Service pages are necessary. They explain what you do, help Google understand your business, and give visitors somewhere to land when they search for a specific service. You need them.
But they have a fundamental limitation: they're you describing yourself. And people know that. A page that says "we deliver high-quality work with minimal disruption" is easy to write and impossible to verify. Every tradesperson in the country could write the same page.
Project pages are different. A project page shows rather than tells. That's why, when someone is close to making a decision about which tradesperson to contact, a portfolio of completed work will convert them faster than the most carefully written service description.
What a Project Page Actually Is
A project page — sometimes called a case study or portfolio entry — documents a single completed job. It covers the situation before you arrived, what you did, and the result.
It doesn't need to be long. Three paragraphs and two photos is enough. The point isn't length — it's evidence. You're giving a prospective customer something concrete to look at and react to, not just text to read.
A well-structured project page covers three things:
The challenge. What was the situation before you started? What problem did the customer have? Be specific: a boiler that had failed three times in two years, a bathroom that hadn't been touched since the 1980s, a damp issue in a Victorian terrace that a previous contractor had tried and failed to fix. Specific problems resonate with visitors who have similar problems.
The solution. What did you do? Not a technical manual — just enough detail to show you knew what you were doing and approached it properly. What materials did you use? What was the process? What decisions did you make along the way?
The result. What does it look like now? What's working that wasn't before? If the customer has said something positive about it, include a quote here. Numbers help too if you have them — "reduced heating bills by roughly 20%" or "job completed in one day" says more than "the customer was very pleased".
The Photos That Matter Most
Before-and-after photos are the engine of a project page. They do in seconds what paragraphs of text take minutes to achieve. A visitor who sees a decrepit, damp bathroom on the left and a clean, well-fitted one on the right doesn't need to be told the work was good.
Take the before photo when you first arrive and assess the job — before you start any work. This is the photo most tradespeople miss because it requires thinking about the website before the job is done. Make it a habit. You don't need a great camera, just a photo that shows clearly what you were dealing with.
Take the after photo when the job is complete and cleaned up. Good light makes a significant difference — open blinds or shoot near windows if the artificial lighting isn't great. Take a few shots from different angles and use the best one.
Additional photos mid-job are useful too, particularly for work that gets hidden when it's done — pipe runs behind walls, structural work under floors, wiring before boxing in. These photos show the quality of what's underneath, which matters to customers even if they'll never see it again.
The SEO Benefit You Might Not Have Considered
Project pages do something service pages struggle to do: they generate specific, keyword-rich content about real jobs in real places.
A project page about a bathroom renovation in a specific area of your town, with photos and a description of the work, can rank for searches like "bathroom renovation [your town]" or "bathroom fitter near [local area]". That's content with a local signal that a generic service page won't have.
The more project pages you build up over time, the wider your coverage of specific searches. Each one is a new entry point into your website — a page that didn't exist before, targeting search terms your service pages may not rank for.
This is the compounding value of documenting your work. A tradesperson who adds two or three project pages a month builds a substantial portfolio archive over a year, each page independently rankable, each one showing a different type of work.
A Format to Use
Here's a simple format that works consistently:
Headline: What it was — "Kitchen Rewire in Brighton" or "New Boiler Installation — Combi Replacement in Hove"
Opening paragraph (the challenge): What the customer had, what the problem was, and why the job needed doing.
Middle paragraph (the solution): What you did, in plain language. How long it took. Any noteworthy decisions or complications.
Closing paragraph (the result): What the customer now has. A quote from them if you have one. An invitation to get in touch if they have a similar job.
Photos: Before and after at minimum. More if you have them.
That's it. The whole thing can be written in 20 minutes while the job is still fresh. The photos you've already taken. The only habit to build is actually posting them.
At DCS, every website I build for trades businesses includes a portfolio section for exactly this reason — structured so that adding new project pages is as straightforward as possible. If you want to see how it works, get in touch.