Why Your Trade Website Is Not Getting Enquiries

There are only two reasons a website produces nothing. Either nobody is arriving, or people are arriving and leaving without contacting you. From where you are sitting the two look identical, because the symptom is the same silent phone. The fixes are nothing alike, and spending money on the wrong one is how most trade owners end up paying twice.

You can separate them in about fifteen minutes using free tools. Run these five checks before you spend anything.

That last check, the incognito search on your own phone, tells you more than most agency reports do.

If Search Console shows almost no clicks, your website is not getting leads because Google is not showing it to anybody. Being online is not the same as being findable, and this is the part most trade owners are never told when they hand over their money.

Three causes account for nearly all of it.

The site was never built to rank#

A five page site with a home page, an about page, a gallery, a services page and a contact page gives Google almost nothing to work with. It does not say what you do, in enough detail, in the places you do it.

Meanwhile the roofer three towns over has a page for flat roofing, a page for chimney repairs, a page for emergency leak repairs, and a page for each area he covers. He is not better at his trade than you. He just gave Google more to hold onto.

Your Google Business Profile is neglected#

For most trades the profile matters more than the website does. The map pack sits above the ordinary results on a phone screen. If your profile is unverified, has the wrong categories, has no photos, or has no reviews, you are invisible in the exact place where people with an urgent job look first.

There are no individual service pages#

If somebody types boiler replacement plus their town, Google wants to show a page about boiler replacement in that town. A single page listing fourteen services in bullet points is not that page. It ranks for nothing in particular because it is about nothing in particular.

None of this is quick. Local visibility builds over weeks and months, not days, and anybody who promises you a position by a certain date is guessing. But it is entirely learnable, and the free audit will tell you which of these three is holding you back.

The harder case is a website not converting despite decent traffic. Hundreds of people are landing on your site every month, and not one of them picks up the phone. That is not bad luck. That is your page failing a test it never told you it was taking.

Somebody has a leak, or a dead consumer unit, or a kitchen they want ripping out. They search, they open three or four results in tabs, and they spend maybe ten to twenty seconds on each one deciding whether it is worth reading properly. They are not admiring your website. They are trying to answer three questions very quickly.

If your page does not answer all three above the fold, they close the tab and ring the next result. They will not scroll to find out. They have two other tabs open and one of them is easier to read than yours.

A good looking site can still convert nothing#

Design and conversion are related but they are not the same thing. I have seen smart, expensive looking sites that never say which towns they cover, and plain sites with a phone number the size of a fist that keep a two van operation booked out.

The other half of it is trust#

A homeowner is deciding whether to let a stranger into their house. Stock photography of somebody else's van, no real photographs of your own work, no company number, no address, and a generic contact form all read as risk. You know you are legitimate. The page has to prove it in seconds to somebody who has never heard of you.

In my experience the same seven problems account for most of it, and they rarely turn up alone. Find your own symptom below rather than reading the lot.

1. Slow loading on a phone#

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data, sometimes standing in a wet loft. If your home page carries a huge slideshow, four tracking scripts and photographs straight off a camera at full size, it will take several seconds to appear, and a good share of people leave before they see anything at all. Test your own site on 4G rather than on the office wifi.

2. No proof of work#

Trades sell on evidence. Ten clear photographs of jobs you have actually finished, with a line about what the problem was and what you did, beat any amount of copy about being reliable and professional.

3. Services a homeowner cannot identify#

If a homeowner cannot tell within a few seconds whether you do the specific thing they need, they assume you do not. Name the jobs plainly, in the words customers use, not in trade shorthand.

4. No service areas named#

If your site never names the towns and postcodes you cover, every visitor has to guess, and a fair number will guess wrong and leave. Say where you work, in writing, on the page.

5. Contact details buried#

A phone number sitting only in the footer, or hidden behind a menu on mobile, costs you calls every week. It belongs at the top of every page, as tappable text, not inside an image.

6. A form that asks too much#

Nobody filling in a form at half past nine at night wants to supply a full address, a budget bracket and a preferred start date. Name, phone, and one line about the job is enough. You can ask everything else when you ring them back.

7. No reason to choose you over the next result#

Most trade sites are interchangeable. If your page could have somebody else's logo dropped onto it and still make sense, you have not given anybody a reason to stop searching.

Set aside an afternoon and go through your own site on your phone, as if you were a homeowner who has never heard of you. Do not use your laptop and do not use the version you have in your head. Open it cold, from a search result, and be hard on it.

Finally, read your home page out loud and ask what it promises that the next result does not. If the answer is nothing, write the honest thing instead: how quickly you answer the phone, how long you have been trading, what you refuse to take on. Specific and unglamorous beats vague and polished every time.

I will say the unflattering thing, given I sell websites: most trade sites do not need rebuilding. They need a handful of fixes that a competent person can make in a day.

If your site loads reasonably quickly, you can edit it yourself, and it simply lacks service pages, service areas, real photographs and a visible phone number, then rebuilding is an expensive way to solve an editing problem. Fix what is there and spend the difference on your Google Business Profile and your local visibility instead.

A rebuild is justified in fewer cases than most agencies would like you to believe. These are the five.

If it does turn out you need to start again, my own websites are a fixed £1,995, and the web design for tradesmen page sets out exactly what that includes and what it does not. If it turns out you do not need one, I would rather tell you that than sell you one.

Work through it in order, and give it a few months before you judge the result. Local search does not respond overnight and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

If you would rather have somebody else look at it, send it to me. The free audit is reviewed personally by me, not run through a tool, and you get it back within three working days. There is no sales call attached to it, and if the honest answer is that your site is fine and your problem is your Google Business Profile, that is what the audit will say. If a rebuild genuinely is the right answer, the web design for tradesmen page explains what that looks like.