Website not generating leads: how to find the cause

Two different problems look the same from the owner's chair: the phone is quiet and the inbox is empty. They have different fixes, so tell them apart first.

Open your analytics (the tool that counts visits to your site) and pick one month. Write down two numbers: how many people visited, and how many contacted you through the site by form, call or message. A person who contacts you about buying is a lead.

If people visit and few contact you, the problem is on the page. If few people visit, the problem comes earlier, because the right people never reach the page. If you can't find the second number at all, the first thing to fix is that nothing records where enquiries come from.

When visitors arrive and leave without writing, the usual causes are these:

• An unclear offer. A stranger can't tell from the first screen what you sell, who it's for and what happens next.
• No visible action. The button sits far down the page, or five buttons compete and none stands out.
• A slow or broken form. It asks for too much, shows an error, or fails to send on a phone, and the visitor leaves without telling you.
• No tracking. Enquiries do arrive, but calls and messages aren't tied to a source, so you can't see which ones the site produced.
• The wrong audience. Ads or search phrases bring people who were never going to buy from you.

When few people visit, look at how they would find you. Search engines may not show your pages for the phrases customers type. Ads may be switched off or pointed at the wrong place. No other site or profile may link to yours. Making your pages show up for those phrases is SEO (search engine optimisation), and our seo services for business page has the details.

Work through these steps in order and stop at the first one that fails. Fix it before moving on.

1. Count. Compare last month's visits with last month's enquiries. The gap tells you which of the two problems you have.
2. Read the first screen as a stranger. Ask someone who doesn't know your business to say, after one look, what you sell and what to do next. If they can't, rewrite the offer before anything else.
3. Use your own form. Send it from a phone with the fields half filled. Check that it sends, that the message reaches you and that the visitor sees a confirmation.
4. Trace each lead. For every enquiry, write down where the person came from. A UTM tag (a note added to a link that shows where a visitor came from) does this for ads and emails.

Our turnkey Premium, corporate Business and Premium and the VIP landing page include lead tracking. Each lead lands in a report with its source, so you see which ad or page produced which enquiry without keeping the list by hand.