Why isn't my website getting leads?

1. The form looks like it works and does not

This is the single most common serious fault, and it is invisible from the outside. The visitor fills in the form, sees a confirmation message, and closes the tab satisfied. Nothing arrives.

It happens for three reasons. A placeholder handler left in from development that fakes success. A form connected to an endpoint that was never configured. Or — most often — a working form whose emails fail silently because the server sends them without proper authentication and they are discarded before reaching an inbox.

Test it yourself right now. Fill in your own form from your phone, on cellular data, with a personal email address. If nothing arrives within five minutes, that is your answer and everything else on this page is secondary.

2. There is no analytics, so nothing is knowable

A surprising number of business websites have no tracking of any kind. No Google Analytics, no Tag Manager, nothing. The owner's belief that the site produces no enquiries is not a measurement — it may be producing enquiries that are being lost somewhere else entirely.

Install GA4 and Microsoft Clarity, which is free and records actual sessions. Ten session recordings will teach you more about why people leave than a year of speculation.

3. Canonical tags pointing at pages that no longer exist

This one is technical, invisible, and quietly fatal. A canonical tag tells a search engine the real address of a page. When a site is rebuilt or migrated, those tags often keep pointing at the old URLs, which now return 404.

The result is that you are instructing Google that the genuine version of nearly every page is a page that does not exist. Google responds by dropping them. The site looks perfect to a human and is invisible in search. We found this on fourteen of sixteen pages of our own site earlier this year.

4. No way to book outside business hours

Nine of every ten sites we audit have no online scheduling of any kind. For most local businesses, a large share of enquiries arrive in the evening and at the weekend — a furnace fails at eleven at night, somebody finally deals with an injury on Sunday, a business owner researches accountants after their own working day.

A form that promises a reply within one business day is not a substitute. The visitor is comparing three businesses and one of them let them pick a time.

5. There are not enough pages to rank for anything

A site of six pages can rank for roughly six things. Your competitor with a page for every service in every area they serve can rank for hundreds. This is the least glamorous and most decisive factor in organic search.

The correction is not to generate three hundred pages. Pages without independent substance are penalised across the whole domain. It is to build a genuine page for each service in each area you actually serve, with local prices, local work and local answers.

6. It is slow on a phone

Most visitors arrive on mobile, frequently on cellular data. Test your own site on a phone away from wifi and time it. Anything over four seconds is losing a meaningful share of visitors before they ever see the page.

7. Nothing on it answers what people search

Most business sites are organised the way the business is organised — About, Services, Contact — rather than the way customers think. Customers do not search 'services'. They search a problem, in a place, at a price.

If your pages are named after your internal structure rather than what somebody types at eleven at night, search engines have nothing to match.