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The agent reading your service page will not call your office

Your service pages were written for someone who can pick up the phone. More and more, the thing reading them is an agent working for a buyer, and that agent will not call your office to ask what a new roof costs on your side of town.

Two coworkers at a shared desk looking at a laptop, one pointing at the screen while the other writes on a notepad

Where the answer hides

Look at your own service page the way a stranger would. The price range sits inside a graphic. The area you cover is a map image. Booking is a widget that loads after everything else, or a line that says call for a free quote. None of that is broken for a person, because a person closes the gap by picking up the phone.

That gap is the whole problem. A buyer who wants three estimates before Friday now hands the job to an agent, and the agent reads what the page actually says. If the page says call us, the page said nothing it could use.

Two ways agents arrive

Sundar Pichai described two ways agents will reach websites. One is browsing pages the way a person does. The other is specialized protocols built for agents, which he called a far more scalable approach that operates anywhere instantly, though he expects it to take longer to develop. He sees momentum behind agent and payment protocols, and a chaotic evolution there, while both ways keep developing.

He called browser based access a very elegant way to work too, because that is what a user would do, and noted it keeps user controls in place. Google uses a user agent named Google-Agent for its hosted agent browsing, classified as a user triggered fetcher, which typically bypasses robots.txt. Protocol work such as Google's Universal Commerce Protocol is still being standardized, so browsing agents stay visible through that phase.

Plain text beats widgets

The fix is unglamorous. Whatever someone needs in order to decide has to exist on the page as readable text: what you do, which cities and counties you work in, how pricing works, what the first visit includes, and how a person books a date. If it lives only in a picture, a widget or a phone call, it is not on the page.

This is not a rewrite of your website. It is the service pages, in plain sentences, in the order a buyer asks the questions. The same text an agent can read is the text a person skims at nine at night before deciding who gets the call, so you are not writing for the machine. You are removing the step where the answer required a conversation.

What changes in your week

One person owns it, and it should be whoever already answers what does it cost and do you come out this far. They take the service pages one at a time, starting with the service that brings in the most calls, and write the answers into the page itself. A week of ordinary work, no new tools.

Then run the test on Friday. Read each page without clicking anything and try to answer the questions a buyer asks before booking. Every answer you cannot find in the text is a sale that depended on somebody being free to pick up the phone, and now it does not have to.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Spica Studio