Why your website gets visitors but no enquiries

Have you ever wondered why you get website visitors but no enquiries?? Getting found is only half the job… I think sometimes people forget that bit.

You do the work. You claim the Google profile, you sort the website, you get a few reviews in. And then you check your stats one evening and there they are, actual people, forty of them last week, having a look at you. Lovely.

BUT not one of them rang…

This happens a lot, and it’s usually not because your prices are wrong or your photos are bad. It’s because somewhere between landing on the page and picking up the phone, they hit a small bit of friction and did the easiest thing instead. Which is going back to Google and clicking the next one.

Here’s what I see most often:

They can’t tell in three seconds whether you do their thing

Somebody in Newark has a leaking shower. They land on your homepage. The first thing they read is “Quality craftsmanship you can trust since 2011.”

That’s great, but do you do showers??

Most people give a page a couple of seconds before deciding whether it’s worth reading properly. So the very top needs to say the plain, boring, useful thing: what you do, who for, and roughly where. “Plumbing and heating in Newark, Mansfield and Grantham” is not a beautiful sentence but it is a very effective one!

Save the story about how you started the business for further down. Someone will read it, and they’ll read it happily, but only after they know they’re in the right place.

The phone number is hiding

I’ve genuinely sat there on a website hunting for a phone number. On a phone… Scrolling.

Your number wants to be at the top of every page, and it wants to be tappable, so that touching it starts the call. Not a picture of a number. Not tucked away on a contact page three clicks in. And ideally at the bottom too, because a lot of people scroll straight to the bottom looking for it out of habit.

Same goes for whichever way you actually like being contacted. If you’d rather have a WhatsApp message than a call, say that. People are quite happy to do it your way, they just need telling.

Nothing answers the question they’re stuck on

There’s usually one thing holding somebody back. How much is this roughly going to cost. How soon can you come. Do you actually cover Orston, or is that too far. Is there parking??

If the site doesn’t answer it, they don’t ring to find out. They assume the worst and move on.

You don’t have to publish a full price list if that doesn’t suit your trade. A range is fine. “Most small jobs come in between £80 and £150” tells someone whether to bother, and it saves you the calls from people who were never going to book anyway.

There’s nothing that makes you feel real

A logo and some stock photos of a smiling call centre in California do not build trust in Newark!

What does: your actual face, your van, your work, your reviews sitting right there on the page rather than only on Google. A line about where you’re based. Maybe the fact you’ve been doing it round here for twelve years.

People are trying to work out whether you’re a real person who will turn up, so you need to help them.

The form is doing too much

If your contact form asks for eleven things including a dropdown of service categories nobody understands, people give up.

Name, way to reach them, and a box to say what they need. That’s it. You can ask the rest when you speak to them.

And when someone does send it, reply the same day if you possibly can. Sometimes the enquiry isn’t lost on the website at all, it’s lost in the two days it took to get back to them, by which point the bloke from Mansfield had already been round and quoted.

What I’d actually do this week

Open your own website on your phone, not your laptop. Pretend you’ve never seen it. Give it three seconds, then ask yourself: do I know what this business does, where they are, and how to contact them?

Then fix whatever failed that test first. Usually it’s one or two things, and usually they take twenty minutes.

Because it’s a shame, honestly. Getting found is the hard part and you’ve already done it. It’d be daft to lose people at the last step.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on yours, message me and I’ll take a look for free and tell you what’s getting in the way.