Why your small business website isn't getting you leads

Most of the sites people ask me to look at aren’t broken. They load, they look decent, the links work. They just don’t bring in any work, and the owner can’t figure out why.

Usually it’s one of a few things, and they’re all fixable.

The first is that nobody can find the site. If you don’t turn up when someone nearby searches for what you do, it might as well not be online. That’s less about clever SEO than about boring fundamentals: a page for each service, your city written somewhere on it, a Google Business Profile that’s actually filled in, and a site that loads fast enough that Google bothers to rank it.

Speed is the one people underestimate. Your visitor’s on a phone, probably on cell data, probably a little impatient. If the page takes five or six seconds to show up, a good chunk of them are gone before they see your name. You don’t notice because your site’s cached on your laptop and feels instant. Pull it up on your phone on the way out the door sometime.

The next one’s quieter: the site never asks for anything. It reads like a pamphlet. Here’s the business, here’s what we do, phone number in the footer. Fine for someone who already decided to call. Useless for the person still making up their mind.

Then the expensive one. The leads you do get, you lose. A form lands in an inbox you check on Sundays. A call comes in while you’re up a ladder and never gets returned. Someone messages Friday night and hires the next name on the list by Monday. You did the hard part, getting them to reach out, and dropped it at the last step.

If you want to see which of these is biting you, I built a free tool that runs your site and checks the usual suspects: speed, whether it works on a phone, whether Google can see it, whether there’s an obvious way to reach you. Plain report, no signup.

Most of the time it’s not a rebuild you need, just two or three specific fixes. More on that here: Do you need a new website, or just a fix?