My website gets traffic but no enquiries — what's wrong?

1. The form is broken and nobody knows

Start here, always. A silently broken enquiry form is the most expensive fault a small business website can have, and it produces exactly the symptom you're describing: visitors arriving, nobody getting in touch.

Test it properly:

• Submit a real enquiry from your phone, on mobile data, not office wifi.
• Check the inbox it's supposed to land in — and check the spam folder.
• Check whether it's going to an old address. Forms often point at whoever set the site up.
• Try it in a different browser, and with a long message.

While you're there, test the phone number link on a mobile. A mistyped tel: link that does nothing when tapped is a surprisingly common and completely invisible fault.

2. You're attracting the wrong people

Not all traffic is equal. A hundred visitors reading "how to bleed a radiator" are worth almost nothing to a plumber — they're there to avoid calling you. Meanwhile ten people searching "emergency plumber Bolton" are worth a fortnight's work.

Open Search Console and look at which queries actually bring people in. If they're informational, or from towns you don't serve, that's not a conversion problem — it's a targeting problem, and it's solved with proper service and area pages. Our local SEO service and the local SEO guide cover that.

3. It's not obvious you cover their area

Someone in Wigan lands on your site. Nothing on the page mentions Wigan, or any town at all. They don't email to ask — they go back and click the next result, which does say it.

Put your coverage in plain sight: on the homepage, in the header or footer, and on individual town pages. It costs nothing and it recovers a startling number of lost enquiries.

4. The site is slow, especially on a phone

Most local trade traffic is mobile, often on a poor signal. Every second of load time sheds visitors, and they don't bounce angrily — they just quietly go somewhere else. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score.

If the site is built on a heavy page builder, this rarely gets fixed by tweaking. That's when it becomes a redesign conversation.

5. There's no obvious next step

Plenty of sites describe the business beautifully and never tell anyone what to do. Or they offer six choices — call, email, form, WhatsApp, Facebook, a booking tool — which is the same as offering none.

• One primary action, repeated. For most trades that's a phone call.
• The number visible without scrolling, tappable, in the header on every page.
• A short form as the fallback: name, contact, what they need. Nothing else.
• Every page ends with a next step. Nobody should have to hunt for the contact page.

6. Nothing on the page makes you look safe to call

People aren't choosing the nicest website. They're choosing the business least likely to let them down. If there are no reviews, no registration numbers, no named people and no photos of real work, you look like a risk — even if you're the best tradesperson in the county.

Reviews with dates, certifications with numbers, real photographs, real faces, a guarantee with terms. Put them where people already are — near the point where they decide — not on an About page.

How to work out which one it is

In an afternoon: test the form and phone link, check Search Console for what people searched, run PageSpeed on mobile, then hand your phone to someone who doesn't know your business and ask them to find out whether you cover their town and get in touch. Watch where they hesitate. That hesitation is your answer, and it's worth more than any analytics dashboard.

If it turns out barely anyone is arriving in the first place, you have the other problem — start with why isn't my website showing up on Google.