An aircraft owner with a check due does not browse. They arrive with a specific aircraft, a specific problem and a short list of places that might take it, and they are trying to get from ten possibilities to two phone calls in about four minutes.
Almost every maintenance website we look at contains the information that person needs. What it does not do is answer their questions in the order they ask them. The content is there; the sequence is wrong. That is a much cheaper problem to fix than it sounds, and it does not require you to change a single thing about how you work.
The seven questions, in order
Watch how a technically literate buyer reads an unfamiliar maintenance provider and the same sequence comes up. Each question is a gate: fail it and they leave, pass it and they move to the next.
1. Can you work on my aircraft?
This is first, always, and it is binary. A King Air operator does not care how long you have been trading until they know you take King Airs. Name the types, or name the class and the weight limit, and put it where it is seen before anything else. If you are limited to aircraft up to a certain weight, that limit is not a caveat to hide at the bottom. It is one of the most useful facts on your site, because it qualifies people in as much as out.
2. Are you approved to do it?
The approval reference is the single strongest trust signal an MRO has, and it is routinely the worst-presented thing on the site. It belongs near the top, as text, in the form the regulator uses. Not in a PDF. Not in a paragraph about the company's history.
There is a whole article on this, because there is more to it than putting the number on the page.
3. What exactly do you do?
Not “a full range of engineering services”. A list. Hot section inspection, fuel nozzle cleaning and servicing, compressor washes, undercarriage inspections, pressurisation testing, battery servicing, transponder testing, tech records. Twelve scannable lines beat two well-written paragraphs every time, because the reader is not reading, they are scanning for their own job.
The test: can someone find their specific job in under five seconds without reading a sentence? If the answer is no, it is prose where it should be a list.
4. Where are you?
Airfield, not just town. An operator thinks in airfields, and so does the search engine. “Exeter Airport” is worth more to you than “Devon”, and both are worth more than “the South West”.
Add the practical detail nobody else bothers with: which side of the field you are on, the hangar number, what to put in a satnav, and whether the postcode on your letterhead actually leads to your door. One site in our sample carries a note telling visitors to use a different postcode from their own, because theirs is shared with the passenger terminal. That note is buried at the very bottom of a long page. It is one of the most useful sentences on the whole site.
5. What happens if I am AOG?
If you take urgent work, say so, and give it its own route: a number that is answered differently, an address that is watched differently, or a form field that flags it. If you do not take urgent work, that is fine, but say that too. Silence reads as “probably not”, and the operator moves on.
The common failure is subtler than having no AOG route. It is having one that arrives in the same inbox as a sales enquiry and a supplier invoice, where it waits until Monday.
6. Why should I believe you?
Approvals cover the regulatory half. The rest is ordinary proof: how long you have been at that field, how many engineers, which manufacturer agencies you hold, which registers you support, the aircraft on the apron in a photograph that was taken this decade.
Photographs matter more here than in most industries, because a hangar is legible. People can read tidiness, equipment and scale straight off a picture. A real photograph of your own hangar outperforms any stock image of a jet at sunset, and costs you an hour with a decent phone camera.
7. How do I get hold of you?
A phone number that dials when tapped. An email address that is text rather than a picture. A form that works on a phone and asks for the registration, the type and what is due. And an idea of what happens next, because “we will be in touch” is not a commitment anybody plans around.
Of the nine UK maintenance and avionics websites we reviewed, seven had no tap-to-call link anywhere. The number was on the page, correctly, in every case. Tapping it on a phone did nothing. Three had no enquiry or quote form at all, including on the page called “contact”.
The blunt version. Aircraft type, approval, capability list, airfield, urgent route, proof, contact. If a stranger cannot get all seven inside two minutes on a phone, the website is costing you enquiries you will never hear about, because people who leave do not tell you why.
The structure we use
Same seven answers, arranged as pages. This is the architecture we start from for a maintenance organisation, before any design happens.
Homepage
Everything above, compressed. Within the first screen: what you do, which aircraft, which approvals, and where. Then the capability list, then proof, then the enquiry route. The homepage is not an introduction to your company. It is a switchboard that gets seven different kinds of visitor to the right place quickly.
A page per service line
Maintenance. Avionics. Airworthiness management. Engine and component work. Hangarage. One page each, because those are the words people search for and because a page can rank for a phrase a section cannot.
Each page answers the same seven questions inside its own scope, and each one ends with the enquiry route rather than sending the reader back to a contact page.
An aircraft or capability page
The types you take, plainly listed. This is the page that wins searches like “King Air maintenance UK”, and it is the page almost nobody has.
About, with the history in it
Most maintenance businesses have been at the same field for decades, through several owners and names. That history is genuinely reassuring to a cautious buyer, and it is usually compressed into one apologetic paragraph. Give it a timeline. Dates, changes of ownership, when you gained which approval, who owns it now.
Contact, with the practical detail
Address, hangar number, hours for the hangar and hours for the office if they differ, how to find the place, what to put in a satnav, and a map. Every one of those is a question somebody would otherwise have to ring to ask.
What to leave out
- The mission statement. Nobody has ever chosen a maintenance provider because of one.
- Stock photography of airliners when you work on piston twins. It reads as a stock photograph, and it makes the reader wonder what else is not quite what it appears.
- Capability lists locked in PDFs. Search engines index them poorly and phones render them badly. Put the list on the page. Keep the PDF as well by all means, but not as the only copy.
- A news section you will not maintain. One site in our sample has a news page whose most recent item is dated 1 September 2022, alongside a notice from the Covid period. An empty news section says nothing. A stale one says something worse.
- Approval wording that is no longer current. Several UK sites still advertise EASA approvals that stopped applying to UK organisations on 1 January 2021.
The one that matters most
If you only change one thing: make the first screen on a phone answer questions one, two and four. Which aircraft, which approval, which airfield. Three facts, above the fold, in text.
It is the cheapest change on the list and it is the one that stops the reader scrolling away in the first fifteen seconds, which is where most of the loss happens. Everything else on this page only matters to people who got past that.
Want yours looked at? Send the address and we will review it against these questions and seven more, on a phone and on a desktop, and write up what we find with how we measured it.
Next: how to present CAA, EASA and FAA approvals, and the conversion checklist that turns all of this into twenty-one things you can check yourself.