Why is my website not getting enquiries?

Your website gets no enquiries for one of four reasons, and each needs a different fix. Either nobody visits, the wrong people visit, visitors leave without contacting you, or enquiries arrive and nobody sees them. The fourth is the cheapest to fix and the most annoying to find late. Open your analytics before you change anything. The numbers tell you which one you have.

Does anybody arrive?

Look at monthly visits. As a rule of thumb, if only a handful of people visit in a month, you do not have a website problem. You have a visibility problem, and no amount of redesigning will fix it.

The fix is getting found. Use search engine optimisation for the terms your buyers actually type, and fill in your Google Business Profile with photographs and reviews. Add listings on the directories your category uses, such as IndiaMART or JustDial. If you need enquiries this quarter rather than next year, add paid advertising too.

Do the right people arrive?

If visits are healthy but most people leave within a few seconds having seen one page, you are ranking or advertising for the wrong searches. This is common after an agency has chased traffic volume as a target.

Look at the search terms in Search Console and the pages people land on. A dental clinic ranking for "how to whiten teeth at home" gets traffic and no patients. A page for "root canal treatment in Rajajinagar" gets fewer visits and books appointments.

The same thing happens in paid campaigns set up on broad match. A machining shop paying for every search containing the word "milling" will collect students, jobseekers and people looking for flour mills, and the report will show a healthy click count.

Do the right people leave?

If visitors look at three or four pages, spend a couple of minutes and then go, the traffic is fine and the site is the problem. These are the most expensive visitors to lose, because you have already paid to get them.

Check your site against these five problems.

• The company history comes before the offer. The visitor has to scroll three screens past "established in 2009" to find out what you sell.
• The page says what you do and not who it is for. "Complete engineering solutions" tells a buyer nothing. "Laser cutting of stainless steel up to 12 mm, for fabricators in and around Peenya" tells them everything.
• There is nothing about cost. You do not have to publish a price. You do have to say what the price depends on, or serious buyers who are comparing three suppliers will drop you at this point.
• Contacting you is work. Nine fields, including one asking a stranger for their budget, and a submit button. Ask for a name, a number and what they need.
• It is slow or awkward on a phone on 4G. Check how many of your enquiries come from phones. For many trades the buyer is standing somewhere with one hand free.

Or are the enquiries arriving unseen?

Before anything else, test it. Fill in your own form from a phone on mobile data and see where the message lands.

Forms break silently after a plugin update. Notifications go to an employee who left. Everything routes to an info@ address nobody opens. Enquiries land in the spam folder. Fixing it is usually an hour's work.

Which problem do you have?

What to do next

Spend twenty minutes in your analytics and write down which row you are in. Then test your own enquiry form from your phone, because that takes two minutes and rules out the worst case.

Do that before you approve a redesign. A new site built on the same wrong answer costs a few months and a large invoice, and it produces the same silence in a better typeface. If the analytics point to a problem you cannot fix yourself, tell us what you need.