Hurricane season and your website: what Tampa Bay trades should set up before June
If you're a roofer, a tree service, a restoration outfit or an electrician around Tampa Bay, you already know the shape of the year: quiet stretches, then a week where the phone doesn't stop. What's less obvious is how much of that week is decided by things you set up months earlier.
Storm demand is not like normal demand. People aren't comparing three quotes over a fortnight. They're standing in the yard looking at a limb through the roof, and they call whoever they can reach first and whoever looks like they'll actually turn up.
Before the season
Make your emergency availability explicit. "Emergency callouts, 24/7 during storm season" on the page, in text, not buried in a PDF. If there's a callout fee, say the number. People who've just had a tree come down are not price shopping, but they hate a surprise, and saying it up front is why they call you rather than the listing that says nothing.
Put the phone number where a panicking person finds it in one second. Top of the page, tappable, and again at the bottom. On a phone, in bright daylight, with one hand.
Say which towns, again. After a storm the search is "tree removal Riverview", not "tree removal near me" — people are specific because they're describing a specific mess. A page that names your towns matches those searches.
Have photos of storm work specifically. Tarped roofs, cleared drives, limbs off a car. Someone deciding whether you can handle their problem is looking for a photo of their problem.
Check the site loads on a bad connection. Cell networks get congested after a storm and plenty of people are on a phone with no home internet. A heavy site is unusable at exactly the moment it matters.
The week itself
Update your hours the day the storm turns. Both on the site and on your Google listing. "Open — emergency response only" tells people something useful. Stale hours saying you closed at five make them call someone else.
Say what you're actually doing. A single line at the top — "We're prioritising emergency tarping in Hillsborough this week; new roof estimates resume Monday" — sets expectations, saves you a hundred phone calls you'd have to say it on, and reads as competence rather than chaos.
Say when you're full. Counter-intuitive, and it works. "Booked through Thursday, taking emergency calls only" loses you nothing — those people were going elsewhere anyway — and it stops you burning goodwill with customers you can't reach for a week.
After
Keep the storm content up for a while. Insurance claims and deferred repairs run for months. The people who couldn't get anyone in week one are still searching in week six.
Ask for the reviews. This is the single best time of the year to ask, and almost nobody does, because everyone's exhausted. A customer you got a tarp onto within four hours will write you the review that carries you through next season. Text them the link.
Write down what happened. Which towns, what work, what you ran out of. Next June it's a checklist instead of a memory.
The unglamorous part
Two things underneath all of the above:
Somebody has to be able to change your website quickly. If updating your hours means emailing a web company and waiting three days, none of this works. Know — before the season — how you get a line of text onto your own site, and how fast.
It has to stay up. Traffic spikes hard after a storm, and that's the worst possible moment for a site to fall over.
We host the sites we build, and change requests get quoted and turned around per request rather than queued behind a project — specifically because a message that says "put 'emergency tarping available' at the top of my site today" needs to be a small thing, not a small project.