Why your website isn’t getting you calls

Put the number where the thumb is

The most common mistake is burying the phone number on a contact page. Someone who is ready to phone you shouldn’t have to go looking for a way to do it. Number at the top, a WhatsApp button reachable from anywhere, and nothing standing between them and you. A form is a fallback for people who aren’t ready to talk yet — it isn’t the main event.

One clear thing to do

A page offering five actions is really offering none. Decide what you want the reader to do — usually phone or message — and make everything else quieter. It’s the change that makes the most difference, and it costs you nothing to make.

Make it load quickly

Plenty of your customers will open your website on mobile data with two bars of signal. If it takes five seconds to show them anything, a good number of them are gone before they have seen your name. The usual culprit is photographs straight off a phone or a camera, at ten times the size the page needs.

This is worth checking on your own website, on your own phone, away from the wifi. It is the one problem you can see for yourself in thirty seconds.

Break the wall of text

Nobody reads a website. They scan it, decide within a couple of seconds whether it’s relevant, then read only the part that matters to them. That means headings that actually say something, short paragraphs, and lists only where a list is genuinely the right shape. If your headings only make sense after you’ve read the paragraph underneath them, they’re decoration.

Write the page for the customer who is about to phone you. That is also what Google rewards.

Answer the questions before they are asked

Every trade has three or four questions that come up on every single call. How much, how soon, do you come out to my area, and what happens if something goes wrong. Put them on the page. You lose nothing by answering them, and you stop spending your day on calls from people who were never going to buy.

This is also, quietly, the most valuable thing you can do for search. A straight answer written in the words a customer would actually use is the bit Google lifts into its results — and it’s the bit an AI assistant quotes back when somebody asks it to recommend a plumber. One piece of writing, three audiences.

A real photo beats a stock one

A photograph of you, your van, or your actual finished work will do more for you than a stock image of a smiling model every time. The visitor is trying to work out whether you’re a real person who’ll turn up. A stock photo answers that question — just not the way you wanted.

Your Google Business Profile does half the work

For a local trade, the call often comes from the profile rather than the website: the map, the phone button and the reviews all sit above the ordinary search results. The two work together. The profile gets you found by someone nearby, and the website answers everything the profile has no room for.

If you do one thing this week, claim your profile, put your real hours on it, and ask three customers for a review. It costs nothing and it moves more than most of what people pay for.

Structure serves everyone at once

Plain language, honest headings, a sensible order, and describing what you do in the words your customers use. That isn’t three separate jobs for humans, for Google and for AI — it’s one job. A page a person can skim is a page a search engine can index and an AI assistant can summarise.

Then cut the rest

Sliders don’t work; people scroll past before the second one arrives. You don’t need a blog if you’re never going to write it. Animations that delay the content are a cost, not a feature. If something on the page isn’t helping a person decide to phone you, it’s in the way.

If you’d rather I did all of this for you, see what it costs.