You check your analytics and the traffic is fine. People are finding you. Then you look at your phone and it has not rung all week.
That gap is the most common problem I get called about, and it is almost never fixed by getting more traffic. Getting found and getting called are two separate jobs. If the second one is broken, more visitors just means more people leaving.
First, rule out the two things that look like a website problem
You are getting the wrong visitors. If you are a roofer in Charlotte and most of your traffic comes from a blog post about roof colors that people read from all over the country, those visitors were never going to call. Check where your visitors are and which pages they land on. Ten of the right people beats a thousand of the wrong ones.
You are getting calls you are not counting. Someone taps your number on their phone and it never registers as a website result. Or they find you on the site, then call the number on your Google listing instead. Ask every new customer how they found you for one month. The answers usually surprise people.
If both of those check out, the problem is on the site. In my experience it is one of these seven, and usually more than one.
1. Nobody can tell what you do in five seconds
Open your home page on your phone and look only at what fits before you scroll. Can a stranger tell what you do, who you do it for, and where you do it? If the headline says something like “Excellence you can trust,” they cannot.
People do not read websites. They scan them, decide in a few seconds whether they are in the right place, and leave if they are not sure. “Commercial HVAC repair and installation across Dallas Fort Worth” is not a clever headline. It is a headline that works.
2. There is no obvious next step
A lot of sites give people five things they could do and no sense of what they should do. Learn more, view services, read our blog, follow us, contact us. When everything is equally available, nothing gets picked.
Pick one action. Call, book, or request a quote. Put it in the header, put it at the end of every section, and make everything else quieter. It feels repetitive to you because you built it. To a visitor who arrived halfway down the page, it is the first time they have seen it.
3. The site is slow
People leave slow sites before they see anything you wrote. A three second wait on a phone with two bars of signal is enough. You will not notice, because your browser has the site cached and you are sitting on your own wifi.
Test it on cellular data with your cache cleared. Oversized images are the usual culprit, followed by too many plugins doing too little.
4. The mobile version was an afterthought
Most of your visitors are on a phone, and often the large majority. If the site was designed on a desktop and then squeezed down, it shows. Text too small to read without pinching, buttons too close together to tap accurately, a menu that takes three taps to open, forms that fight the keyboard.
Go through your own site on your phone as if you were a customer. Try to contact yourself. Anything that annoys you will make somebody else leave.
5. There is nothing that makes you believable
Someone about to spend real money with a business they have never used is looking for reasons to trust you, and a lot of sites give them none. No reviews, no photos of finished work, no faces, no license or insurance details, no address, no sense that a real person is behind it.
Stock photos of models in hard hats actively hurt here. A slightly imperfect photo of your actual crew on an actual job beats them every time.
6. You are asking for too much, too early
A twelve field form is a demand, not an invitation. Somebody still deciding whether to talk to you is not going to hand over their address and budget range just to ask a question.
Ask for the minimum you need to start a conversation. Name, phone, and one line about the job is usually plenty. You can get the rest on the call. And give people more than one way to reach you, because the person who will happily text you will never fill in a form.
7. The site looks cheaper than what you charge
This one is uncomfortable, but it matters most if you are the more expensive option in your market. When a website looks like a template, it quietly argues that the pricing is negotiable. People compare you against whoever they looked at just before you, and that comparison happens in about two seconds, before they read a word.
This is not about being fancy. It is about looking like a business that charges what you charge.
How to work out which one is yours
You do not need software for this. Four things will tell you most of it:
- The five second test. Show your home page to someone who does not know your business, take it away after five seconds, and ask them what you do.
- The phone test. On cellular data, try to hire yourself. Time it. Count the taps.
- Ask three recent customers what nearly stopped them getting in touch. They will tell you, and it is rarely what you expected.
- Watch where people leave. If they land on the home page and leave from the home page, it is a clarity problem. If they reach the contact page and leave there, it is a form problem.
Fix them in this order
Speed first, because nothing else matters if the page never finishes loading. Then clarity, so people know they are in the right place. Then the phone experience. Then one obvious next step. Then proof. Then the way it looks.
Most people work that list backwards. They start with a redesign, because that is the visible part, and end up with a better looking site that still does not ring the phone.
If you are not sure which one it is
Usually it is not a mystery. Twenty minutes on a site is normally enough to find the two or three things costing the most business, and they are rarely the things the owner was worried about.
That is what the free strategy call is for. I will go through your site, tell you what I would change and in what order, and you keep that plan whether you hire me or not.
