How were the 500 websites selected?

We pulled home service businesses across 53 Metro Atlanta cities from Google Business Profile and organic search results, filtered to companies with an active website and a physical service area, and sampled proportionally by trade so no single vertical dominated the set.

What does the Atlas Performance Index measure?

Atlas scores four categories: technical performance (load time, Core Web Vitals), conversion path (mobile CTA placement, click-to-call, form friction), local search foundation (schema markup, NAP consistency, service area coverage), and Google Business Profile completeness and review velocity.

Can I get an Atlas score for my own website?

Yes. Atlas runs as a standalone audit and we publish the full scored report, including the specific fixes ranked by revenue impact, whether or not you hire us afterward.

The Atlas Report: We Audited 500 Home Service Websites in Metro Atlanta. Here's What We Found.

We ran the Atlas Performance Index against 500 home service websites across 53 Metro Atlanta cities and scored every one on speed, mobile conversion path, local schema, and Google Business Profile completeness. The results explain why most contractors are invisible.

We Audited 500 Home Service Websites in Metro Atlanta

Everybody in this industry says the same thing: "most contractor websites are bad." It gets repeated in every sales pitch, including ours. Nobody ever shows you the receipts.

So we pulled the receipts.

We ran the Atlas Performance Index against 500 home service websites across the 53 Metro Atlanta cities we serve -- roofing, HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, pool, gutters, wildlife control, remodeling, and adjacent trades. Every site got scored on the same four categories: technical performance, conversion path, local search foundation, and Google Business Profile health.

The gap between the top 10% and everyone else is not a design gap. It is a plumbing gap -- and it is worth millions in unclaimed revenue across the metro.

The Headline Numbers

Here is the aggregate picture across all 500 sites:

Median mobile load time: 4.8 seconds. Google's own threshold for "good" is under 2.5 seconds. Only 18% of the set cleared it.

61% had no click-to-call button visible without scrolling on a mobile viewport, despite mobile making up the majority of home service search traffic.

74% had no LocalBusiness or Service schema markup at all, meaning search engines and AI models were guessing at their service area, hours, and offerings.

43% had a contact form as the only conversion path. No phone, no text, no chat, no instant quote.

Median number of form fields: 6. Every field past the third measurably reduces completion.

29% of Google Business Profiles were missing service area definitions, and 38% had not posted an update in over 90 days.

Only 7% of sites had any form of instant estimate or pricing guidance, right as Google is rolling "Online Estimate" buttons into local results.

52% had at least one broken or dead-end page in their primary navigation.

Finding One: Speed Is Not a Vanity Metric Here

The correlation we did not expect to be this clean: sites in the fastest quartile had substantially deeper engagement than sites in the slowest quartile -- more pages per session, longer sessions, and far lower single-page exits.

That matters beyond user experience, because engagement signals feed back into local ranking. A slow site does not just lose the visitor. It loses the ranking that would have brought the next hundred visitors.

The most common culprits were unremarkable and completely fixable:

Uncompressed hero images, frequently 3-8MB, dropped in straight from a phone

Page builder bloat loading dozens of scripts to render a headline and a button

Chat widgets, tracking pixels, and review sliders all loading before content

No image sizing, causing layout shift that makes fast sites feel slow

None of this requires a rebuild. Most of it is a week of work that nobody is being paid to do.

Finding Two: The Mobile Conversion Path Is the Real Bottleneck

This is the finding with the clearest dollar value attached.

A homeowner with a leaking roof or a dead AC unit is not browsing. They are in a hurry, they are on a phone, and they are going to contact two or three companies in the next ten minutes. If your primary action requires scrolling, pinching, or typing a paragraph into a message box, you lose to the company whose phone number was a thumb-tap away.

What the top decile did differently:

A tap-to-call button pinned in the viewport, not buried in a header menu

Three fields to start a conversation, with qualification happening after contact

A text option, because a meaningful share of homeowners will not make a phone call

A visible service area, so nobody has to guess whether you cover their zip code

Real pricing guidance, even as a range, which reduces the "just checking" call volume

Finding Three: Nobody Is Structured for AI Search

This is where the set was weakest, and it is going to matter more every quarter.

Three quarters of these businesses have no structured data describing what they do, where they do it, or what it costs. When a language model assembles an answer to "who should I call for a roof leak in Marietta," it needs machine-readable facts and corroborating citations. Most of these companies have supplied neither.

The pattern among the small group that was well-structured:

LocalBusiness and Service schema, with defined service areas

FAQ content answering the questions people actually ask, in plain language

Consistent name, address, and phone data across their site, GBP, and directories

Content that states specifics -- trades, cities, price ranges, response times -- instead of adjectives

Search engines have been able to guess for years. Language models do not guess, they cite. If you are not stating facts in a structured way, you are not in the answer.

Finding Four: Google Business Profile Is the Most Neglected High-Leverage Asset

GBP is roughly a third of local ranking potential and it costs nothing but attention. Yet 38% of this set had let their profile go stale for a quarter or more, and a meaningful share had never defined a service area.

Review behavior told the same story. It was not that these businesses had bad reviews -- most had solid ratings. It was that reviews arrived in unpredictable clumps, months apart, with no owner responses. Review velocity and response rate are both signals. Ignoring them is choosing to rank lower.

What the Top 10% Have in Common

The highest-scoring sites in the study were not the prettiest. Several were plainly designed. What they shared:

1. Fast, image-disciplined pages that loaded in under two seconds on mobile

2. A contact action reachable within one thumb-tap from anywhere on the page

3. Structured data describing services and service areas explicitly

4. An actively maintained Google Business Profile with steady review flow

5. Pricing transparency in some form -- ranges, calculators, or instant estimates

6. Individual pages for each service and each city rather than one catch-all page

That is a checklist, not a mystery. Which is the actual finding of this study: the companies winning local search are not doing something clever. They are doing the obvious things consistently, in a market where almost nobody does.

The Cost of Sitting in the Middle

Across the whole set, the median site had between four and seven fixable issues that each measurably suppress lead volume. Compounded, that is routinely a difference of 30-60% in inbound lead flow between a median site and a well-built one on identical traffic.

You do not need more visitors. You need to stop losing the ones you already have.

Get Your Own Atlas Score

Atlas is the same audit we ran on all 500 of these sites. Run it against your own domain and you get the scored report, your position against the metro benchmarks in this study, and the fixes ranked by revenue impact rather than by how easy they are to bill for.

You get the report either way. What you do with it is up to you.

Lead. Don't Chase.