You check analytics and the numbers look fine. People are arriving. Then you check your inbox and there is nothing. It is one of the more frustrating positions to be in, partly because the obvious response is to go and buy more traffic, which usually makes it worse.
The short answer. If people are arriving and not enquiring, more traffic will not help. You are paying to send more people through a process that already fails. Fix the process first.
Before anything else, check the traffic is right
Sometimes this is not a conversion problem at all. It is an audience problem wearing a conversion problem’s clothes.
Open your top landing pages and top search queries. Ask one question about each. Would someone searching that be ready to hire you? A page ranking for a broad informational term will bring visitors who were never going to enquire today. That is normal and not a fault.
If most of your traffic is like that, your site is working and your keyword targeting is aimed too wide. If your traffic genuinely matches what you sell, keep reading.
The five places enquiries leak
1. Nobody can tell what you do
People decide very quickly whether a site is relevant to them. If your homepage headline could belong to any company in your industry, you have spent that moment saying nothing.
The test is simple. Show your homepage to someone outside your business for five seconds, then cover it and ask what you do and who you do it for. If they hesitate, that is your first fix.
2. There is no obvious next step
Plenty of sites have calls to action everywhere and a clear one nowhere. Six competing options is the same as none. The visitor does not choose, they leave.
Every page should have one action you want most. Everything else on the page is secondary to it.
3. Nothing on the page earns trust
Someone about to contact a business they found through Google is taking a small risk. Real work, real names and real detail reduce it. Stock photography and vague claims do not.
Put the proof near the action. A testimonial or case study three screens above your contact form is doing far less work than one sitting beside it.
4. The form asks for too much
Every field is a small reason to stop. If a first enquiry asks for company size, budget range and a phone number, some people will simply close the tab.
Ask for the minimum you need to reply usefully. You can gather the rest in the conversation that follows.
5. The form is broken and nobody noticed
This is more common than people expect and it is worth ruling out early. Submissions that fail silently, notification emails going to spam, a plugin update that quietly stopped the form sending.
Send yourself a test enquiry today. If you cannot remember the last time you did, do it before reading the rest of this.
How to find which one is yours
You do not need expensive tooling to narrow this down.
- Check the funnel by page. Look at which pages people land on, and where they leave. A high exit rate on the contact page points somewhere very different to people never reaching it.
- Watch someone use it. Ask a person who does not know your business to find what they need and get in touch. Do not help them. Watch where they pause.
- Test the form yourself. On a phone, on mobile data, not on your office wifi.
- Read your own headline out loud. If it sounds like something you would skip, visitors are skipping it.
What to fix first
Work in this order. It moves the most for the least effort.
- Make sure the form actually works.
- Make the headline say what you do and who for.
- Cut the page down to one clear action.
- Move your proof next to that action.
- Remove form fields you do not truly need.
Most sites we look at need the first three. That is usually enough to see a difference before anyone touches design or spends more on ads.
Common questions
What conversion rate should I expect?
For a service business, somewhere around two to five percent of visitors becoming enquiries is a reasonable range to aim at. Treat that as a rough guide rather than a target. Your industry, your prices and the intent behind your traffic all move it.
Should I just run ads instead?
Not until this is fixed. Ads send more people into the same process. If that process loses them, you are paying for the privilege.
How long before I see a change?
Fixing a broken form shows up immediately. Messaging and layout changes need enough traffic to judge fairly, which for most small sites means a few weeks rather than a few days. Resist the urge to judge it after two quiet afternoons.
Where to go from here
Almost every site in this position has one clear bottleneck rather than five small ones. Finding it is usually a morning’s work, and it is the difference between a site that looks busy and one that produces work.
This is the sort of thing our conversion optimization work deals with, and where a focused landing page often helps for campaign traffic. If you would rather have someone look properly, send us the URL and what you are seeing.
