If your website gets visitors but the phone stays quiet, the problem is rarely that you need more traffic. It is almost always that the site makes it slightly too hard, or slightly too uncertain, to get in touch. The good news is that the fixes that get more enquiries from a website are usually small, cheap and quick.
Here they are in roughly the order we would tackle them.
1. Put a tap-to-call button where the thumb is
Most people looking for a local business are on a phone, often holding it one-handed. A phone number written in small text in the top corner has to be found, zoomed and copied. A bar fixed to the bottom of the screen with “Call now” and “Get a quote” is always in reach, whatever page they are on and however far they have scrolled.
Make sure the number is a proper tap-to-call link (so tapping it opens the dialler) and not just text, or worse, text inside an image.
2. Say what you do and where, before anyone scrolls
The top of the home page, the bit visible before scrolling, has one job: confirm to the visitor that they are in the right place. That means what you do, the towns you cover and a way to contact you. “Quality workmanship since 1998” does none of those.
Compare “Welcome to Smith & Sons” with “Plumber and heating engineer in Exeter and East Devon. Boiler repairs, servicing and bathroom installs.” The second tells a visitor in two seconds whether to stay.
3. Make the quote form short
Every extra field on a form is a reason to give up. For most service businesses, a quote form needs four things: name, phone number, postcode and a box for “what do you need doing?”. An optional photo upload is useful for jobs that are hard to describe. Anything else you can ask on the phone.
Say what happens next, right next to the button: “We reply the same working day” or “We will ring you back before 6pm”. People are more willing to send a form when they know it will not vanish into a void.
4. Put the proof next to the buttons
Customers hesitate at the moment of contact. That is exactly where trust signals should sit: a couple of genuine reviews, your registrations and accreditations where they apply, and photos of real jobs. A reviews page three clicks away does very little. A review quoted under the quote button does a lot.
- Real reviews, with the reviewer’s first name and town, linked to where they came from.
- Registrations and memberships that genuinely apply to you (Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, TrustMark, Which? Trusted Traders and so on).
- Your own face and name. People let people into their homes, not logos.
- Photos of your work, not stock photos of a smiling model in a hard hat.
- Insurance and guarantees, stated plainly.
5. Fix the speed
A slow site loses people before they see anything. The usual culprit on small business sites is photos uploaded straight from a phone or camera, each several megabytes. Resizing and compressing them is often the single biggest speed improvement available, and it costs nothing.
You can check your own site with Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Our guide on how fast a website should load explains what the numbers mean.
6. Answer the questions people ring to ask
Most businesses get the same handful of questions on the phone. For a plumber it is: do you cover my area, how much roughly, how soon can you come, are you insured, do you do evenings or weekends. Yours will be different, but the principle is the same. If the website answers those, the enquiries you get are warmer, and some people who would have moved on without asking will ring instead.
A price range beats no price at all. Hiding prices does not protect you; it sends people to whoever does publish them.
A quick checklist to run on your own site
Open your website on your own phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and check:
- Can you call the business with one tap from every page?
- Can you tell what the business does and where, without scrolling?
- Does the quote form fit on one screen and ask only what is needed?
- Are there real photos and real reviews near the contact buttons?
- Does the page appear within a couple of seconds?
- Are the opening hours and phone number correct, including bank holidays?
- Does the form actually arrive? Send a test enquiry and check your inbox and spam folder.
Where more traffic does help
Once the site converts the visitors it already gets, more visitors are worth having. For most local businesses, that mainly comes from a complete Google Business Profile, steady genuine reviews and useful service pages rather than paid campaigns. Our guide to local SEO basics covers that side.
But fix the leaks first. Sending more people to a site that loses them is paying to lose more people.