site goes live.

Tracking installed on launch day

Call tracking, form tracking, analytics and Search Console, all live the day the site launches so you have a clean baseline instead of a guess.

Conversion rate, page by page

Which pages produce calls and which ones lose people. That tells us what to fix next, and it is usually one section on one page.

Core Web Vitals watched, not assumed

Real load speed on real phones, checked monthly. Sites slow down over time as images and plugins pile up, and the drop is invisible until traffic falls.

Rankings held through the move

We record every ranking and URL before launch and compare weekly afterwards, so a redirect problem gets caught in days rather than discovered in a quarterly report.

What you get at handover

  • Admin access to the site, hosting and domain, in your name
  • Analytics and Search Console set up and verified
  • Call and form tracking reporting into one dashboard
  • The redirect map, checked and documented
  • A short training video on editing your own pages
  • Backups and updates running on a schedule

What we will not do

Lock your site to a platform you cannot leave, hold the domain hostage, or charge you to change a phone number.

Start with the grid scan.

We will scan your map rankings across every suburb you serve, audit your Google Business Profile and citations, and show you exactly where the calls are going instead.

PHONE 614-908-2515
WEBSITE Thenerdseo.com
HOURS Mon to Fri, 8am to 6pm

Get your free grid scan

Tell us your main service and the towns you serve. We will send back the map showing where you rank in each one.

No contract pitch on the first call.