A website not getting enquiries is usually blamed on Google, and sometimes Google is the problem. More often the visitors are arriving and leaving again: the form does not send, the number cannot be tapped, or the first screen does not say what the business does or where. Those are cheaper to fix than traffic, so check them first.
Is the problem visitors, or enquiries?
These are two different faults with two different fixes, and it is worth an evening to find out which one you have before spending money on either.
Google Search Console is free, and once your site is verified its Performance report shows how often your pages appeared in Google results (impressions), how often someone clicked, and the searches that showed them. It keeps up to 16 months of history, so you can see whether something changed and when.
Your Google Business Profile has its own performance page, which counts taps on the call button and on the website link. For many local businesses more enquiries start there than on the website.
Then apply a rough rule. If the site is barely being clicked, the problem is being found, and the last two checks below matter most. If it is being clicked every week and the phone stays quiet, the problem is what happens after the click, which is checks one to seven.
An illustration, not a benchmark: a plumber whose Search Console shows 60 clicks a month and no form enquiries in three months has a site that people reach and leave. More visitors would leave the same way.
1. Does the form actually arrive?
A broken contact form is the commonest silent failure on a small business site. It looks fine, it says “thank you”, and the message goes nowhere, or into a spam folder nobody opens.
- Use a phone, on mobile data. That is how most of your customers will send it.
- Fill in every field the way a customer would. Include a photo if the form takes one.
- Check where it lands. The inbox you read, not only the one the form was set up with years ago. Check spam too.
- Time it. If it takes more than a few minutes to arrive, ask why.
- Do it again next month. Plugins update, passwords change and email settings drift. A form that worked in spring can stop in autumn.
A failed form does not tell you it failed. The customer sees a thank-you message and waits for a reply that never comes, and you never learn they tried. The only way to know is to send yourself an enquiry on a schedule.
While you are there, look at how many fields you ask for. Name, phone, postcode and what the job is will do for most trades. Every extra field is one more reason to give up halfway.
If the form sends to an address on your own domain, make sure the domain is registered in your name and renews on time: .com or .co.uk, and who owns your domain shows how to check.
2. Can a phone user call you in one tap?
Someone with a leak, a locked door or a dead boiler is holding a phone. If your number is written as plain text, or worse as part of a picture, they have to copy it by hand.
- Right the number is a link that opens the dialler, at the top of every page and again at the bottom.
- Not the number appears once, in the footer, as text inside an image.
The same goes for WhatsApp, which for many trades is how the first photo of the job arrives. A button that opens a chat with your business number saves the customer saving your number first. What a tradesperson’s website needs covers the rest of the contact set-up.
Then tap your own number from your own phone. A surprising number of sites link to an old number, or to a mobile that went to a former employee.
3. What does the first screen say?
Open the homepage on a phone and do not scroll. What you see is all that most visitors read before deciding to stay. It needs three things: what you do, where you do it, and how to get in touch.
- Right “Boiler repairs and servicing in Stockport and south Manchester”, with a call button and a quote button under it.
- Not “Quality workmanship you can trust”, over a photo of a sunset.
The second version could belong to any business in the country. A customer looking for someone local cannot tell whether you cover their street, and the next result is one tap away.
If a cookie banner covers part of that screen, check whether you need one at all; do you need a cookie banner? shows how.
4. Do you say what anything costs?
“Every job is different” is true and it is not an answer. Customers want to know whether you are in their range before they spend time on the phone, and a site with no figures at all sends them to one that has some.
You do not have to publish a price list. A fixed price for the jobs that are the same each time, a “from” price for the rest, and a sentence on what pushes the price up will do more than a page of adjectives. Copperline, a demo we built for a plumber in Stockport, puts a fixed price on the common faults and explains what is charged by the hour, which is the shape most trades can copy.
5. Is there anything a stranger can check?
People are letting you into their house or trusting you with their money. Your own description of yourself counts for little; things they can verify count for a lot.
- Reviews on Google, with replies from you, and a link to them from the site.
- Registration numbers that can be looked up, such as Gas Safe or an electrical competent person scheme, linked to the register.
- Photos of your own jobs, not stock photos.
- A real name: who will turn up, or who answers the phone.
How to get more Google reviews covers asking for them without it being awkward, and what UK law now forbids.
6. Is it quick on a phone?
Paste your address into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile result, not the desktop one. The three numbers Google calls Core Web Vitals have published targets: the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds (Largest Contentful Paint), the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds (Interaction to Next Paint), and the layout should not jump about as it loads (a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less).
The usual culprits on a small site are oversized photos, a slider at the top, and plugins or embedded widgets that load on every page whether they are used or not. A site that loads its photos at the size they are shown, and nothing it does not need, normally passes without heroic effort.
7. Does Google know what you do and where?
If the first check showed very few clicks, this is where to look. Search Console’s list of queries tells you what you are being shown for. If the searches are your business name and nothing else, Google does not yet connect you with the work.
The fixes are ordinary. A page for each main service. The towns you cover named in the text, not only “the North West”: our own web design in Warrington page names Stockton Heath, Lymm and Great Sankey, because that is how people there search. A Google Business Profile with the right primary category and the same name and phone number as the site. How to get your business on Google Maps goes through the profile step by step, and how long until a new site shows up on Google covers the timing.
8 and 9. Are you there when they try, and do you reply?
The last two checks are not on the website at all, and they lose as many jobs as anything above.
Missed calls. If you are on tools all day, the phone will go unanswered. A voicemail greeting that says when you return calls, and then doing it, keeps the customer from ringing the next name on the list.
Slow replies. An enquiry answered the next week has usually been given to someone else. Say on the site how fast you reply, “the same working day” or “by 9am the next morning”, whichever is true, and set up an automatic acknowledgement on the form that repeats it. A reply-time promise you keep is one of the cheapest trust signals there is.
If you only have an hour, do check one and check two today. They cost nothing, and a site that is losing enquiries to a broken form or an untappable number is losing them every day it stays that way.
If you would rather someone else went through the nine, the free review looks at your site on a phone and tells you in writing the three things we would change first.
For the decisions behind a site that brings in work, there is what a tradesperson’s website needs, and for the profile that often brings more calls than the site, how to get more Google reviews.
Official sources
The official pages behind the points above:
