Key facts
- The homepage claimed the business had operated since one year, while the about page named a different founding year, roughly three years apart.
- Years-of-experience claims also disagreed: one page said 15 plus years, another said 12 plus years, and a third said 2 plus years of excellence.
- Total jobs completed were listed as 500 plus on one page and 1,542 plus homes improved on another, alongside separate counts for specific repair types.
- A ratings badge reading 4.9 and a separate label reading 5-star rated sat directly next to a reviews widget that displayed a 0 average star rating, with no review text visible anywhere on the site.
- None of these numbers were used anywhere in the business's own advertising materials once the contradiction was found, since no single figure could be confirmed as the accurate one.
The finding
This business had, by any reasonable measure, a real and probably strong trust story: years of operation, real jobs completed, and presumably real reviews somewhere. The problem was that its own website could not agree with itself on any of the numbers that would prove it.
One page said the company had operated since one specific year. A different page named a founding year roughly three years off from that. Years of experience were quoted as 15 plus in one place and 12 plus, then separately 2 plus, in others. Job counts ranged from 500 plus to over 1,500. A ratings badge and a text label both claimed strong star ratings, directly beside a widget that showed zero.
What we looked at
We read the homepage's trust claims, then compared them line by line against the about page and a sample of the site's other pages, including a set of neighborhood-level pages built for local search. We recorded every year, every plus-sign count, and every rating claim we found, with the exact page it appeared on.
We also opened the reviews widget itself to see what it actually displayed once loaded, since a badge claiming a rating and a widget showing a different number are two separate technical pieces that do not always get updated together.
Why it mattered for leads
A homeowner comparing garage door companies is often making a same-week decision under some stress, a broken door is not something most people plan for. Trust numbers like years in business and jobs completed exist to shortcut that comparison. When those numbers contradict each other on the business's own site, a careful reader notices, and the contradiction reads as carelessness at best.
The empty ratings widget sitting next to a claimed 4.9 score is the sharper problem. A visitor who clicks through expecting to read reviews and finds none may reasonably wonder if the rating was ever real, which undermines every other claim on the page along with it.
False positive checks we ran
We re-fetched every page fresh to rule out a caching issue showing us stale, already-corrected numbers. The contradictions held across repeated fetches.
We also checked whether the different numbers might simply belong to pages built at very different times, an old page nobody had gotten around to updating yet. That would still be worth fixing, but it would explain the pattern differently. In this case, several of the contradicting pages had been built or edited around the same recent period, which points to the numbers being drafted inconsistently rather than one page simply going stale.
The fix
The rebuilt site uses exactly one founding year and one job count, chosen as the figures the business itself could confirm, and removes every other version of those numbers from every page, including the location pages that had quietly drifted from the main site's language.
The ratings badge was removed until it could be tied to a real, checkable review source with an actual star average behind it, rather than a static graphic making a claim the site's own widget could not back up.
How to check your own site for this
Search your own site for every place a founding year, a years-in-business claim, a job count, or a star rating appears, whether that is with your browser's find tool on each page or a site search through a search engine, and write each one down next to the page it came from.
Line them up in one place. If any two disagree, even by a small amount, a visitor comparing pages back to back will notice exactly the same thing you just did.
Related questions
It matters less for the exact number and more for what a contradiction signals. A visitor who catches one inconsistency starts checking the rest of the page more skeptically, which works against every other honest claim on the site.
They are often two separate pieces added at different times, a static image or badge someone uploaded once, and a live widget that pulls from an actual review source. When the widget's connection breaks or was never fully set up, the badge keeps claiming a number nothing on the page can back up.
Yes, at least until it can be confirmed. A missing number invites a visitor to look elsewhere for proof. A contradicted number actively damages trust in every other claim on the page, which is a worse outcome.
It shows up more often than most business owners expect, usually because different pages were written or updated at different times by different people, without anyone comparing the finished pages side by side afterward.
Keep one internal document listing the business's core trust numbers, the founding year, total jobs, and any verified rating, and require every new page to pull from that document rather than being written from memory.
Real findings from SearchPod proposal reviews, anonymized; platforms change, records are dated.
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