This is a different problem from being invisible on Google, and it’s a more frustrating one. People are finding you. They’re landing on your website. They’re reading it. And then they’re leaving without saying anything.
I find this harder to diagnose than a ranking problem, because there’s no single number that tells you what went wrong. But in twenty years of this, at Depop, Etsy, Missguided and Simply Be before I set up VKNG Digital here in Lancashire, I’ve only ever found eleven causes. Usually two or three at once.
Work through them in order, because the first two are the ones that will make you feel sick if they turn out to be the answer.
1: The form is broken and nobody told you
Start here, always start here.
Forms break silently. A plugin updates, a mail setting changes, a hosting company tightens its spam rules, and the form carries on looking perfect while sending nothing anywhere. The visitor sees “thanks, we’ll be in touch”. You see an empty inbox and assume nobody’s interested.
I have found this on live sites where it had been going on for over a year. The owner thought their website was useless. It had been quietly collecting enquiries and binning them.
Test it properly: fill your own form in from your phone, on mobile data rather than your office wifi, using a personal email address. Then wait ten minutes and check your inbox, your spam folder, and your junk filter. Then do it again from a different device.
If nothing arrives, that’s your answer and you’ve just found money.
2: It works, but the emails are going to spam
The slightly less bad version of the same thing. Enquiries arrive, get filed as junk, and you never see them.
This happens most often when the form sends from an address at your own domain, which some mail providers treat as suspicious. Check your spam folder now, and if you find enquiries in there, mark them as not spam and get whoever runs your site to look at how the form sends mail.
While you’re in there, check whether anyone else in the business receives the enquiries and has stopped forwarding them.
3: You’re asking for too much
Every field you add costs you enquiries.
Name, email, phone, company, how did you hear about us, which service are you interested in, budget range, preferred contact time, a captcha, a tickbox to confirm you’ve read the privacy policy. Each one is another small reason to give up, and people on a phone with one thumb free give up quickly.
For most local businesses you need a name, one way to reach them, and a box to describe the problem. That’s it. You can ask everything else on the phone, when they’re already talking to you.
If you’re worried about time-wasters, understand the trade. A longer form filters out time-wasters and also filters out busy people with money.
4: There’s no phone number, or it isn’t tappable
A good number of your customers never wanted to fill in a form. They wanted to ring you, found no number, and left.
Put your phone number in the header of every page, make it a proper tappable link on mobile, and put it in the footer as well. If you’d rather people messaged, WhatsApp works the same way and plenty of trades get more enquiries through it than through any form.
Giving people a choice of how to contact you costs nothing and reliably increases the total.
5: The form is at the bottom of a long page
If someone has to scroll past two thousand words of text to find out how to contact you, most of them won’t.
Contact details belong near the top as well as the bottom. On a long service page, put a way to get in touch after the section that answers the main question, not only at the very end.
6: The page doesn’t say what happens next
“Send” is a leap of faith. People hesitate because they don’t know what they’re signing up for.
Tell them. “Fill this in and I’ll come back to you the same working day with a rough price.” That sentence does more work than any redesign. It sets a timescale, it says what they’ll receive, and it quietly promises they won’t be rung by a salesperson for the next six months.
And then honour it, because a same-day promise you break is worse than no promise.
7: They don’t trust you yet
This is the big invisible one.
Someone who has never heard of you is about to hand over their phone number. What on the page tells them you’re real and competent? Usually: reviews, actual photos of actual work, your real address, your real name, a face, how long you’ve been going, who you’ve worked for.
Stock photography and a slogan do the opposite. They make a real business look like a brochure.
If you have Google reviews, put the good ones on the page. If you’ve done work for anyone recognisable, say so. If you’re a one-man band, say that too, because plenty of customers prefer it.
8: There’s no price information at all
Nobody expects a fixed quote on a website. But a page with no indication of cost whatsoever makes people assume they can’t afford you, and they’d rather leave than find out.
A range works. A starting-from figure works. “Most bathrooms we fit come in between eight and fifteen thousand” works. It qualifies people in as well as out, and the enquiries you do get are better.
9: The page is slow, or awkward on a phone
Most of your visitors are on a phone. If the form fields are too small to tap accurately, if the keyboard covers the field you’re typing in, if the page takes seven seconds on 4G, you will lose people who genuinely wanted to contact you.
Fill your own form in on your own phone, outdoors, on mobile data. Not on the office wifi on a laptop. You’ll find things.
10: The traffic is the wrong traffic
Sometimes the form is fine and the visitors were never going to buy.
If most of your visitors arrive from a blog post called “how does a boiler work”, they’re students and curious homeowners, not people with a broken boiler. They were never going to ring you. Your form isn’t under-performing, your audience is.
This is worth checking in Google Search Console, which is free. Look at which searches bring people in. If the top ten are all information questions and none of them are “plumber near me” or “boiler replacement Preston”, you’ve diagnosed it.
11: You’re being compared and losing
People rarely visit one website. They open four, skim them all, and contact one or two.
So open your three main competitors next to your own site and read all four as a customer would. Who looks more trustworthy? Who makes it clearer what they do? Who has more reviews? Who makes contacting them easier?
If you’d pick one of them over you, that’s the honest answer, and it’s more useful than any tool.
What this is called, as it happens
The business of getting more of your existing visitors to actually get in touch has a name. It’s called conversion, and it is a separate discipline from getting found in the first place.
It’s worth knowing they’re separate, because they get sold together and they shouldn’t always be bought together. If a hundred people a month visit your site and nobody contacts you, paying someone to bring you two hundred visitors doubles your problem rather than solving it. Fix the leak before you turn the tap up.
The order I’d fix them in
- Test the form properly from a phone. Check spam. This is free and occasionally solves everything.
- Put a tappable phone number in the header of every page.
- Cut the form down to three fields.
- Add one sentence saying what happens after they press send.
- Put three real reviews and three real photos of your own work on the page.
- Add a price range or a starting-from figure.
- Only then look at traffic quality.
The first four are an afternoon. They’re also where most of the gain is.
If you’d rather have someone tell you which of the eleven is actually costing you money, send me your business name and postcode and I’ll run you a free audit. I’ll test your form, look at the page the way a customer does, and tell you what I’d change first. If the answer is “your form’s broken, go and fix it, you don’t need me”, that’s what you’ll get.
Ready to dominate?
Get a FREE audit now!
Click now to request your FREE audit and our team of Lancashire SEO Specialists will analyse your website, identify opportunities, and deliver you a no-obligation plan of attack!
