Your analytics say people are visiting. Your inbox says they aren't getting in touch. That gap is one of the most common problems we see, and the good news is that it's rarely the whole website. It's usually two or three specific things, and most of them can be fixed in a week.
Here are the seven we find most often, roughly in the order we check them. The first two, and the fifth, are all about the first screen people see:
1. It isn't clear what you do
A visitor decides whether to stay in a few seconds. If the first screen says something like "Excellence in every project" or "Welcome to our website", they have to work out what you actually sell. Most won't bother.
The fix is a headline that says what you do, for whom, and where. "Residential and commercial cleaning across Auckland" beats "Your trusted partner" every time. Then one line underneath on why you, and one button.
2. There's no obvious next step
Look at your home page and ask: what's the one thing I want someone to do here? Call? Book? Ask for a quote? If the answer is "all of them, and also read our story, and follow us on Instagram", nobody does any of it.
Pick one action and use the same words for it everywhere. Put it in the header, so it's one tap away on every page, and repeat it at the end of every page, where people who've read everything are deciding.
3. The form asks for too much
Every field you add is another reason to give up. A form that asks for an address, a budget range, a preferred contact time and "how did you hear about us?" before someone has even spoken to you feels like paperwork.
Ask only for what you need to reply: a name, a way to contact them, and what they need. You can get the rest on the call. If you genuinely need more, split it into short steps so it never looks like a wall of boxes.
4. It's slow, or awkward on a phone
Most visitors to a local business site are on a phone, often on mobile data. If the page takes several seconds to show anything, or the button is too small to tap, or a pop-up covers the content, a lot of them leave before they've read a word.
Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data, and try to enquire. If anything annoys you, it's annoying everyone. Google's free PageSpeed Insights will also tell you exactly what's slowing the page down.
5. There's nothing to prove you're good
People are wary of businesses they've never heard of. A page that only describes you, in your own words, asks them to take a risk. Proof takes that risk away:
- Real reviews, with names
- Photos of real work, not stock images
- Results, with numbers where you have them
- Names of businesses or customers you've worked with
Put the strongest piece near the top, not buried on a "testimonials" page nobody clicks.
6. The wrong people are arriving
Sometimes the site is fine and the traffic is the problem. If you're running ads to broad terms, or ranking for searches that aren't really about what you sell, you'll get plenty of visitors and very few enquiries.
Check where your visitors come from and what they searched for. If a lot of it doesn't match what you do, the fix is in your ads or your SEO, not your design. This is why we build the site and the marketing together: the page and the traffic have to fit each other.
7. Enquiries are arriving, but nobody can tell
This one is surprisingly common. The form sends to an inbox nobody checks, or into spam, or the phone number on the site is old. Or enquiries are coming in fine but nobody knows which ones came from the website, so it looks like it isn't working.
Send yourself a test enquiry today and see where it lands. Then set up tracking, so every form, call and email from the site is counted. You can't improve what you can't see.
Where to start
If you only do three things this week:
- Rewrite the first screen of your home page so it says what you do, for whom, and where.
- Choose one action, and put it in the header and at the end of every page.
- Send yourself a test enquiry from your phone and fix anything that gets in the way.
That alone often moves the number. When Kick Cleaning came to us, the work covered the site, the ads and how leads were followed up, and their cost to win each new customer halved. You can read how we did it.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes, we're happy to look at your site on a free 15-minute call and tell you what we'd change first. See how we approach website design.