Why your website gets traffic but no enquiries

You check your analytics. People are visiting. A few hundred a month, maybe more. Then you check your inbox and there is nothing in it.

This is the most common problem we get called about. A site that gets found and still closes nobody. The traffic is real. The gap sits between the visit and the enquiry, and it is almost always fixable.

Buying more traffic makes it worse

The normal reaction to an empty inbox is to buy more visits. More ads, more posts, more SEO work.

That widens the leak instead of plugging it.

Say 1,000 people land on your site each month and 15 of them get in touch. That is 1.5 percent. Double your traffic and you get 30 enquiries and double the ad bill. Fix the site so 4 percent get in touch and you get 40 enquiries from the same 1,000 people, at no extra cost.

One of those two options gets cheaper over time. The other gets more expensive every month you keep paying for it.

Start with the six second test

Open your homepage on your phone. Look at it for six seconds. Then lock the screen.

Now answer three questions without looking again.

1. What does this company do?
2. Who is it for?
3. What am I meant to do next?

Six seconds is roughly what a first time visitor gives you before they decide to stay or go. If you cannot answer all three, neither can they.

Do this with two or three people who do not work with you. Their answers will be more honest than yours.

The five reasons people leave

We have rebuilt a lot of sites now. The same five problems come up again and again, usually more than one at a time.

1. The headline could belong to anyone

This is the big one.

Before we rebuilt BeLocal Consulting, their headline read "With well proliferated networks, subject experts and numerous success stories." A real visitor learns nothing from that. It could sit on a law firm, a recruiter or a software company.

The fix is boring and it works. Say what you do and who you do it for, in words your buyer would use. BeLocal now leads with cross border market entry and the founder's 25 years doing it. Same firm. A visitor now knows within one screen whether they are in the right place.

2. The site talks about you instead of them

Count how many times your homepage says "we" and how many times it says "you".

If "we" wins by a lot, that is a problem. Visitors are not reading to learn about your company culture. They are trying to work out if you can solve their problem. Every sentence that does not help them decide is a sentence they might leave on.

3. Your proof is buried or missing

Power8 sells corporate wellness programmes to enterprise HR teams. Their client list includes Amazon, Deloitte and EY. None of that was anywhere near the top of their old site.

They had the proof. They were just not showing it where it counted.

Look at your own site. How far does someone have to scroll before they see evidence that other people trust you? If the answer is more than one screen, move it up.

Proof that works:

• Named clients, with logos if you have permission
• Quotes with a full name, a role and a photo
• Numbers you can back up
• Real examples of finished work

Proof that does not work:

• "Trusted by hundreds of clients"
• Star ratings with no name attached
• Stock photos of people in meetings

4. There is no obvious next step

Some sites give a visitor eight things to do. Book a call, download the guide, join the newsletter, follow on LinkedIn, read the blog, get a quote, see pricing, chat now.

Eight choices is the same as no choice.

Pick one main action. Put it in the same place on every page. Say the same words every time. Power8 now uses "Book a free consultation" and nothing else. A visitor never has to work out what they are supposed to do.

5. It is too slow to matter

Every extra second of load time costs you visitors. On mobile, on a normal connection, three seconds is enough for a lot of people to give up.

You can check this yourself in two minutes with PageSpeed Insights. Put your homepage in and read the mobile score, not desktop. Most of your traffic is on a phone. We go through the whole diagnosis, and what each number means, in what a slow website is costing you.

What belongs above the fold

"Above the fold" means what someone sees before they scroll. On a phone that is a small space, so it has to work hard.

Four things, in this order:

One line saying what you do. Plain words. No metaphors. If your mum could not repeat it back, rewrite it.

One line saying who it is for. "For consultancies and advisory firms" does more work than three paragraphs about your values.

One button. The same one you use everywhere else on the site.

One piece of proof. A logo row, a star rating with a real name next to it, or a single number you can defend.

That is it. Everything else can wait until the second screen. Most homepages try to fit eight things up there and land none of them.

Your form is probably part of the problem

Two opposite mistakes, and both cost you enquiries.

The first is asking for too much. Eleven fields including phone number, company size and how they heard about you. Every field is another reason to give up.

The second is asking for too little. A name and an email tells you nothing. You reply asking what they need, they reply explaining, and two days have gone.

The middle is better. Ask for name, email, company, roughly what they need, and a budget range. Five fields. Enough to reply properly on the first try.

Yes, a longer form reduces the raw number of submissions. It raises the number of useful ones, which is the trade almost every service business should take. Forty enquiries where thirty are students is worse than twelve where eight are real.

What to fix, in what order

Not everything is worth the same effort. This is the order we work in, and why.

Fix	Effort	Effect	Do it when
Rewrite the headline	Low	High	Always. Start here
Move proof up the page	Low	High	You already have proof
Cut to one call to action	Low	Medium	You have more than three
Improve mobile speed	Medium	High	Mobile score is under 50
Restructure the page order	Medium	High	Bounce rate is over 60 percent
Rebuild the whole site	High	High	Three or more of the above are true

Start at the top. The first three cost you an afternoon and no money. A lot of sites gain something real from those alone.

How to tell if it worked

Pick your numbers before you change anything, then write them down.

The ones worth tracking:

Conversion rate. Enquiries divided by visitors. This is the number that matters most. Most service business sites sit between 1 and 2 percent. A well built one gets to 3 or 4.

Bounce rate on the homepage. How many people leave without going anywhere else. Over 60 percent usually means the page is not answering the six second test.

Enquiry quality. Harder to measure, easy to feel. If your form asks about budget and scope, more of the wrong people filter themselves out and the ones who do write are worth talking to.

Give any change four to six weeks before you judge it. Less than that and you are reading noise.

A quick worked example

Power8 is a corporate wellness company. They sell programmes to HR and leadership teams at large companies. Their client list has Amazon, Deloitte and EY on it.

Their old site opened with "No more stress" over a picture, and had a WhatsApp button as the main contact route.

Nothing there was untrue. It was just aimed at the wrong person. An HR director with a budget and a procurement process reads "get help on WhatsApp" and concludes this is not a company that works with organisations like hers.

Four changes:

1. The headline started talking to companies instead of individuals
2. The nine programmes were written out so a buyer could scope and price them
3. The client logos and named testimonials moved near the top
4. "Book a free consultation" replaced every other call to action

Same business, same services, same people. What changed was who the page was speaking to and what it showed them first.

The honest caveat

Not every empty inbox is a website problem.

If your traffic is coming from the wrong place, no page will save it. Someone searching for free templates is never going to book a paid project, however good your homepage is. Check where your visitors come from before you rebuild anything.

And if you sell something with a long buying cycle, a slow month is not proof of anything. Look at a quarter.

But if you have real traffic from people who could genuinely buy, and your inbox is still quiet, the page is where to look.