Your website looks good.
You’re getting visitors.
Google Analytics confirms people are definitely arriving.
So why isn’t anybody getting in touch?
It’s one of the most frustrating problems a business can have online.
And the immediate reaction is often:
“We need more traffic.”
Sometimes you do.
But more traffic isn’t necessarily the answer.
If your website isn’t converting the visitors you already have, sending another few thousand people to it might simply give you a bigger version of the same problem.
Before increasing your SEO or advertising budget, it’s worth working out where things are going wrong.
Here are ten areas we’d investigate.
1. Your website doesn’t immediately explain what you do
Open your homepage and imagine you’ve never heard of your business.
Within five seconds, could you answer:
- What does this company do?
- Who is it for?
- Why should I care?
- What should I do next?
If not, there’s a problem.
Businesses often try to sound clever when being clear would be much more effective.
A beautifully written headline that says “Creating tomorrow, today.” might sound impressive.
But it doesn’t actually tell anybody anything.
Your main messaging shouldn’t require interpretation.
A visitor needs enough information to quickly decide whether they’ve found the right place.
Creativity can come afterwards. Clarity comes first.
2. You’re attracting the wrong traffic
Not all website traffic is valuable.
Imagine you sell premium commercial office furniture and your website receives 10,000 visits from people looking for cheap second-hand desks.
Your traffic report might look fantastic.
Your sales team probably won’t agree.
This is why SEO and PPC shouldn’t be judged purely on visitor numbers.
Look at:
- the keywords bringing people to the site
- which pages they land on
- geographical location
- engagement
- enquiries
- purchases
- cost per conversion
A smaller number of highly relevant visitors can be considerably more valuable than huge volumes of irrelevant traffic.
3. Your calls to action are too weak
Sometimes people aren’t enquiring because you haven’t made it particularly obvious that they should.
A call to action doesn’t have to shout BUY NOW! from every corner of the screen.
But every important page should have a clear next step.
That could be:
- Request a quote
- Book a consultation
- Talk to our team
- Arrange a demo
- View our work
- Download the guide
- Call us
The right CTA depends on where somebody is in their journey.
A person reading their first blog article might not be ready to request a quote. But they might be interested in viewing a case study.
Help people move naturally from one step to another.
4. You’re asking for too much, too soon
We’ve all encountered contact forms that feel like a mortgage application.
Name. Email. Phone. Company. Address. Turnover. Budget. Favourite biscuit. Blood group.
By the time you’ve reached the bottom, you’ve forgotten why you wanted to get in touch.
Every additional field creates a little more friction.
There will be occasions when detailed forms are useful, particularly if information is required to provide an accurate quote.
But for a general enquiry, ask yourself:
Do we actually need this information right now?
If you can collect it during the conversation later, perhaps you don’t.
5. Your website doesn’t create enough trust
People don’t only evaluate what you sell.
They’re evaluating whether they trust you enough to contact you.
Trust can come from lots of small signals:
- genuine customer testimonials
- case studies
- recognisable clients
- professional photography
- accreditations
- reviews
- clear contact information
- an established address
- named team members
- transparent information
- a well-maintained website
The opposite is also true.
Broken links, outdated copyright dates, obvious stock photography, spelling mistakes and abandoned social profiles can quietly introduce doubt.
None of those things on their own necessarily lose a sale.
Together, they can.
6. The mobile experience isn’t good enough
It’s easy to approve a website on a lovely 27-inch desktop monitor.
Your customers may not be using one.
They could be looking at the same website one-handed on a phone while sitting on a train.
That changes things.
Buttons need to be easy to tap. Text needs to be readable. Forms need to be painless. Navigation needs to make sense.
And whatever action you most want the user to take shouldn’t require six minutes of scrolling to find it.
Mobile design isn’t simply the desktop website squeezed into a narrower space.
The experience needs to be considered independently.
7. The website is too slow
Patience is in increasingly short supply online.
If pages take too long to load, people can leave before your beautifully crafted headline has even appeared.
Speed problems can come from:
- enormous images
- badly optimised video
- poor hosting
- excessive scripts
- unnecessary plugins
- inefficient code
- third-party tracking
- poorly configured caching
Page speed also isn’t purely a technical SEO exercise.
It’s part of the customer experience.
A fast website feels slick. A slow website feels like hard work.
8. Your content talks too much about you
We do this.
We offer that.
We’ve been established since 1987.
We have 42 members of staff.
Wonderful.
But what does any of that mean for the customer?
People naturally evaluate services through the lens of their own problem.
They want to know:
- Can you solve this?
- Do you understand what I need?
- What difference will it make?
- Have you helped somebody like me?
- What happens next?
Your experience and expertise matter enormously.
But frame them around their value to the customer.
There’s an important difference between:
“We have 25 years of experience.”
and:
“With 25 years of experience, we can identify potential problems early and help you avoid costly mistakes.”
Same fact. Much stronger reason to care.
9. There’s a disconnect between your advertising and the landing page
This happens surprisingly often with PPC.
An advert promotes one specific service.
You click it.
And arrive on the homepage.
Now you’ve got to find the service again.
Every extra step creates an opportunity to lose somebody.
If you’re running targeted advertising, the destination should continue the same conversation.
The message, offer and expectation created by the advert should be reflected on the landing page.
If somebody searches for “commercial property photographer Essex”, the landing page should make it immediately obvious that you provide commercial property photography in Essex.
Not eventually.
Immediately.
10. You’re not measuring the right things
Finally, you can’t improve what you can’t see.
A website might feel as though it’s underperforming when the real issue is incomplete tracking.
Or the opposite could be happening: traffic reports look healthy while very few visitors take commercially valuable actions.
At a minimum, we’d want to understand:
- where traffic comes from
- which pages attract visitors
- which pages lose them
- form submissions
- phone enquiries where measurable
- purchases
- important button clicks
- advertising conversions
You don’t need to obsess over hundreds of metrics.
Focus on the ones connected to real business outcomes.
Before you redesign the whole website…
Here’s the good news.
A website that isn’t generating enough enquiries doesn’t always need completely rebuilding.
Sometimes the problem is surprisingly specific.
It could be:
- poor messaging
- the wrong traffic
- a difficult form
- weak calls to action
- an underperforming landing page
- slow mobile performance
Fixing one or two significant points of friction can sometimes make a meaningful difference.
That’s why we’d always investigate before reaching for the redesign button.
What should you look at first?
If enquiries have dropped, we’d start by answering three questions.
Are enough of the right people visiting?
If not, investigate SEO, PPC, social media, referrals and other acquisition channels.
Are visitors engaging with the site?
If traffic is arriving but immediately leaving or failing to explore important content, investigate the messaging, user experience and relevance of the landing page.
Can people easily take the next step?
If people are engaging but aren’t converting, investigate calls to action, forms, trust signals and the conversion journey.
Those three questions help narrow the problem considerably.
Your website should be part of your sales process
A website doesn’t exist simply to prove that your business exists.
For most companies, it should actively support marketing and sales.
That doesn’t always mean selling something online.
It could mean generating enquiries, booking appointments, encouraging calls, producing leads or simply giving somebody the confidence they need to shortlist you.
The important thing is knowing what success actually looks like.
Once you know that, you can design and optimise the website around it.
At Break17, we combine website design, SEO, PPC, content and digital marketing rather than looking at each in isolation.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t the website.
Sometimes it isn’t the marketing.
It’s the gap between the two.
If your website is attracting visitors but not enough customers, talk to Break17 and we’ll help you work out where the opportunities are.
