Why Isn't My Website Getting Any Calls?

Your website looks alright. You paid somebody for it, or you built it yourself over a few evenings. And the phone still is not ringing because of it.

I hear this constantly, and the frustrating part is that "my website does not work" covers two completely different problems that need completely different fixes. Sorting out which one you have takes about ten minutes, and it will save you spending money on the wrong thing.

Is it a visibility problem or a conversion problem?

Only two things can be going wrong.

Nobody is finding the site. People search for what you do, you are not on the first page, and they ring somebody who is. Your website could be the best in the country and it would make no difference.

People find it and do not ring. They land, look for about eight seconds, and go back to the results. The site is being seen and it is not doing its job.

The fix for the first is getting found on Google. The fix for the second is the website itself. Spending on the wrong one is the most common waste of money I see, and it is expensive in both directions: months of search work pointed at a site nobody would ring, or a shiny rebuild that still nobody can find.

How do I tell which one I have?

Set up Google Search Console. It is free, it takes about five minutes, and it is the only tool in this article you genuinely need.

Open the Performance report and look at two numbers over the last three months.

• Impressions under a few hundred. Nobody is finding you. This is a visibility problem and the website is not your bottleneck.
• Impressions in the thousands, clicks in the dozens. People are seeing you in the results and choosing somebody else. Your titles and descriptions are losing the click before anyone reaches the site.
• Clicks in the hundreds and a quiet phone. They are arriving and leaving. This one is the website.

Most trade businesses I look at are in the first group and have been sold a solution to the third. If you take one thing from this page, take that.

Why do people not ring when they do find it?

Assuming they are landing and leaving, it is almost always one of these six.

It takes too long to load. Test it on your phone on mobile data, standing outside, not on the office wifi. If you can count to three before anything useful appears, you have lost a good share of people before they saw anything at all. Google's own threshold is 2.5 seconds to show the main content, and the usual culprit on a trade site is one enormous photograph straight off a camera.

Your number is not obvious. It should be visible without scrolling and tappable in one go. Not in a footer. Not as an image. Not behind a form that asks for a message first. On a phone, a number that is not a link is a number somebody has to memorise and retype, and plenty will not bother.

It does not say which jobs you do. "Quality workmanship, fully qualified, no job too small" tells somebody with a leaking hot water cylinder nothing at all. Name the jobs. Use the words a customer would use, not the words on your invoice. Nobody searches for "reticulation remediation".

The towns are missing. Almost nobody searches without somewhere in mind. A site that never names the suburbs it covers has not answered the question it was asked, and will not be shown for it either.

There is nothing that says you are real. No photographs of your own work, no reviews, no name, no face. Photographs off your phone of jobs you have finished beat stock images every single time, and it is not close. A stock photo of a smiling man in a hard hat is a signal that there is nothing real to show.

It asks for too much. A nine-field contact form is a wall. Name, number, and a line about the job is plenty. Every extra field is another chance to decide this is too much effort on a Tuesday evening.

What should I fix first?

In this order, because that is roughly the order of impact per hour spent:

1. Make the phone number visible and tappable on every page
2. Get the site showing something useful in under three seconds on mobile data
3. Write out the jobs you actually want, in plain words
4. Name your service areas
5. Add your own job photographs, and get a few reviews up using something like Toolbox Tribe's review request builder
6. Cut the contact form back to three fields

Those first two alone fix a surprising number of "my website does not work" complaints, and neither needs a rebuild. The first is twenty minutes. The second is usually a morning.

What does a reasonable result look like?

A handyman business I built for in the Nelson and Tasman area has published figures of 700 plus organic visitors and top three positions for more than 30 searches. An electrician in Christchurch came out at around 1,500 visitors and 170 plus enquiries.

Neither of those is a dramatic number by internet standards and that is the point. A one van operation does not need thousands of visitors. It needs the few dozen people a month who are actually looking for the work it does, arriving on a page that makes ringing the obvious next step. Chasing traffic figures is how trade businesses end up paying for visitors who were never going to hire anybody.

When is it actually worth rebuilding?

I did 15 years on the tools before this, ten of them running my own plumbing business, so I am not keen on telling people to spend money they do not need to.

A rebuild is the right call when the site is slow at its foundations rather than slow because of one big image, when you cannot edit it yourself and nobody can find who built it, or when it was never structured to be found in the first place. Those are real problems and no amount of tinkering fixes them.

Otherwise you are often a handful of honest fixes away, and it is worth finding that out before you commit to a new website. If you would rather have somebody go through it properly and tell you which of the two situations you are in, that is what an audit is for, and the answer sometimes is that there is nothing much wrong.