Glossary

The service business website glossary

Every term you will meet while buying a website, a phone answer, or software for a trade business, defined in plain words. No definition here assumes you enjoy computers.

AI receptionist

Software that answers your business phone with a natural voice, tells callers about your services and hours, takes their name, number, and problem, and saves the call as a lead. Unlike a human answering service, it picks up every call at once, at any hour, at a flat cost.

How Fasite's works

Answering service

A company whose human operators pick up your calls when you cannot, usually billed per minute or per call. The traditional option before AI receptionists existed; still preferred by some businesses that want a human voice at any price.

Missed-call text-back

An automatic text message sent to any caller you did not answer, usually within seconds. It saves some lost jobs but does not answer the caller's question; many callers simply phone the next company on the list instead of texting back.

Lead

A potential customer who has raised their hand: filled out your contact form, called your number, or asked for a quote. Leads are the unit a service business actually buys marketing for; traffic and clicks only matter when they turn into leads.

Lead capture

Everything on a website built to convert a visitor into a lead: contact forms, click-to-call buttons, quote requests, booking widgets. A site without lead capture is a brochure; people can admire it but not hire you through it.

CRM (customer relationship management)

The system of record for your leads and customers: who inquired, from which channel, what happened next, and what the job was worth. For a small service business the useful core is a simple pipeline, not the hundred-field enterprise version.

Field service management (FSM)

Software that runs field operations: quoting, scheduling, dispatching crews, invoicing, and payments. Jobber and Housecall Pro are the best-known examples. FSM starts after a customer exists; it is not designed to bring in new ones.

Fasite vs Jobber

Done-for-you website

A service, not a tool: the provider builds, hosts, updates, and optimizes your site, and you request changes instead of making them. The opposite of a website builder. Priced higher than DIY software because labor is included.

Compare the providers

Website builder

Software for making your own site with templates and drag-and-drop editing; Wix and GoDaddy's builder are the household names. Cheap and capable, with one built-in assumption: someone at your business will do the building and the upkeep.

Fasite vs Wix

AI website builder

A builder that generates the first draft of your site from a short description, instead of starting you on a blank template. Generation is fast; everything after generation (edits, SEO, content) still works like a normal builder unless the provider manages it for you.

Fasite vs Durable

Local SEO

Making your business show up when people near you search for what you do. It runs on different levers than general SEO: your Google Business Profile, reviews, consistent business listings, and pages that name your services and towns.

Google Business Profile (GBP)

Your free listing in Google Maps and local results: hours, phone, reviews, photos. For 'near me' searches it usually matters more than your website, and the two work best pointing at each other. Formerly called Google My Business.

Local pack (map pack)

The block of three map results Google shows for local searches, above the normal links. Winning it depends mostly on your Google Business Profile, proximity, and reviews; no amount of website content alone places you there.

NAP consistency

Name, Address, Phone: keeping them byte-for-byte identical everywhere your business is listed. Conflicting versions of your own address across directories make search engines trust all of them less.

Citation (local SEO)

Any mention of your business name, address, and phone on another site: directories, maps, trade associations. Citations corroborate that your business exists where you say it does; quality and consistency beat raw count.

Service area business

A business that travels to customers rather than serving them at a storefront: plumbers, electricians, cleaners, landscapers. Google treats these differently; you list the areas you serve instead of showing your home address.

Shared leads

Leads sold by marketplaces like Angi or Thumbtack to several competing contractors at once, each paying per lead. The economics favor the marketplace: you fund the race, then sprint against three rivals for the same homeowner. Leads from your own website have no per-lead fee and are not resold.

Speed to lead

How fast you respond after someone inquires. Response time is one of the strongest predictors of winning the job, because callers who reach voicemail frequently just dial the next company. It is the argument for answering every call, by whatever means.

Organic traffic

Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results, as opposed to ads. Slower to build than paid traffic and far cheaper per visit once it exists, because rankings keep working while you sleep.

Search intent

What the searcher is actually trying to do: learn something, compare options, or hire someone right now. 'Water heater replacement cost' and 'emergency plumber' deserve different pages because the person typing them is in a different moment.

Meta description

The one or two sentences under your page title in search results. Not a ranking factor, but it is your ad copy in the results page; a specific, honest description earns more clicks than a keyword pile.

Schema markup (structured data)

Machine-readable labels in a page's code that state facts plainly: this is a business, these are its hours, this is a FAQ. Search engines and AI assistants use it to quote pages accurately instead of guessing.

Answer engines (AI search)

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers, which reply with a recommendation instead of ten links. They favor pages with a clear direct answer up top, comparison tables, and question-shaped headings; being cited by them is a different job than ranking.

Online booking

Letting customers pick a real open slot on your calendar from your website, instead of phone tag. Works best when the slots shown are genuinely yours and confirmations go both ways; a booking form that emails a request is lead capture wearing a costume.

Conversion rate

The share of visitors who become leads. Twenty extra visits mean nothing if none call; a page that converts 1 in 20 beats a prettier one converting 1 in 100. Measure it before redesigning anything.

Domain name

Your address on the internet, like yourbusiness.com, rented yearly from a registrar. Whoever the domain is registered to controls where it points, so always know who registered yours and read the terms of any service that provides one.

Web hosting

The computers that serve your website to visitors, rented monthly or bundled into whatever service builds your site. Owners rarely need to think about hosting except when it fails: a down host means a down site, whoever built it.

Per-user pricing

Software billed per person on your team, so the price rises when you hire. Standard in field service software; worth modeling at the team size you plan to reach, not the size you are today, because reviews of these tools most often complain about exactly this.

Call summary

A short written record of what a caller wanted: name, number, the problem, the address. The difference between a phone system and a lead system is whether every call ends as a summary someone can act on, rather than a voicemail nobody replays.

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