What to do in a quiet month

Ask for reviews first

Go through the last six months of customers and ask the happy ones. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and reviews affect both your map ranking and whether people ring you.

If you do one thing on this list, do this one. It is the highest return available to a business with time and no money.

Then the things that compound

Photographs of finished work, filed properly. Content for the searches you want in three months. Your Google profile completed fully. Old quotes followed up. Past customers contacted where there is a genuine reason.

None of it produces work this week, which is why it never gets done in a busy month, and all of it produces work later.

• —Ask the last six months of customers for reviews
• —Photograph and file finished work properly
• —Complete every field on your Google profile
• —Follow up quotes older than three weeks
• —Contact past customers where something is genuinely due
• —Write the pages you want ranking in three months
• —Fix whatever is slow or broken on the website
• —Ask three suppliers to list you on their site
• —Work out what your best job type actually earns

Ask suppliers for a link

Manufacturers, wholesalers and trade bodies frequently have 'approved installer' or 'stockist' pages. A link from one is relevant, real and genuinely hard to get any other way.

You already have the relationship. It takes three emails and it is one of the few things that measurably improves how often Google crawls your site.

What not to do

Do not discount to fill the diary. It trains customers to wait for a quiet month and it drags your rate down for everybody.

And do not switch the advertising off. Restarting costs more than keeping it running at a lower budget, and a quiet month is exactly when you need the pipeline building.