My website gets no enquiries: the real causes

Before changing anything, find out whether anyone is actually visiting your website. No visitors and no enquiries are two completely different problems with opposite fixes, and spending money on the wrong one is the most common mistake in this situation.

The five minute diagnosis

Those four take five minutes and tell you which of the two problems you have.

Which problem do you have

Most owners assume they have a traffic problem, because that is the story marketing companies tell. Plenty actually have a conversion problem, which is cheaper and faster to fix, and which no amount of extra traffic will solve.

If nobody is visiting

The order that produces results fastest:

The Google Business Profile. Free, and for a local business it often matters more than the website. Categories right, services listed, hours current, real photos, service areas set. This moves within weeks, unlike search rankings.

Reviews. Free, and the strongest local ranking signal available to you. Ask every customer, by text, the same day.

Local pages. Real pages naming the towns and services you want. “Emergency electrician Horsforth” rather than “we cover West Yorkshire”. Three good ones beat twenty thin ones.

Site speed and mobile. Google measures both and visitors abandon slow pages.

That sequence is deliberate. The first two are free and fast; the last two take months. Businesses that start with an SEO retainer while their profile lists the wrong opening hours are spending in the wrong order.

If people visit and do not enquire

Now the problem is on the page, and it is usually one of these.

No price, anywhere. People compare three businesses and drop the ones that will not indicate cost. A from-price is enough. This is the single most common conversion killer and it costs nothing to fix.

It is not obvious what you do or where. Someone should know your trade and your area within three seconds of landing. Vague headlines about passion and quality do not survive contact with a customer in a hurry.

Contact is hard. Phone number small or not tappable. Form asking for eleven fields. No indication of how fast you reply.

No proof. No reviews on the page, no photos of your work, no accreditations. People need reassurance before they ring a stranger.

Slow, or broken on a phone. Most visitors are on mobile. If the site is awkward there, they leave and you never know they came.

Each of those is an afternoon’s work, not a project, and the effect shows immediately rather than in six months.

The enquiries you may be losing after the form

Two failures that happen after everything on the site works:

Enquiry emails going to spam. If your form sends from your own domain without proper email authentication, the messages can land in junk. Check the folder. Why emails land in spam covers the fix.

Slow replies. An enquiry answered a day later is often already lost. Whoever they contacted second replied first. This is not a website problem and it costs more businesses more work than any website problem does.

What to do this week

If you take one thing from this: test the form, check the visitor number, and see which of the two problems you have before spending a penny on anything.

Then fix the free things first. Google profile, reviews, prices on the page, a tappable phone number. That is a week of work costing nothing, and for a lot of businesses it is the whole answer.

If after that you still have visitors and no enquiries, the page needs rewriting. If you still have no visitors, it is local search, and that is a three to six month job rather than a quick one.

Related reading: website but no customers, why isn’t my website getting traffic and how do I know if my website is working.

If you want a second opinion, send us your web address and we will tell you which of the two problems you have and what we would fix first. Often the answer is something you can do yourself in an afternoon.