You paid for a website. It is live, it looks respectable, your mate said it was smart. And the phone is quiet. If that is you, you are in very good company — it is the single most common question local service businesses ask. The useful bit: you can work out which of the two problems you have this evening, without buying anything.
Only two things can be wrong
Every quiet website has one of two problems: either nobody is finding it, or people are finding it and choosing not to get in touch. Every cause you will ever read about — whether Google has your site listed, wording, speed, reviews, your Google Business Profile, a broken form — is a version of one of those two.
This matters because the fixes point in opposite directions. If nobody is finding your site, rewriting your homepage is a wasted evening. If plenty of people are finding it and leaving, getting yourself higher up Google just means more people leaving. Diagnose first, fix second. Almost everyone who has ever paid for the wrong work skipped this step.
The awkward third possibility. Sometimes people are getting in touch and the message never reaches you. A form that fails silently, or enquiry emails landing in a spam folder, look identical to a website nobody wants. It is the cheapest thing on this page to rule out and the one almost nobody checks, so it has two sections of its own further down this page.
How do I tell which problem I have?
In about ten minutes, with no tools. If you already have Google Search Console or Google Analytics set up, the answer is already sitting in them: Search Console shows how often you appeared in searches and how often you were clicked, Analytics shows how many people actually arrived. Visitors but no calls is problem two. Barely any visitors is problem one.
Most small business websites have neither. You can still get a decent answer:
- Search your own business name. If your site does not come up when someone searches for you by name, you have a serious visibility problem — and you are losing the warmest leads you will ever get.
- Search
site:yourdomain.co.uk, using your actual domain. That lists the pages Google currently holds in its index. Nothing back means Google does not know your site exists: problem one in its purest form. - Search what you do plus your town — “plasterer Kettering”, “dog groomer Stroud” — in a private browsing window, so Google does not flatter you with results shaped by your own history. Are you in the first couple of pages? Are you in the map block at the top?
- Send yourself an enquiry through your own contact form, from your phone, with a real message. Then go and look for it.
If the first three pass and the fourth arrives, and the phone is still quiet, you have problem two: people arrive and do not act. If you want the longer version of this diagnosis, how do I know if my website is actually working walks through seven checks in order.
What is a good conversion rate for a small business website?
The average across 13 industries is 5.13% of sessions, according to Ruler Analytics’ 2026 conversion rate benchmark, published 26 May 2026 and built from more than 110 million sessions and over 5 million tracked conversions, including phone calls as well as forms. It is UK data, which is rarer than it sounds in this field. Here is the part of it that applies to service businesses:
| Sector | Average conversion rate |
|---|---|
| Legal | 7.9% |
| Automotive | 7.9% |
| Finance | 6.3% |
| Education | 6.3% |
| Marketing & advertising | 6.2% |
| Professional services | 6.1% |
| Construction & engineering | 4.9% |
| Beauty & cosmetic | 3.5% |
| Real estate | 2.8% |
| Health & social care | 2.3% |
| Travel | 1.9% |
| All 13 industries — average 5.13% (Ruler Analytics, 2026) | |
Read that as a sanity check, not a target. A sole-trader emergency plumber and a wedding caterer booking four big events a year need completely different phones. And these are rates for businesses that measure, which skews them upwards — a business tracking calls and forms properly is usually a business already paying attention.
A correction to an earlier version of this page. This guide previously said “a commonly cited rough norm is that around 2–3% of website visitors get in touch”. We went looking for where that comes from and could not find a primary source for it anywhere — it is repeated from blog to blog without an origin. It has been replaced above with a benchmark that names its sample. If you have been judging your site against 2–3%, you may have been judging it against a number nobody can vouch for.
The more useful number is your own baseline: how many enquiries does the site produce now, so you can tell whether a change helped? Most small business sites measure nothing, which makes every decision a guess. Conversion tracking turns the guess into a number and costs nothing but an evening.
Problem one: why is my website not getting traffic?
Five causes account for nearly all of it, and four are about words rather than code.
Google does not have your site indexed
Rarer than people fear, but it happens — especially with new sites nobody ever told Google about, and with sites left switched to “discourage search engines” after being built. The site: search above tells you in five seconds; Search Console tells you why. There is a whole guide on why isn’t my website showing on Google if this is you.
One vague “Services” page instead of a page per service
When someone searches “end-of-tenancy clean”, Google is looking for a page about end-of-tenancy cleans, not a bullet point in a list of twelve things. This is the single biggest fix for most local business websites, and how to write a service page that gets found walks through it.
Your wording is not your customers’ wording
Most businesses write in their own trade language: “FCU” when the customer searches “fused spur”, “balayage” when the customer types “blonde highlights”. Search matches words. If your words are not their words, you never meet. Writing about your services in your customers’ language covers the fix.
No Google Business Profile, or an unclaimed, half-empty one
For local searches the map block sits above everything else on the page, and it is built from Business Profiles, not websites. If you are not in it, a share of your local customers never see you at all. Claiming a profile costs nothing and takes an evening.
A second correction. An earlier version of this page said “somewhere around two in five clicks on local searches go to that map area”. Every trail we followed for that number in September 2026 led back to industry blog posts citing each other rather than to a study we would stand behind, so it has been removed. What is safe to say is that the map block is physically above the blue links, so being in it matters. By how much, precisely, nobody has published credibly.
Your site never says where you work
If your pages do not name your towns and areas in ordinary sentences, nothing gives Google a reason to show you to people in them. “Serving the local area” tells nobody anything. Location pages that get found shows how to do this without producing twenty near-identical pages.
Problem two: my website gets traffic but no leads
Start with the boring mechanical causes, not the wording. People rewrite their homepage three times before they discover the form has not worked since March. Work down this list in order, because the first four can be tested in a couple of minutes each and any one of them makes everything else pointless.
| Check | How to test it | Time |
|---|---|---|
| The contact form actually delivers | Submit a real enquiry from your phone and go looking for it | 5 min |
| Enquiry emails are not being filtered | Check spam folders; check the domain has SPF and DKIM | 5 min |
| The phone number is tappable | Tap it on your own phone and see whether it dials | 1 min |
| The site is not slow on a phone | Load it on mobile data, then run PageSpeed Insights | 5 min |
| The page earns trust in ten seconds | Show it to someone who has never seen it and ask what you do | 5 min |
How do I test whether my contact form is working?
Send yourself a real enquiry and follow it all the way to an inbox — five steps, five minutes, and it is the highest-value five minutes on this page. A form that fails silently is the most expensive fault a small website can have, because every failure is a customer who decided to hire you and then heard nothing back.
- 1. Fill it in as a customer would, from your phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi. Use a real name and a real message, not “test test” — spam filters treat “test” messages differently from ordinary ones, so a “test” that arrives proves less than you think.
- 2. Watch what happens after you press send. Do you get a confirmation on screen? A page that reloads with the fields still full, or scrolls back to the top with no message, is usually a form that silently failed.
- 3. Check the inbox it is meant to reach — and check you still own that inbox. Forms are routinely set up pointing at the web designer’s address, or at an old
info@that was closed when you changed email provider. - 4. Check the spam and junk folders, in every mailbox the form sends to, including any forwarding address. This is where most missing enquiries turn out to be.
- 5. Check the form’s own stored entries. Most website builders and form plugins keep a record of submissions in the admin area even when the email notification fails. If there are entries there that never reached you by email, you have just found your problem — and possibly some enquiries you can still answer.
Do this once a quarter and after every website change, plugin update or email provider switch. Those are exactly the moments forms break, and nothing tells you when they do. If your site has more than one form — a quote request, a newsletter box, a booking page — test each one separately.
Why are my enquiry emails going to spam?
Usually because the domain sending them has no SPF or DKIM record. Google’s email sender guidelines require every sender to set up SPF or DKIM authentication for their sending domain, and senders of 5,000 or more messages a day must also publish a DMARC record, which may be set to a policy of none. Google also asks senders to keep their spam rate below 0.3%, and recommends staying under 0.1% to leave headroom.
Contact forms fail this constantly. A typical form sends the enquiry from your own web host’s mail server, with your domain in the “from” line. If your domain’s SPF record does not list that server, the receiving mailbox sees a message claiming to come from you, sent by something that is not authorised to send as you — and quietly files it as spam. No bounce, no warning.
How to check, in a few minutes:
- Send yourself a form enquiry from a different email address, ideally one at a different provider, and look at whether it arrives in the inbox or the junk folder.
- Open the message and view its original headers. Gmail calls this “Show original”. Look for the SPF, DKIM and DMARC results. “PASS” on all three is what you want.
- Use a free DNS lookup tool to check whether your domain publishes an SPF record at all. Plenty of small business domains have never had one.
- If you have no idea who controls your DNS, that is worth resolving on its own account — do I own my website covers how to find out.
The durable fix is to have the form send through a proper mailbox on a business email account rather than through the host’s server, and to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up on your domain. If you are also weighing up the mailbox itself, how much does business email cost covers the market rates.
Is my phone number tappable, and is it in the right place?
It should be visible without scrolling, on every page, and it should dial when tapped. That last part is a genuine technical detail: a phone number typed as ordinary text does nothing when a thumb lands on it. It only dials if it is coded as a telephone link, the tel: kind. Open your site on your phone and tap your number. If nothing happens, you are asking a customer standing in the rain to memorise eleven digits and retype them.
Two more things worth fixing while you are there. Put the number in the header, not only in the footer — a visitor who has to hunt will try the next result instead. And write it once in a consistent format across every page, including your Google Business Profile, so that the number Google associates with you is the number on the site.
Why is my website slow on a phone, and how slow is too slow?
Google publishes the exact bar, so you do not have to guess. Its Core Web Vitals set three thresholds, each measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads:
| Metric | What it measures | Good | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | How long until the main thing on screen appears | 2.5 seconds or less | Over 4.0 seconds |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How fast the page responds when you tap | 200 milliseconds or less | Over 500 milliseconds |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much the page jumps about as it loads | 0.1 or less | Over 0.25 |
Run your homepage and one service page through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool and you will get both the lab score and, if your site has enough traffic, field data from real visitors over the previous 28 days. The field data is the one that counts.
The usual culprits, in order of how often they are to blame: photographs uploaded straight off a camera or phone at several megabytes each, a pile of plugins and tracking scripts, a page builder loading a large stylesheet for a simple page, and cheap shared hosting. The first of those is often a single afternoon’s work and can halve a load time on its own.
A third correction. This guide used to open this section with “most local searches happen on a phone”, and cited older Google research that 76% of people searching “near me” on a phone visit a business within a day. We could not trace that 76% figure to a live primary source in September 2026, so it is gone. What we can cite: StatCounter recorded UK page views in August 2026 as 49.17% desktop, 46.11% mobile and 4.72% tablet. So roughly half, not most — but half is more than enough reason to test your site on a phone.
What is a visitor deciding in the first ten seconds?
Whether to stay at all. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, writing on 11 September 2011 about Microsoft research covering more than two billion page visits, found that the first ten seconds of a visit are the critical window, that the average page visit lasts a little under a minute, and that visits follow a pattern of “negative ageing”: a visitor who survives the brutal opening seconds becomes progressively more likely to stay for several minutes. Get past ten seconds and you are in a very different conversation.
What they are deciding is narrower than most homepages assume. Does this person do my job? Do they cover my area? Can I trust them? Everything else is decoration until those three are answered.
So the evidence that changes minds is specific, not flattering:
- Real photographs of your own work. Stock photos of models in clean hard hats convince nobody. Slightly wonky phone photos of a job you finished last month do more for trust than any paragraph.
- Reviews, on the page, with names. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published on 11 February 2026 from a sample of 1,002 adult consumers, found 97% read reviews for local businesses. That is a US sample — we could not find an equivalent UK study of the same standing — but the direction is not seriously in dispute. Note the figure has moved: an earlier version of this page cited 92%, from an older edition of the same survey.
- Specifics instead of adjectives. “Quality workmanship at competitive prices” could be anyone, anywhere. “Re-pointing and chimney work across Basingstoke and north Hampshire, 14 years, fully insured” answers all three questions in one line.
- Accreditations, insurance, years in business. Small, checkable facts. They are worth more than a paragraph about your passion for customer service.
Is it the website’s fault or the words’ fault?
Nearly always the words. Most quiet websites were built perfectly competently — the platform is fine, and what is missing is content: the pages, the wording, the areas, the proof. That is good news, because words are far cheaper to fix than websites.
The platform genuinely is the problem in a narrow set of cases: the site cannot be indexed at all, it is painfully slow and cannot be made faster, it is unusable on a phone, or it will not let you add and edit pages yourself. Those are real, and if one applies, a rebuild may be the honest answer. But it is the minority case, whatever a salesperson tells you. If you are already in the unhappy position of having paid for a site that does nothing, I paid for a website and get nothing deals with that situation directly.
What should I do first?
Test the form, then the number, then the speed — in that order, tonight, before you spend money on anything. They are the three faults that make every other improvement pointless, and all three are free to check.
After that, the order depends on which problem the diagnosis gave you:
| What you found | What it means | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
site: search returns nothing | Google does not have your site | Why isn’t my website showing on Google |
| Not in the map block for your trade and town | Business Profile missing or neglected | Set up a Google Business Profile |
| One page listing every service | Nothing for Google to match a specific search to | Write a service page that gets found |
| No towns named anywhere | No reason to show you locally | Location pages that get found |
| Form submission never arrived | Enquiries are being lost, not refused | The five-step form test above |
| Enquiries land in junk | Missing SPF or DKIM on your domain | Business email, done properly |
| Visitors arrive, nobody calls | Trust, clarity or speed | The ten-second test above |
| No idea how many enquiries you get | You are guessing | Set up conversion tracking |
If you have read both lists and still cannot tell which applies to you, that is normal. It is genuinely hard to be objective about your own website, because you know what every page means before you read it and your customers do not.
Common questions
- Why is my website not generating leads?
- Either nobody is arriving, or people arrive and do not act. Check which before you change anything: search site:yourdomain.co.uk to see whether Google holds your pages, then search what you do plus your town in a private window. If you barely appear, that is a visibility problem. If you appear and the phone is still quiet, test the contact form and the phone link on your own mobile, because a form that fails silently looks exactly like a website nobody wants.
- What is a good conversion rate for my website?
- Ruler Analytics' 2026 UK benchmark, built from more than 110 million sessions and 5 million tracked conversions across 13 industries, puts the average at 5.13%. Construction and engineering sit at 4.9%, professional services at 6.1%, beauty and cosmetic at 3.5%, health and social care at 2.3%. The widely repeated claim that 2 to 3% of visitors get in touch traces back to nothing we could stand behind, so treat it as folklore.
- Why is my contact form not sending emails?
- Usually one of four things: the form posts to an address that no longer exists, the plugin or builder was updated and the notification setting was reset, the message is being sent from your web host's server and filtered as spam, or a spam-blocking add-on is quietly discarding submissions. Test it by filling the form in yourself from your phone with a real message, then checking the inbox, the spam folder and the form's own stored entries.
- Why are my emails going to spam?
- Most often because the domain sending them has no SPF or DKIM record. Google requires every sender to set up SPF or DKIM for their sending domain, and senders of 5,000 or more messages a day must also publish DMARC, which can be set to a policy of none. Forms that send from a web host rather than from your real mailbox fail this constantly. Send yourself a test and look at the message headers, or use a free authentication checker.
- Why is my website slow on mobile?
- Almost always oversized images, too many scripts and plugins, or a cheap shared host. Google's Core Web Vitals give you the exact bar: Largest Contentful Paint should happen within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint should be 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift should be 0.1 or less, all measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads. Above 4 seconds, 500 milliseconds or 0.25 respectively, Google rates the page poor.
- How do I get more leads from my website?
- Fix in this order: make sure enquiries can physically reach you, make sure the page answers what a stranger is deciding in the first ten seconds, then go after more visitors. Working form, tappable number on every page, real photographs of your own work, reviews on the page, your towns named in ordinary sentences, and one page per service. More traffic to a page that loses people just loses more people.
- Do I need a new website?
- Usually not. Most quiet sites are quiet because of what is on them, not how they were built, and wording, service pages and a Google Business Profile can all be fixed on the site you have. A rebuild is the right answer in a narrow set of cases: the site cannot be indexed, it is painfully slow and cannot be made faster, it is unusable on a phone, or you cannot add and edit pages yourself.
- Is it my website or my Google Business Profile?
- For a local service business it is often the profile. The map block sits above the ordinary results for searches like plumber plus a town name, and it is fed by Business Profiles rather than websites, so a missing or neglected profile can make you locally invisible whatever your site does. They work as a pair: the profile gets you seen, the website earns the call. Claiming a profile costs nothing.
Related guides
Sources, all checked 15 September 2026. Conversion rates by industry: Ruler Analytics, “Conversion Rate Benchmarks 2026”, published 26 May 2026, based on 110 million-plus sessions and 5 million-plus tracked conversions across 13 industries, UK data. Core Web Vitals thresholds and the 75th percentile rule: Google, web.dev, “Web Vitals” and the individual LCP, INP and CLS reference pages. Email authentication requirements and spam-rate thresholds: Google, “Email sender guidelines”, Gmail Help. Review-reading behaviour: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published 11 February 2026, sample of 1,002 adult consumers in the United States; we could not find a UK survey of comparable standing, and have said so on the page. First ten seconds of a visit and the “negative ageing” pattern: Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, “How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?”, 11 September 2011, reporting Microsoft research on over two billion page visits. UK device split: StatCounter Global Stats, United Kingdom, August 2026. Could not be sourced, and therefore removed from this page: the frequently repeated claim that 2–3% of website visitors convert; the claim that around two in five clicks on local searches go to the map block; and the figure that 76% of people making a “near me” search on a phone visit a business within a day, which we could not trace to a live primary Google source.