10 Questions Your Squarespace Website Should Answer Before Someone Ever Contacts You
There’s a very simple exercise I come back to again and again when I’m looking at a small business website, and funnily enough, it has very little to do with the things we tend to think about first when we hear the words website design.
I’m not looking at whether your fonts are trendy enough, whether you’ve chosen the perfect shade of green, or whether your homepage has one of those very cool scrolling animations… Instead, I’m usually trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who has never encountered the business before and asking:
What would I need to know before I felt comfortable reaching out to this person?
Because when we’ve been inside our businesses for a while, we know so much that our clients don’t.
We know exactly what happens after someone inquires. We know roughly what things cost, how long they take, what’s included, who our services are best suited to, what makes our approach a little different, and all of the tiny details we’ve picked up through hundreds of conversations and projects along the way.
The person landing on our website for the first time knows... none of that.
They might have found you through Google five minutes ago. They might have been quietly following you on Instagram for six months. Their friend might have texted them your name with an enthusiastic “You NEED to talk to her!”
Either way, at some point they arrive on your website and start trying to piece together whether what you offer is what they need. And this is where I think we sometimes underestimate what a website can actually do for a small business.
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Why Your Small Business Website Should Answer Questions Before You Do
Your website isn’t just there to make your business look legitimate or give people somewhere to read your About page. It can be one of the systems that helps your business run.
It can answer questions before they hit your inbox, explain your services while you’re working with another client, help someone understand whether they’re a good fit before they inquire, and build enough trust that when they do finally reach out, they already have a pretty good idea of what working with you might look like.
So, whether you’re currently piecing together your own small business website, wondering whether you've outgrown the one you built a few years ago, or simply feeling like your website exists but isn't really doing much for you, these are the questions I think it should be answering before someone ever contacts you.
Website Clarity: Help People Understand Your Business
Before someone can trust you or choose you, they have to understand you. These first few questions are really about giving both your potential clients and search engines enough context to figure out exactly what your business does and whether it's relevant to them.
1. Okay, but... what do you actually do?
I know. This one feels almost insultingly obvious. And yet, it’s one of the things I see most often when looking at service-based business websites. Usually, it isn't because the business owner doesn't know what she does. It's almost the opposite: she knows her business so well that she's forgotten what it's like to encounter it without any context.
So the homepage starts with something like:
Creating meaningful experiences for your next chapter.
Or:
Helping you step into what’s possible.
Or:
Thoughtful support for the life you’re building.
All lovely sentences.
I am also... not entirely sure what you sell. 😅
You could be an interior designer, a therapist, a business coach, a doula, a photographer, a financial planner, or someone who has developed a particularly moving way of selling insurance. This is where I will almost always choose clarity over cleverness.
That doesn't mean your website has to sound boring, corporate, or like it was assembled entirely from SEO keywords. Please don't do that either. It simply means that somewhere very early in the experience, I want your visitor to be able to understand, in normal human language, what kind of business they've landed on.
Something like:
Home organization and downsizing support for Calgary homeowners and seniors.
Or:
Brand and Squarespace website design for service-based small businesses.
Now I have context. And once I have context, you have so much more room to bring in personality, emotion, clever copy, beautiful imagery, and all the things that make your business feel distinctly like you.
There’s another benefit here too, because the language that helps your clients understand your business is often the same language that helps Google understand it. If you’re a Calgary wedding photographer but nowhere on your website actually says Calgary wedding photographer, you’re making Google do quite a lot of detective work.
And generally speaking, we don't want your clients or Google playing detective.
2. Is this actually for someone like me?
Once I understand what you do, the next thing I’m subconsciously trying to figure out is whether you do it for people like me.
This is where specificity becomes incredibly useful. And I know specificity can feel a little scary when you run a small business because there’s often that tiny voice in the back of your head saying:
But what if someone outside of that description wants to hire me?!
They still can. Being clear about who you work especially well with doesn't mean installing a tiny bouncer at the entrance to your website who refuses admission to everyone else lol.
It simply makes it easier for the people you most want to work with to recognize themselves.
Compare:
Bookkeeping solutions tailored to your unique needs.
with:
Monthly bookkeeping support for Canadian service-based business owners who are ready to hand their books to someone else.
The first could apply to almost anyone. But, the second immediately creates a little moment of recognition for the right person. Oh. That's me! And those little moments matter.
Your ideal clients shouldn't have to infer that you understand them.Your website can show them through the problems you talk about, the examples you use, the services you offer, your portfolio, testimonials, FAQs, photography, and the language woven throughout the site.
The goal isn't to make your audience as tiny as possible. It's to make the right people feel like they've landed somewhere relevant.
3. Where are you, and where can I hire you?
This one is especially important for businesses that serve a particular location, and it's another piece of information that somehow has a habit of disappearing from websites. I've landed on websites where I've genuinely thought:
This person seems perfect. Are they in Calgary? Toronto? Texas? Australia? Am I about to become emotionally invested in a service I cannot actually buy? Please tell me!😂
If you're a local or location-based service business, your website should make it relatively easy to figure out where you're based and where you work. And there’s a lovely overlap here between good user experience and good local SEO, because your potential clients and Google are both looking for that information.
You don't need to awkwardly write your keywords in every piece of website copy. But natural sentences such as:
“I'm a Squarespace website and brand designer based in Calgary, Alberta, working with service-based small businesses throughout Canada.”
gives everyone useful context.
Your location and service areas can also show up naturally on your Contact page, About page, individual service pages, footer, portfolio pieces, and anywhere else they genuinely make sense.
SEO tends to work a lot better when we stop thinking of it as Where can I hide my keywords? and start thinking: What information would make this page more useful and specific? Quite often, the two goals overlap.
Service Information: Help Potential Clients Decide If You’re a Fit
Once someone understands what your business does, they're usually moving into a different stage of the decision: figuring out whether what you offer actually matches what they're looking for. This is where your website can do quite a bit of qualifying before an inquiry ever reaches you.
4. What can I actually hire you for?
This is another one that sneaks up on established businesses because our services tend to evolve gradually. You start with one offer. Then a client asks for something slightly different, and you realize you actually really enjoy doing it. Then you add another service. Then you stop offering the thing you started with. Then your pricing changes. Then your process changes.
Then one day you realize your Instagram Highlights, website, proposal template, and the actual services you're currently selling are all living in slightly different eras of your business. 🫢
Very normal! (Please let me assure you 😌). But your website should eventually catch up. When someone is considering working with you, they need to be able to understand the actual options available to them now.
For each of your core services, I generally want someone to be able to figure out things like:
what the service actually is
who it's best suited to
what problem you're helping solve
what's generally included
what the process looks like
what kind of result or outcome they're working toward
how to take the next step
That doesn't mean your homepage needs to contain every detail you've ever written about every service. In fact, I would very much prefer that it doesn't. This is where good website structure does some of the work for us:
Your homepage gives me the overview.
Your Services page helps me compare my options.
Individual service pages give me the details I need to make a decision.
Your portfolio shows me what the work actually looks like.
Your testimonials let me hear from people who have already been through the process.
Your FAQs clear up the questions that might otherwise stop me.
And your calls to action tell me where to go when I'm ready.
Your website isn't one giant piece of content. It's a collection of pages that should work together to move someone through a decision.
5. How much is this going to cost me?
Ah yes. The pricing conversation. 😂 I know there are approximately nine million opinions on whether service providers should put their prices on their websites, and I don't think there is one universal answer that works for every business.
Some services are straightforward enough to list an exact price, while others vary considerably depending on scope. Sometimes a starting price makes the most sense. Sometimes an average investment range is more helpful.
But what I do think is worth considering is whether your potential client has enough information to understand the general financial commitment before everyone spends time moving through an inquiry process.
Because imagine this:
Someone fills out your inquiry form.
You read it.
You send a thoughtful response.
Maybe you schedule a call.
You spend 45 minutes talking through their project.
You explain the process.
They're excited.
You're excited.
And then you discover they were expecting the entire project to cost $500 while your projects begin at $3,000.
Nobody did anything wrong. There was simply a piece of information missing earlier in the process. And this is where I think we need to slightly rethink the goal of a service-based business website.
The goal isn't necessarily to get the highest possible number of inquiries. It's to help you get more of the right inquiries. If someone looks at your starting price and thinks, Oh, that's way outside my budget, that's useful. If someone else looks at it and thinks, Yep, that's roughly what I expected, that's useful too.
Your website just helped both people make a decision without you needing to be there.
Website Trust: Give People a Reason to Choose Your Business
Understanding your services isn't quite the same as being ready to hire you. Especially with a service-based business, your potential client is usually handing over money for something she can't completely evaluate until after you've worked together, which means trust plays a pretty significant role in the decision.
6. Can I trust you with this?
This is such an interesting part of website design because trust isn't created by one magical section titled WHY YOU CAN TRUST ME. It's built through dozens of little signals, including:
Your work.
Your words.
Your photos.
Your reviews.
Your process.
Your experience.
How specific you are.
Whether the website feels current.
Whether what you're saying feels believable.
Whether the whole thing feels consistent.
And for a service business, this matters enormously because people usually aren't just buying a deliverable. They're trusting another human being with something that matters to them…
Their business.
Their home.
Their wedding.
Their finances.
Their health.
Their family.
Their story.
So instead of simply telling people: I provide exceptional service and high-quality results.—which, respectfully, is what approximately every business on Earth says—I want to see evidence!
Show me the portfolio. Tell me what changed. Let me read what your clients said. Walk me through the process. Show me the credentials if they're relevant. Tell me how long you've been doing this. Give me an actual example.
One of the most useful shifts you can make in your website copy is moving from claiming credibility to demonstrating it. And your testimonials are a great example.
“Kaylee was amazing!” is incredibly kind and absolutely going on my emotional-support folder for a bad day. 😂 But a testimonial that says: “Within 60 days, our Google clicks had increased 600%, and we started receiving inquiries through search.” gives a prospective client a different kind of information. And, ideally, you want both.
What did working with you feel like, and what did the work actually accomplish? That's where trust starts becoming much more tangible.
7. What is it actually like to work with you?
I think this question gets overlooked because you know your process, but your potential client doesn't, and uncertainty creates friction.
Imagine someone has finally decided she's ready to invest in professional website design. She's excited about the end result, but she's also thinking:
How much work is this going to be for me?
Do I need to have everything figured out first?
How many meetings are there?
Do I need to write all my own copy?
What happens if I have no idea what colours I like?
Am I about to receive a questionnaire with 73 questions that requires a bottle of wine and an entire Sunday to complete?
These are real parts of the buying decision, even if nobody is typing them into your inquiry form. So show people enough of the process that they can picture themselves moving through it. You don't need to publish the internal SOP. A simple explanation of what happens after they inquire, how they prepare, what you'll take care of, when they'll provide feedback, and approximately how long everything takes can remove a surprising amount of uncertainty.
And if the way you work is part of what makes your service different, this is also where you get to show that.
Maybe your process is incredibly collaborative.
Maybe it's intentionally streamlined.
Maybe clients don't have to sit through eight meetings.
Maybe you provide unusually thorough preparation.
Maybe everything happens in one focused week rather than stretching across four months.
Those aren't boring operational details. They're part of the client experience you're selling.
User Experience: Make the Next Step Easy
By this point, someone may understand what you do, know which service interests them, have a reasonable idea of the investment, and feel pretty good about working with you. Now your website has one more very important job: don't make the next step harder than it needs to be.
8. What do you want me to do next?
This seems like such a tiny website detail, but it matters so so much in buyer psychology. Someone has read your homepage; they like what they see and they're interested in working with you. But then… nothing. There’s no obvious next step, or worse, seventeen next steps…
Book a call!
Download my guide!
Follow me on Instagram!
Read the blog!
Join the newsletter!
Learn more!
Contact me!
Buy this thing!
At some point the website starts feeling like a Cheesecake Factory menu and we have no idea what we're supposed to choose!
Most service-based business websites benefit from having a clear primary action. Perhaps that's starting an inquiry, booking a consultation, viewing your services first. There can absolutely be secondary actions for people who aren't ready yet, but there should be some hierarchy. Because good website design isn't about giving people every possible option. It's about understanding where they are in the journey and making the next logical step feel obvious.
9. Do I actually want to work with this person?
This is where things become a little less measurable, but no less important. Because by the time someone has figured out what you do, looked through your work, checked your prices, and read a couple of testimonials, they're often evaluating something much more human:
Do I like this business?
Do I connect with the person behind it?
Do they seem to understand what matters to me?
Does their work feel like what I'm looking for?
Do their values align with mine?
Would I feel comfortable asking them a question I think might be silly?
Would I actually enjoy spending several weeks or months working with them?
And this is where your brand, website design, copy, photography, portfolio, process, testimonials, and personality all start working together. Your branding isn't just there to make everything look pretty. Your copy isn't just there to fill the sections. Your photos aren't decoration. All of those pieces are communicating something about what it might feel like to enter your world and work with you. And this is one of the reasons I find holistic website design so interesting.
You can technically separate branding, SEO, user experience, copywriting, website strategy, and business systems into different boxes. But your client doesn't experience them in boxes. She experiences the business.
She searches for something on Google, lands on a page, looks around, gets a feeling, reads a few words, notices a testimonial, clicks into a service, checks the price, decides whether she trusts you, and eventually chooses whether to reach out. It's all one experience to her. Which means all of those pieces need to make sense together.
10. And finally... how do I actually contact you?
If someone has made it all the way to Yes, I think I'd like to talk to her, please don't make the final step unnecessarily difficult. Your Contact page should be easy to find, buttons should use fairly consistent language, and your inquiry form should ask for the information you actually need to determine whether the project might be a fit.
And, perhaps most importantly, your inquiry form does not need to double as your entire onboarding process!
I love a thorough questionnaire more than most people. Truly. Give me structured information and a well-organized form and I am delighted. 🤭 But there's a time and place. Before someone has even spoken to you, do you really need 28 required fields?
For many service businesses, the initial inquiry might only need someone's name, contact information, the service they're interested in, a little context about what they need, their approximate budget and timeline, and perhaps how they found you. You can gather the detailed information once you've both decided to move forward.
The goal of the inquiry form isn't to learn everything there is to know about this person. It's to make the next decision easier.
How Your Website Can Support Your Business Systems
Your Website Can Do More Than Sit There Looking Pretty
This is really the bigger idea behind all ten of these questions, and it's something I've become increasingly interested in as I've worked with more small businesses. I don't think of a website as a standalone marketing piece, instead, I think of it as part of the operating system of the business.
It sits at this really interesting intersection between marketing, SEO, branding, communication, client experience, and operations, because the same website that helps someone discover you can also help them understand you, trust you, qualify themselves, learn about your process, and take the first step toward becoming a client.
When those pieces are working together, your website starts doing some of the repetitive communication that would otherwise land on you.
It can explain your services while you're deep in client work.
It can show someone your portfolio while you're making dinner.
It can answer the “How much does this usually cost?” question while you're out walking the dog.
It can help someone find your business through Google while you're spending your Saturday doing literally anything other than trying to think of an Instagram Reel. 🙃
It can even help someone realize that you're not the right fit before either of you spends an hour figuring that out manually.
And no, I don't think a website can magically automate your entire business while you disappear to Italy for three months with an Aperol Spritz. If anyone has figured that one out, please email me immediately. 🙋♀️
But I do think the systems we build around our businesses can carry some of the load. Your website is one of those systems. That's what I mean when I talk about building businesses that leave room for real life. It's not necessarily about working less, scaling to infinity, or turning everything into passive income. It's about looking at all of the little things you're doing over and over again and asking whether there's a more thoughtful way to build them into the business itself. And sometimes, that starts with something as simple as answering the questions your clients are already asking.
The 10-Minute Small Business Website Audit
If you want to see how your own squarespace or wix website is doing, you don't need an SEO tool or a complicated analytics dashboard for this one.
Start by opening your website—preferably on your phone, because that's how plenty of your clients will experience it—and try to look at it as though you've never seen your business before. Can you quickly figure out:
What does this business actually do?
Is it meant for someone like me?
Where are they based, and can I hire them?
What services can I choose from?
Roughly what should I expect to spend?
Why should I trust this person?
What will working together look like?
What should I do next?
Does this feel like a business I want to work with?
How do I contact them?
And then, because this is the part I find particularly useful, open your inbox. Look through your last handful of inquiries, discovery conversations, DMs, or emails from prospective clients and pay attention to what people keep asking.
Do you work with businesses outside Calgary?
How much does this cost?
Do I need to provide the copy?
How long does it take?
Can you help me with ___ too?
What happens after I book?
If you keep answering the same question, that's information. Maybe the answer belongs on your website, in an FAQ, or your service description needs to be clearer. Maybe it belongs in an automated email after someone inquires. Or, maybe it reveals a bigger gap in your client process. Not every repetitive task can—or should—be automated away.
But every once in a while, you'll find something you've manually explained 37 times that your website could have been quietly explaining for you all along. And those are exactly the little opportunities I love finding. Because that's when your website stops being something your business simply has and starts becoming something that actually supports the way your business works.
Looking at Your Own Website and Thinking, Oh... We Might Have Some Work to Do?
That's quite literally what I'm here for!
I'm Kaylee, the designer behind Endeavor Design Studio, a Calgary-based Squarespace website and brand design studio for service-based small businesses that have grown beyond the “I just need to get something online” stage and are ready for their website to catch up.
My approach brings together website strategy, thoughtful design, SEO, branding, user experience, messaging, and the systems surrounding your client journey, because I don't think any of those things exist in isolation.
The goal isn't simply to give you a prettier website. It's to build something that helps the right people find you, trust you, and choose you, and takes work off your plate in the process.
