Why does hardly anyone get in touch through our website?

Why does a site that looks fine still go quiet?

Because looking fine is a judgement made by the people who built it and the people who paid for it. Neither of them is the buyer.

A business website has three jobs, and it has to do all of them. It has to turn up when someone searches for what you do. It has to look like the right answer in the list of results, so they click. And once they land, it has to tell them quickly what you do, who it is for and how to get hold of you. Fail at any one of those and the inbox stays empty, however good the photography is.

Most sites that go quiet are failing at one job in particular, and the fix for each is different. A redesign fixes none of them by default. A brochure nobody finds is still a brochure, just a nicer one.

Where is the site actually losing people?

Find out before you change anything. Google's Search Console gives you the numbers.

Google's help page on the Performance report explains the three figures that matter here. Impressions are how many times your site appeared in search results. Clicks are the number of times a user clicked your site from those results. The click through rate is clicks divided by impressions. By default the report shows the past three months, which is long enough to see a pattern.

Read those three together and the problem usually points at itself.

What you see	What it usually means	Where to start
Very few impressions	Google rarely shows the site for the searches your buyers make	The words on your pages, and your Business Profile if you serve a local area
Plenty of impressions, very few clicks	The site turns up, but the result does not look like the answer	Page titles and the short descriptions under them
Clicks arrive, enquiries do not	People land, look and leave	The page itself and the route to getting in touch
Hardly anything at all	Google may not have found the site properly	Search for site: followed by your domain and see what comes back

Google's SEO starter guide suggests searching Google for your site with the site: search operator. If you see results pointing to your site, you are in the index.

Search Console covers Google search only. Visits from social media or adverts sit elsewhere, but for many small businesses search is where strangers find them, and strangers are the enquiries you are missing.

What does Google say makes a page worth showing?

Less mystery than you might expect. The starter guide opens by admitting there are no secrets that will automatically rank your site first, and adds "(sorry!)". Worth remembering if a promise of page one sounds too easy.

Google's page on creating helpful, reliable, people first content defines it as content created primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings. It then lists questions you can ask of your own pages. Two are worth taping to the monitor. Does the main heading or page title give a descriptive, helpful summary of the content? And after reading it, will someone leave feeling they have learned enough to help achieve their goal?

Hold your homepage up to the first one. "Solutions for a changing world" is not a summary of anything. "Bookkeeping for builders in Derby" is.

The starter guide also asks you to think about the words a person would search for. Its example is that some people search for "charcuterie" and others for "cheese board". In business terms, you might call it bespoke workflow software while your buyer types "stop typing orders in twice". If your pages only use your words, they only match the searches of people who already talk like you.

The same guide says a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page. Google uses it, with the headings on the page, to build the headline people see in the results. If yours says "Home", it is wasting the best space you have.

Is the site too slow or too busy to keep people?

Sometimes the words are fine and the page gets in its own way.

Google measures this with Core Web Vitals. In plain terms there are three. The main content should load within the first 2.5 seconds. The page should respond to a tap or click in under 200 milliseconds. And things should not jump about as it loads, which Google scores as a layout shift of less than 0.1. Search Console has a Core Web Vitals report that shows how your pages measure up, so you do not need to time anything by hand.

The usual culprits are easy to spot once you look. A full screen video behind the headline. Images uploaded straight from a camera. Then a cookie banner, a chat window and a newsletter popup all arriving at once, before the visitor has read a word. The starter guide says not to let adverts become overly distracting or stop people reading your content, and warns against interstitial pages that make a site difficult to use. Your own popups count.

How many taps does it take to get in touch?

Count them. On your own phone, from the homepage, see how many taps it takes to send a message or find a number to ring. Then ask someone who has never seen the site to do the same while you watch and say nothing.

The faults are dull, which is why nobody checks them. The contact details live only in the footer. The button says "Learn more" when it means "Talk to us". The form asks for a company size, a budget band and a phone number before anyone has said hello. The form works, but sends to an inbox nobody reads, so the enquiry did arrive and simply died there. If enquiries land somewhere nobody looks, or get retyped into three places, we wrote about sending form responses straight to where they are used.

Ask for what you need to reply and nothing more.

What does a contact form need to tell people?

A contact form collects personal data, so data protection law applies to it. The ICO's guidance on privacy information says the UK GDPR specifies what you need to tell people when you collect personal data from them. Among the things you must always provide are who you are and how people can contact you, why you use their data and on what lawful basis, how long you keep it, what rights they have and that they can complain to the ICO.

The simplest way we know to do that is a short line by the submit button linking to a privacy notice that covers enquiries. The ICO notes that this guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act, so check the current version when you write or update the notice. If your situation is anything other than straightforward, take proper data protection advice.

Does a local business need more than the website?

Often, yes. If you serve a town or a county, plenty of buyers will meet you in the local results on Google Maps and Search, not on your site.

Google's tips on local ranking say businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results, and that local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity. The same page says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google. So the work is unglamorous: claim and verify the Business Profile, fill in every field honestly, keep the hours right and reply to reviews.

Why do people get this wrong?

The commonest mistake is redesigning first. A new look with the same vague words gets the same silence, now on a faster template.

Second is writing about yourself. Buyers search for their problem, not your values.

Third is measuring the wrong thing. Visits feel like progress. Enquiries are the point, and a site with fewer visitors who all get in touch is doing a better job.

The fourth is giving up too early. The starter guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped. Change one thing, wait, then read the numbers again.

When is this not the answer?

When the problem is the offer. If people do find you and do get in touch, then go quiet at the quote, the website has done its job and the conversation is about price or fit.

When your work comes from referrals and that suits you. Then the site is a credibility check, not a lead source. It needs to confirm you are real, current and easy to reach, and very little else.

When nobody searches for what you sell, because the market is small or the product is new. Search cannot send people who are not looking. That calls for outreach, events or partners, and a website that backs them up.

And when the inbox is the problem, not the site. An enquiry answered days later is not a website fault.

Where do you start?

Give it an hour. Open Search Console and note impressions, clicks and click through rate for the last three months. Count the taps to get in touch on your own phone. Read your homepage heading as a stranger would and ask whether it says what you do and for whom.

That hour usually points at one of the three jobs. If you want a second pair of eyes on which one, tell us what's stuck and we'll map the quickest fix. Sometimes it is a few page titles. Sometimes it is a contact path, and sometimes it is a new website. Time to talk yet?