The frustrating version of a website problem is not "nobody visits". It is "people visit, and nothing happens". You are paying for the site, it appears when you search your own name, and the phone is no busier than it was.
That gap is almost always one of four things. Here is how to work out which one is yours.
First, put a number on it
Before deciding what to fix, find out what the gap is worth. You need three figures, and you probably have all of them:
- Monthly visitors. Google Analytics, your hosting dashboard, or your Google Business Profile insights.
- Enquiries per month that came from the website — calls, forms, emails. Count them for one month if you have never tracked it.
- What a job is worth to you on average, and roughly how often a quote becomes work.
Then:
visitors × (enquiry rate you think is achievable − your current rate)
× average job value × your quote-to-win rate × 12
= what the gap is worth per year
The point of doing this yourself is that the answer varies enormously. A roofer quoting €4,000 jobs and a barber charging €25 are in completely different situations, and any article that gives you one euro figure for "the average Irish trade" is making it up. Yours might be €2,000 a year, in which case do the cheap fixes and get on with your work. It might be €40,000, in which case it deserves a proper look.
The four reasons the phone does not ring
1. It is hard to contact you on a phone.
Open your own site on your mobile. Time how long it takes to get to a tappable phone number from the homepage. If it is more than about three seconds, or if the number is text you have to copy rather than a link that dials, you are losing people who were ready to call.
This is the most common problem and the cheapest to fix. A number in the header, tappable, on every page.
2. The site loads too slowly on mobile data.
Not on your office broadband — on a phone with two bars in a van. People leave slow pages, and they do not tell you they left. Test it on a real connection, or run your address through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score rather than the desktop one.
3. There is no obvious next step.
Plenty of sites describe the services well and never actually ask. Every page needs one clear thing to do next, and it should be the same thing. If a visitor has to decide between "contact", "get a quote", "book a call" and "email us", that is four decisions where there should be one.
4. It does not answer "why you".
If your site lists the same services as the next three results, in the same order, with the same stock photography, you are asking to be chosen at random or on price. What actually differentiates a trade business is usually specific and boring: how quickly you answer, whether you turn up when you said, what you are insured for, what you will not take on. Say those things.
The one that is not about the website
If you are on-site all day, calls go unanswered, and there is no way to book you other than reaching you personally, then the website is not the bottleneck — your availability is. That is what online booking is for, and it is a different product from a website. It is worth being honest with yourself about which problem you actually have before paying to fix the other one.
What to do first
In order of effort-to-benefit:
- Make the phone number tappable and visible on every page. An afternoon.
- Check the mobile speed and fix whatever is obviously heavy — usually images. A day.
- Give every page one clear next step. A day.
- Rewrite the homepage so it says why you rather than what you do. A week, on and off.
If after that the phone still is not ringing, the problem is more likely to be that you are not appearing in searches at all — which is a different article, and a different fix.
Want a second opinion on yours? Send us the address and we will go through it — how it behaves on a phone, how fast it loads, whether Google can find you, and whether it asks for the enquiry. Free, and we will tell you if we think it is fine as it is. Get a free website review.