Matches Machinery Hire

The client: Matches Machinery Hire

Matches Machinery Hire is a family business working out of Taunton, hiring a 1.8 tonne Kubota KX018-4 mini excavator across 1770, Agnes Water and the surrounding area. There is one machine, on dry hire, delivered on its trailer or collected.

This one was built from scratch, starting with registering the domain. With nothing to inherit, the work was as much about what to leave out as what to put in: a hire business with one machine does not need most of what a hire website usually carries.

The problem Matches Machinery Hire came to me with

Most hire sites exist so that nobody has to pick up the phone. This one can’t. There’s a single machine, so whether it’s free next Tuesday depends on where it is this Tuesday and how long that job runs over. Access, gateways and slopes decide which attachments go on the trailer. A booking system would cheerfully take a deposit for a job the excavator physically can’t reach, and then Dave loses a day driving out to say so.

What I built for Matches Machinery Hire

No cart, and the site says so. There is no account to create, no deposit taken online and no booking engine, and the site states it outright: no call centre, no booking system, you speak to the person who owns the machine. For a hire business this far out of town, getting the owner on the phone is what people want.

The specs, twice. Weight (1.8 t), track width (990 to 900mm) and dig depth (2.38 m) run in the hero and again on the machine page. The 900mm figure matters most, because it tells you the machine fits through a standard gateway, so the hero copy says that in words rather than leaving people to do the arithmetic.

A “what people hire it for” list. Trenching for water, power and drainage, footings, post and pier holes, backyard access, site clean-up and rock breaking. Most people hiring an excavator don’t know whether their job even needs one, so the page answers the question they really have: will this machine do my job? It closes by inviting them to describe the job and promising a straight answer if it’s the wrong machine. Turning away bad-fit enquiries is worth doing when a wasted delivery costs a day.

Three steps, so nobody’s surprised. Call or enquire, confirm dates and delivery, machine arrives. It’s there to set the expectation that this is dry hire and the customer supplies the operator, and to prompt them to mention augers or the rock breaker before the trailer gets loaded.

The phone number as the main button, everywhere. It sits in the header, hero and footer. The enquiry form exists for after hours, behind the number rather than in front of it.

Place names in the copy. 1770 and Taunton run right through the writing rather than sitting in the meta tags, and Agnes Water carries the H1 and the title tag, because that’s how people up there search for plant hire.