Why is my website not getting enquiries?

You paid for a website. It looks fine. Three months later it has produced one enquiry, and that was from someone trying to sell you SEO. This is the single most common problem I get asked about, and in almost every case it comes down to one of six things.

The most common reason a website is not getting enquiries: nobody is finding it

Before you change a single word on your site, find out how many people are actually visiting it. Open Google Analytics or Google Search Console and look at the last 90 days. If you are getting 40 visitors a month, your website is not getting enquiries because there is nothing to convert. No amount of rewriting fixes an audience problem.

Then check where those visitors come from. A lot of small business sites get most of their traffic from people who already know the business by name, searching for it directly. That traffic is worth having, but it will not grow your enquiry volume. What you need is people searching for the thing you do, in the place you do it.

Try it yourself. Open an incognito window and search for your main service plus your town. If you are nowhere on page one and you are not showing in the map results, that is your first job. For most local businesses, a properly filled-in and active Google Business Profile does more for enquiries in the first month than anything else you can do.

Your homepage doesn't say what you do or who it's for

Someone lands on your homepage from a Google search. They have about five seconds of patience. In that time they need to work out what you do, whether you cover their area, and whether you deal with people like them.

A surprising number of small business homepages open with something like "Welcome to our website. We pride ourselves on delivering a quality service to all of our customers." That sentence could belong to a plumber, a solicitor or a dog groomer. It tells the reader nothing, so they go back to Google and click the next result.

Compare it with: "Emergency plumber covering Leeds and Wakefield. Same-day call-outs, fixed prices quoted before we start." Now the reader knows the service, the area, the urgency you handle and how you charge. That is four decisions made for them in one line.

You're making people work too hard to contact you

I audit a lot of websites where the contact route is genuinely difficult. The phone number sits in an image, so it cannot be tapped on a mobile. The contact page is three clicks deep. The form asks for company name, budget range, how you heard about us and a message of at least 50 characters.

Every field you add to a form gives someone another reason to abandon it. For most small businesses, name, email or phone, and a message box is enough. You can ask the rest of your questions when you reply.

Some practical fixes worth doing this week:

• Make your phone number real text and wrap it in a tel: link so mobile users can tap to call
• Put your phone number in the header on every page, not only the contact page
• Cut your contact form down to three fields
• Add a WhatsApp or SMS option if your customers are tradespeople or work on site

Also think about when people want to reach you. If half your enquiries come in after 6pm, an unanswered form is costing you real money.

Your site is slow or awkward on a phone

Google has indexed the mobile version of websites by default since 2023, so the phone experience is the one that counts for rankings. It is also the one your customers are using. Most local service searches now happen on a mobile, often standing in the room where the problem is.

Google's own Core Web Vitals guidance says the main content of a page should load within 2.5 seconds. Plenty of small business sites take four or five, usually because of oversized images, a bloated theme, or a stack of plugins nobody has reviewed since launch.

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score rather than the desktop one. Then open your site on your own phone and try to complete an enquiry. If you have to pinch to zoom, if the menu covers half the screen, or if the form fields are too small to tap accurately, your customers are hitting the same wall.

Slow and fiddly sites do not produce polite feedback. People just leave, and you never find out they were there.

Your website is not getting enquiries because there's no proof you're any good

Someone might be sold on your service and still not contact you, because they have no evidence you will do a decent job. BrightLocal's annual Local Consumer Review Survey has found year after year that the large majority of consumers read online reviews before choosing a local business.

Most small business sites handle this badly. They have a testimonials page with three unattributed quotes on it, which reads as though the owner wrote them. Nobody goes looking for that page.

Put the proof where the decision happens. Reviews near the contact form. A named client quote under the service you are describing. Photos of actual work rather than stock images of a smiling call centre. If you have accreditations that matter in your trade, such as Gas Safe, SRA, or a chartered body, put the badge where people can see it without scrolling.

Numbers help more than adjectives. "We reduced their monthly agency spend by £900" lands harder than "great to work with".

You might be getting enquiries and losing them

This one catches people out more often than you would expect. I have found broken contact forms on sites where the owner was convinced their marketing had failed. A theme update, an expired plugin licence or a changed email address, and the form silently stops delivering.

Test it properly. Submit your own form from a phone on mobile data, using an email address you do not normally use, and check whether it arrives. Then check your spam folder, because form notifications land there constantly.

Speed of reply matters too. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that firms contacting an online lead within an hour were far more likely to qualify that lead than those who waited longer. If you reply to Monday's enquiry on Thursday, that person has already booked someone else.

Finally, count your missed calls. Many small businesses get plenty of enquiries and lose them to an unanswered phone, then blame the website.

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