Why is my website not getting leads?

"We have a website, but nobody contacts us through it" is one of the things we hear most from small businesses. The cause is rarely just one thing, and almost never the colour of the buttons. Below is the order to check things in, the ten most common causes and what to change first.

First: does the site get visits?

Open the performance report in Google Search Console and look at the last three months:

Look at the searches in the report too. If people land on the site looking for something other than what you sell, say "what is a CRM" when you sell CRM setup, the visits are real but they aren't customers.

The 10 most common causes

1. The top of the page doesn't say what you do

A visitor decides within seconds whether they're in the right place. The top of the page has to answer three questions: what you do, where and for whom. "Innovative solutions for your business" answers none of them; "Plumbing repairs across Austin, same-day call-outs" answers all three.

2. There are no separate service pages

Someone searching "water heater installation" wants the page about water heater installation, not a list of ten services. A page for each important service shows up for more searches and answers each one better.

3. There's no price anywhere

Price is the first question almost every customer has. A "from" price, a range or an example ("cut and beard trim: $45") filters out people who aren't a fit and gives the rest the nerve to ask. Visitors who find nothing often go to the competitor who shows a number.

4. There's no proof

Real reviews, real photos of the place, the team and the work, the names of the people who do it. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 97% of consumers said they read reviews before choosing a local business. Stock photos look exactly like your competitors'. How to collect reviews: How to get Google reviews.

5. Contact is hard on a phone

Most visits to a local business site come from phones. Check on yours:

• the phone number can be tapped to call;
• a call or text button is visible without hunting for it;
• the address opens a map;
• opening hours are text, not part of an image.

6. The form asks too much, or doesn't work

Every extra field loses people. For a first enquiry, name, phone or email and one free-text field are enough. Then test it: send an enquiry yourself and see whether it arrives, how long it takes and whether it lands in spam. Email sent by your site needs the right settings on your domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC): Professional email address for your business.

7. The site is slow

A page that loads slowly on mobile data loses visitors before it appears. The usual causes are oversized images and extra scripts: Why is my website slow.

8. Your Google profile and your site disagree

Different hours, another phone number, another name. Customers don't know which to believe, and neither does Google. The details should match everywhere: Google Business Profile guide.

9. There's no clear next step

Every page should end with one obvious action: call, message, book, request a quote. Three different buttons with three different messages usually means no click at all.

10. The leads come in, but replies are slow

Sometimes the site does its job and the enquiry dies in an inbox. Research published in Harvard Business Review, covering 1.25 million leads received by 42 US companies, found that firms that tried to contact a prospect within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as those that tried even an hour later. An automatic confirmation and a phone notification for every new enquiry solve much of this.

How many leads should a website bring?

There's no number that fits everyone. One benchmark: Unbounce analysed 41,000 landing pages and found a median conversion rate of 6.6% across industries in 2024. Landing pages are built for a single action, though, usually for visitors arriving from ads; a whole website, where many people just want your opening hours, normally converts lower. The difference between the two is explained in Landing page vs website.

More useful than comparing with others is tracking your own numbers month by month: visits from Google, calls, messages, forms.

How to measure

• Search Console for visits from Google and the searches behind them.
• Leads counted by hand at first: how many calls, messages and forms each week.
• "How did you hear about us?", asked at first contact.
• Site analytics, with attention to consent rules where they apply: Website legal requirements.

What to change first

1. Test the form and the contact buttons on a phone.
2. Rewrite the top of the home page: what, where, for whom, plus one button.
3. Add prices, ranges or price examples.
4. Add real reviews and real photos.
5. Give each important service its own page.
6. Reply to leads within the hour, with a phone notification.
7. Only then, if the site is slow or hard to change, consider a redesign.

The first conversation with us is free: send us your site's address and we'll tell you what we'd change first, and whether it's worth fixing or rebuilding. What a site built by us includes is on our web design page.