Think of your website as a bucket. Traffic is the water going in, and enquiries are what you collect at the bottom. Most small-business sites don’t have a traffic problem. They have leaks. People land, can’t work out what to do next, and drift off again. Pour more visitors into a leaky bucket and you just waste them.
The good news is the leaks are usually cheap to fix, and you can spot most of them yourself. For a head start, run our free website health check and it’ll flag the obvious ones. Then work through the list below, roughly in order. The things near the top lose you the most enquiries.
Say what you do, and who it’s for, straight away
When someone lands on your homepage they decide in a couple of seconds if they’re in the right place. If your first screen says ‘Welcome to our website’ or leads with a slogan nobody understands, they leave.
Put it in plain words near the top: what you do, who you do it for, and where. ‘Bathroom fitters covering Glasgow and Lanarkshire’ beats ‘Transforming spaces since 2004’ every time. A visitor should read one line and think, yes, these people can help me. Say it the way you’d explain it to someone in the pub, and skip the jargon.
Give people one obvious thing to do
Every page should have a single main action. Call now. Fill in the form. Book a slot. Offer five options with equal weight and most people pick none of them.
Decide on the one action you want most, make the button stand out, and repeat it sensibly down the page. Near the top, again once you’ve explained the service, and once more at the bottom. That isn’t pushy. It’s saving people the hunt for how to reach you. Use words that say what happens next, so ‘Get a free quote’ beats ‘Submit’.
Make getting in touch effortless
Every extra step between ‘I’m interested’ and ‘I’ve contacted them’ costs you enquiries, so cut the steps out.
Put your phone number in the header, in real text, on every page, and make it tap-to-call on a phone. Keep contact forms short. Name, number and a message box is plenty. Nobody wants to fill in fifteen boxes to ask a simple question, and every field you add drops the number of people who finish. It also helps to offer a choice. Some will phone. Others can’t stand the phone and would rather tap a WhatsApp button or pick a slot from a booking link. Give a couple of easy routes and let them choose.
Sort out speed and mobile
Most people will look at your site on a phone, often on mobile data with half a bar of signal. If it takes an age to load or feels fiddly, they’ve gone before they’ve read a word.
Check your own site on your phone right now. Is it quick? Can you read the text without pinching to zoom in? Are the buttons big enough to tap without missing? Does the number dial when you press it? If any of that’s a fight for you, it’s a fight for everyone else, and most won’t hang about to tell you. Big images are the usual reason a site loads slowly. Get them compressed and the whole thing speeds up.
Show people they can trust you
A stranger won’t hand over their details until they believe you’re real and any good, so prove it.
Real reviews with a name attached carry far more weight than ‘our customers love us’. A short case study showing a job you did, with a before and after, tells a better story than any amount of sales copy. Photos of your real team and real work beat stock images of models in a call centre. If you hold accreditations or a licence that matters in your trade, show the logos. None of it has to be slick. Honest and specific wins. One genuine review that names a nearby town does more than ten anonymous five-star ratings.
Get the local basics right
If you serve a particular area, say so on the page in words. Name the towns, the regions, the places you actually cover. That’s what people type into Google, and it’s how they decide you’re near enough to bother calling.
Claim and fill in your free Google Business Profile as well. For a lot of local searches that profile turns up before your website does, with your phone number, reviews and opening hours sitting right there. It’s free, it takes an afternoon, and it quietly brings in calls on its own.
You don’t have to fix all of this in a week. Start at the top, plug the biggest leaks first, and the same traffic you already get will start turning into more enquiries.
Not sure where your site is leaking? Run the free health check for a plain-English list of what to fix first. If the site needs rebuilding rather than patching, have a look at Websites and we’ll sort it out with you.