A website that brings in no leads usually has one of three problems. Discovery: the right people aren’t reaching it. Conversion: they arrive but don’t call, book or write. Delivery: they do get in touch, but the message never reaches you or isn’t answered in time. Each has different causes and different fixes, so start by working out which one you have.
First, which problem do you have?
- Discovery. Few visitors, or visitors who aren’t the people you serve. Google’s free Search Console shows how often your site appears in Google Search, for which searches, and how many people click. If you have a verified Business Profile, its performance view shows calls from the profile and clicks to your site.
- Conversion. People visit, but calls and messages are rare.
- Delivery. Customers say they contacted you and never heard back, or you find messages you didn’t know had arrived.
You can have more than one. Delivery problems are often worth testing first: they’re quick to check, and they can make the other two look worse than they are. How easy they are to fix depends on the cause.
Discovery: nobody is finding the site
- You don’t appear for the searches your customers use. The site describes your services in your words, not theirs, or has no page for the service or area someone is searching for.
- Search engines can’t see it properly. New sites take time to be found. Settings left over from development can keep pages out of search, and Search Console shows which pages Google has indexed.
- Your Business Profile isn’t doing its part. It’s incomplete, out of date, or doesn’t link to your site.
- The visitors are the wrong ones: people outside your area, or looking for something you don’t offer.
Visibility is search and marketing work; the fix depends on which of these it is.
Conversion: people visit but don’t get in touch
When people arrive and leave without acting, four things are usually involved: what you offer, whether they trust you, how the site works on a phone, and how easy it is to contact you.
The offer isn’t clear enough to act on
- A visitor should be able to tell quickly what you do, for whom, where, and what happens next.
- Vague headlines (“Quality you can trust”) say nothing a competitor couldn’t say.
- Missing service area. People don’t know whether you cover them.
- No idea what to expect: how pricing works, what the first step is, how long things take.
- Written for everyone. A site that tries to appeal to every customer often convinces none of them.
Visitors can’t tell whether to trust you
- Stock photos where real photos of your work and team should be.
- No reviews, or reviews with no sign of where they came from.
- No licenses, insurance or credentials, where your trade expects them.
- Nothing that shows a real business: no address or service area, no names.
- Signs of neglect: old hours, past offers, broken links. A site that looks abandoned makes the business look closed.
The site is slow or awkward on a phone
- Many of your visitors will see the site on a phone first.
- Small text, buttons that are hard to tap, menus that hide the contact page, and pop-ups that cover the page all push people back to the search results.
- Google’s PageSpeed Insights reports how a page performs on mobile and desktop. Where enough real Chrome users have visited, it includes their experience too (Google: about PageSpeed Insights).
- Try it yourself: open your site on your phone, on mobile data, and try to contact yourself.
Getting in touch takes too much effort
- The phone number is hard to find, or can’t be tapped to call.
- The form asks for more than you need to reply.
- Pages end with no clear next step.
- There’s only one way to reach you, and it’s not the one the customer prefers.
Delivery: inquiries are sent but never reach you
This is the problem owners rarely suspect, and often the first worth testing:
- Form messages go somewhere nobody reads: a former employee’s inbox, a previous developer’s address, or a spam folder. Our guide to owning your website covers keeping the accounts around your site in your control.
- The form is broken. An update can stop it sending, and nothing tells you.
- The phone number is wrong on the site or on your Business Profile, or calls go to a line or voicemail nobody checks.
- Replies come too late. The inquiry arrived, but by the time you answered, the customer had called someone else. Our guide to what to automate first covers following up with new inquiries.
Some customers never use the website, and that’s fine
Many businesses win most of their work by referral and phone. For them, the website’s job is often to reassure people who already heard your name, not to produce inquiries by itself. Before you judge the site, ask your last few new customers how they found you and whether they looked at your website first.
What you can check yourself this week
A few checks need no tools or expertise:
- Submit your own contact form, and see whether, where and how quickly the message arrives. Check the spam folder.
- Call the number on your site, from your phone, by tapping it.
- Check the name, phone number, hours and website link on your Business Profile.
- Open your site on your phone and ask: would I know what this business does, where, and how to reach it?
- Search for your main service and town the way a customer would.
- Ask recent customers how they found you.
- If you have Search Console, look at which searches show your site and how many people click.
How this works with Lux
If you’d like a second pair of eyes, our free first look is a conversation and an honest read of what you have and where the opportunity is. You don’t need to know which problem you have before you get in touch. If the site is structurally sound, we improve it rather than start over. If the problem is being found, that’s search and marketing work. Either way, you get a scoped proposal before any work begins.