Why is my website not getting any enquiries?
There are only two possible causes, and telling them apart takes about ten minutes. Either nobody is arriving, or people arrive and leave. They cost entirely different amounts to fix, and most businesses spend money on the wrong one because nobody checked which they had.
A website that produces nothing is failing in one of exactly two ways. Either nobody is arriving, or people arrive and then leave without doing anything.
That sounds obvious written down. It matters because the two problems cost completely different amounts to fix, and I meet a lot of businesses who have spent money on the wrong one, usually a redesign that was never going to help.
Two causes. Only ever two.
Work out which one you have
Open your analytics, or ask whoever set the site up. You need two numbers: how many people visited last month, and how many did the thing you wanted them to do.
If forty people arrive and one enquires, you have a conversion problem. More visitors will not fix it, they will just be lost at the same rate.
If four people arrive and three enquire, you have a visibility problem and a site that is working rather well. Do not touch the site. Go and get found.
If you have no analytics at all, that is the first job, and it is an afternoon.
If nobody is arriving
This is the more common of the two for a local business, and it is usually not a website problem at all.
For anyone with a front door, most local enquiries come through the map results rather than the ordinary search listings, and those are decided by your Google Business Profile rather than by your site. A business can have an excellent website and be invisible on the map. It happens constantly.
Check the profile first. Are the hours right? Is there a photograph from this year? Has anybody replied to the reviews? Then check whether the site is actually indexed, whether it states plainly what you do and where, and whether it loads quickly on mobile data rather than office broadband.
None of that is glamorous and all of it gates everything else.
If people arrive and leave
Then the site is losing them, and it is worth finding out where before changing anything.
The failures I see most often are the same handful, and none of them are about the design being unattractive.
What they came for is not on the first screen. Somebody arriving for prices, hours, or whether you cover their area should not have to go hunting for it. Most sites treat these as detail pages when they are the reason people came.
It is slow on a phone. Test it on mobile data, away from your wifi, on an ordinary handset. A site that takes eight seconds has lost most of its visitors before it finishes loading, and they do not come back to see if it improved.
Acting takes too much effort. If enquiring means a form with nine fields, or ringing during service, or emailing an address you have to select and copy, a proportion of people simply will not. The path from interest to enquiry should be one obvious step.
It does not say where you are. For a local business this is fatal and extremely common. Somebody who cannot tell within seconds whether you serve them will leave rather than investigate.
Nothing suggests other people use you. Reviews, real work, named results, a photograph of the actual premises. A site that could belong to anyone gives no reason to trust it.
The ten minute version
Open your own site on your phone, standing outside, on mobile data, pretending you have never seen it.
Time how long it takes to load. See whether you can find a price, the opening hours, and a way to get in touch without scrolling twice. Notice whether it is obvious what area you cover.
Whatever irritated you in that ten minutes is what is irritating everybody else, and it will almost always be cheaper to fix than a rebuild.
When a rebuild genuinely is the answer
There are real cases. A site that cannot be edited without a developer will go stale and stay stale. A site that fails on a phone cannot be patched into working. A site describing a business you no longer run is misleading people before they arrive.
But the order matters. Find out where people are leaving, fix what is cheap, and rebuild only when you know what the new site has to do differently. A redesign chosen on taste tends to produce a better looking version of the same problem.
If you want somebody to work out which of the two problems you have, the free audit does exactly that, and what we build is designed around the answer.
Questions people ask
- How many visitors should my website get?
- There is no useful benchmark, because a plumber serving three postcodes and a shop selling nationally have nothing in common. The number that matters is the ratio: of the people who arrive, how many do the thing you wanted. If that ratio is healthy and the total is small, you have a visibility problem. If the ratio is poor, more visitors will not help you.
- Why do people leave my website without contacting me?
- Most often because what they came for was not on the first screen, the site was slow on a phone, or contacting you required more effort than they were prepared to spend. Prices, hours and a way to act are the three things people look for and the three most commonly buried.
- Does my website need a blog to get enquiries?
- Not for enquiries directly. Writing helps you get found for questions people ask before they are ready to buy, which is a slower and broader game. If the problem is that the people already arriving are not enquiring, a blog will not touch it.
- Should I redesign my website if it is not converting?
- Rarely, and not first. A redesign is the most expensive possible response and it frequently changes the wrong things, because it is decided on taste rather than on what visitors were doing. Find out where people are leaving before you rebuild anything.