What does a damp proofing website need to win surveys? Three buyers land on it, and only one of them is a worried homeowner

The site is not selling the treatment, it is selling the survey

Every enquiry a damp proofing business receives is a request for a diagnosis, not an order for a damp proof course.

This sounds like a distinction without a difference until you look at what it changes on the page. A site selling treatments leads with treatments: tanking, injection, salt-resistant render, timber treatment. A site selling surveys leads with the problem the visitor actually has, which is that they do not yet know what is wrong, and they are worried that whoever looks at it will have an interest in finding something expensive.

That worry is the single biggest obstacle in this trade and it is almost never addressed on the websites I read. The firms that do well are the ones that diagnose honestly and are willing to tell a customer that the real fault is a blocked gutter or a raised ground level. If that is how you work, the website has to say so in the first screen, because it is your differentiator and the visitor is actively looking for a reason to trust somebody. General builder and renovation websites can afford to lead with a portfolio. A damp site cannot, because the buyer is not yet sure what they are buying.

What that changes, concretely

The survey becomes a described product rather than a phone number. What you look at, what instruments you use, how long it takes, what you hand over afterwards, and whether it is chargeable or free. Firms are cagey about that last one, and being cagey costs bookings. A visitor who cannot tell whether a survey costs nothing or costs three hundred pounds will very often just close the tab and try someone whose page says.

Three buyers land on a damp proofing site, and each is on a different clock

The same page has to serve a house purchaser working to a surveyor's deadline, a landlord working to a legal one, and a homeowner working to no deadline at all.

This is the structure I would build the whole site around, and it is the thing that separates a damp proofing website from every other trade site I have built. A roofer has one buyer. A damp specialist has three, they arrive through different searches, and what convinces one of them is irrelevant to the other two. The fastest way to work out what your site is missing is to ask which of the three it currently answers.

The landlord clock is written into law now, and almost no damp site mentions it

Awaab's Law came into force on 27 October 2025 and gives social landlords in England 10 working days to investigate damp and mould that presents a significant risk of harm, then a further 5 to make the home safe.

The law is named after Awaab Ishak, the two year old who died after prolonged exposure to mould in his family's housing association home, and it converts what used to be a service standard into a statutory timeframe. The government's guidance for social landlords sets out the timeframes, and the regime is being widened: further hazards come into scope in 2026, and the remaining ones in 2027.

Private landlords are on a different but related hook. The Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018 amended the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 so that a property must be fit for human habitation throughout the tenancy, with damp and mould expressly within scope, and a tenant can take the landlord to court directly rather than waiting on the council.

Why this is a website problem and not just a news item

Because it creates a buyer who is searching with a deadline and a budget, and who cannot tell from a typical damp proofing homepage whether you are equipped to help. Housing officers and managing agents are procuring a service with a paper trail. The site that says "we attend within five working days across the West Midlands and issue a written report with photographs and moisture readings" wins that enquiry outright, because the alternative sites do not say anything of the kind.

It is one page, not a rebuild

A single landlord and managing agent page, linked from the main navigation, is usually enough. It should carry the timeframes you can actually meet, and nothing you cannot. Overpromising an attendance window to a professional buyer is worse than declining the work.

Your accreditations are very possibly named wrongly

The Property Care Association's CSRT has been renamed CSTDB, and a website still advertising the old acronym alone is quoting a name the awarding body has moved on from.

CSRT stood for Certificated Surveyor in Remedial Treatments. It is now CSTDB, Certificated Surveyor of Timber and Dampness in Buildings, awarded through the PCA in partnership with the Awarding Body for the Built Environment, and the PCA's own exams page carries both acronyms. Nobody needs to retrain and the older certificate is still recognised across the UK industry. But this is precisely the sort of thing a website accumulates and nobody proofreads, and the people most likely to spot it are the professional referrers you most want.

The same goes for the methodology. RICS, Historic England and the PCA published a joint position statement, Investigation of moisture and its effects in traditional buildings, setting out agreed principles and competencies for assessing moisture, with a non-invasive inspection first and an invasive one only where it is justified. If that is how you survey, saying so in one sentence does more for a professional referral than a page of treatment descriptions. It is the same mechanic that makes MCS worth a prominent position on a heat pump installer's website: the accreditation is not decoration, it is the shortlist criterion.

The accreditation block, as I would build it

Photographs carry more weight here than in any trade I build for

Damp is the one trade where the before photograph is as important as the after, because the after on its own just looks like a wall.

A finished kitchen sells itself in one image. A successfully treated and re-plastered wall looks like nothing at all, which is the entire problem. The pairing is what carries the message, and the caption is what makes it legible: the property type, the fault found, what was done, and roughly when. "Rising damp, Victorian terrace, hallway, treated and re-plastered" tells buyer three that you have seen their house before. Guidance on getting usable shots off a phone is in how to photograph your work, and the short version for damp is to shoot from the same spot both times and include a doorway or skirting so the eye can match the two.

This is also why running a damp business off a social page alone goes wrong faster than it does for other trades. The images are the asset, and on a platform you do not own they are organised by date rather than by problem, so nobody can find the one that looks like their hallway. That argument plays out in every trade, and I have set it out at length for fencing contractors, but damp is the case where it costs the most.

What the site costs against what one survey is worth

One converted survey in a year covers the website, with the rest of the year's enquiries on top.

The arithmetic is unusually easy in this trade because the job values are known and published. Checkatrade's cost guides put a damp survey at roughly £200 for a two bedroom flat and around £400 for a three bedroom terrace, and a chemical damp proof course at about £70 to £120 per linear metre before re-plastering, which frequently costs as much again. Those are their published figures for 2026, not mine.

The bottom line. A damp proofing website does not need to be big and it does not need to explain damp. It needs to describe the survey, answer all three buyers rather than only the anxious one, carry current accreditation names, pair the photographs, and say who covers the guarantee. That is a six page site, and it is the same six pages every time: home, the survey, what causes damp and what we do about it, the work, who we are, and get in touch.