Why your website gets visitors but no enquiries

01 · The symptom

Traffic is not the problem you think it is

This is the most common thing a business tells us on a first call, and it's almost always described as a traffic problem — the assumption being that more visitors would produce more enquiries. Usually they wouldn't. If a hundred people arrive and none of them contact you, a thousand will produce the same result at ten times the cost. Something between arriving and asking is broken, and it is nearly always one of three things.

02 · Fault one

Fault 1: the page has no single clear action

A homepage with six equally-weighted buttons has no call to action; it has a menu. If everything is offered at the same volume, the visitor has to decide what the priority is, and the decision they usually make is to leave and think about it. One primary action per page, repeated, at the same weight each time.

03 · Fault two

Fault 2: there is no proof, only claims

Most sites make claims in their own voice and stop there. A visitor in Doha comparing three suppliers has no way to separate the one that does good work from the one that writes well about doing good work. Named clients, specific outcomes and a real face do more for a conversion rate than another paragraph of adjectives.

04 · Fault three

Fault 3: the contact form asks for too much

A nine-field form asking for a budget range before it has told you a price is a wall. So is a phone number as the only route on a page someone is reading at 11pm. Match the effort you ask for to the size of the commitment — name, one contact field, one sentence — and give at least one route that works outside office hours.

05 · How to check

How to check your own site

• Which pages people actually arrive on — not which ones you think are important
• The step where the largest share of people leave, page by page
• Whether your enquiries arrive with a source attached, or as anonymous emails
• How the site behaves on a phone, on mobile data, in Arabic

06 · What it costs

Fixing this usually costs less than a rebuild

Three of the four things above are copy and layout changes on pages that already exist. We'd rather do that first and see what it moves than take payment for a redesign that solves a problem nobody has diagnosed yet.