Put these five facts on your homepage in plain text

Byavannoy
Name, city, services, phone, hours — in HTML

Your homepage should say five things in real words on the page: who you are, where you work, what you do, how to call you, and when you are open. Put them in plain text, not only in a logo or a big photo. That is how Iowa customers and AI both treat your site as the source of record.

This is not a list of every URL you need before 9 p.m. That is a different post. This is the homepage itself — the first page a crawler and a person both hit.

Why plain text beats a pretty hero

A lot of Iowa service sites open with a full-screen photo and the shop name baked into the image. It looks fine on a phone. It is thin for search and for AI. Engines and chat tools cite sentences they can read in the HTML. A logo file and a stock skyline do not count as an answer.

Cloudflare’s mid-2026 note that bots outnumber humans on their network is about HTTP requests, not “nobody visits websites.” People still hire a plumber in Coralville or a clinic in Davenport. Machines still decide which shop they mention first. Both need facts in words.

The five facts

Write them the way you say them on the phone. One short block near the top is enough.

1. Who you are — Legal or DBA name. Same name as the truck and the Google listing when you can. 2. Where you work — Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Quad Cities / Davenport, or the towns you actually cover. “Serving Eastern Iowa” without a city is fog. 3. What you do — Services in customer language. Furnace repair, not “residential comfort solutions.” Cleaning, not “smile design suite” with no other words. 4. How to reach you — Phone that rings. Optional form or text line. Link the number so a phone can dial it. 5. When you are open — Weekday hours, Saturday if you have it, closed days. Point to a full hours page if the schedule is long — but put the basics on the homepage too.

Match the same five on Google Business. The listing is the storefront. The homepage is the full file.

What does not count

  • Text only inside a slideshow image
  • A PDF menu or “download our brochure”
  • A footer copyright line with the city and nothing else above the fold
  • “Call for a free quote” with no service list and no town

If a bot loads the homepage and cannot finish the sentence “This shop in _ does _ and you call ___,” you are asking Maps or a competitor’s clearer page to answer for you.

How this fits the rest of the site

Service pages, trust pages, and job photos still matter. The homepage does not replace them. It names the shop so those deeper pages have a clear home. A before-and-after from last week’s job can sit under the five facts with one caption. That is the same photo-to-content habit — proof under the identity block.

The cut

Put name, city, services, phone, and hours on the homepage in plain text. Iowa shops that keep that block true stay the source of record for customers and for AI. A beautiful hero with no readable facts sends the answer somewhere else.

Upley helps Iowa trades and practices build sites they own — design, hosting, SEO, GEO, and copy that answers before the call.

Book 30 minutes → /half-hour-meeting/ · aaron@upley.com · 319-535-2508 · from $115/month