Check in this order: whether enquiries arrive at all, whether you can count them, whether the visitors are buyers, whether the page makes the next step obvious, and how fast you reply. Most guides start at step four. In our check of 122 local business websites, 29% had no analytics of any kind, so nobody could count the results.
When a website stops producing enquiries, the advice that ranks for this question is almost always about persuasion: clearer calls to action, better headlines, more trust signals, faster pages. All of that can matter. But it assumes the enquiries are being lost on the page, and for a local business they are just as often lost after it, in a form email nobody receives, a phone line nobody answers, or a reply that arrives the next day.
So this is a diagnosis in the order that costs least to check, starting with the boring parts.
Step 1: are enquiries actually arriving?
Before you change a word on the site, test the plumbing. Ten minutes, today.
- Fill in your own contact form from your phone, with a personal email address. Check the inbox and the spam folder.
- Tap the phone number on your homepage on a mobile. Does it dial? Does somebody answer, or does it go to a voicemail that is full?
- Send a message through any chat or booking widget and see where it lands.
- Check the address the form sends to is one somebody still reads. Former staff inboxes are a classic.
If the form email is the problem, which is more common than anyone expects, the cause and the fix are in not getting emails from your website contact form.
Step 2: can you count your leads at all?
“The website is not getting leads” often turns out to mean “we do not know how many leads the website gets”. If there is no analytics, no record of form submissions and no way to tell which calls came from the site, the only answer to “is the website working” is that nobody can tell.
| What we checked | Result |
|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 or Google Tag Manager on the homepage | 68 of 122 (56%) |
| Only the old Universal Analytics tag, which Google stopped processing in July 2023 | 12 of 122 (10%) |
| No analytics of any kind visible | 35 of 122 (29%) |
| Call tracking installed | 14 of 122 (11%) |
Our own check of public homepage source, October 2026. A Tag Manager container may or may not include Analytics, so that row is an upper bound. No business is named.
Put together, 34 of the 122 sites, more than a quarter, showed neither analytics nor call tracking. For those businesses the question “is the website getting leads” has no answer beyond the owner’s impression. Another 12 still carry only the old Universal Analytics tag, which is the more misleading case: it looks like tracking, and it has recorded nothing since 2023.
The minimum that answers the question is not expensive:
- Analytics that records form submissions as an event, so you can see enquiries, not just visits.
- A stored copy of every form submission in the site or the form service.
- A way to tell website calls apart. Ask every new caller how they found you, or use a tracking number on the site only. For a local business, a lot of calls come from the Google Business Profile rather than the website, and that is worth knowing before blaming either.
Step 3: are the visitors people who could buy?
Traffic is not the same as demand. A plumber’s site that ranks for “how to fix a dripping tap” gets visitors who are trying not to call a plumber. If your Search Console shows impressions mostly for questions, and not for your service plus your town, the site may be busy with the wrong people.
| Query type | Example | Likely to enquire? |
|---|---|---|
| Service plus place | emergency plumber Tulsa | Yes, this is the buyer |
| Your business name | smith dental | Yes, already chose you |
| Price or comparison | cost of a new furnace | Sometimes, if the page answers it |
| How to do it yourself | how to reset a breaker | Rarely |
| Unrelated | a word in a blog post that happens to rank | No |
If the buyer queries are missing entirely, the problem is not conversion. It is that the site does not have a page that answers “do you do this, here”, which is a question about what pages you have. How many a local business site needs is covered in how many pages a small business website should have.
Step 4: does the page make the next step obvious?
This is where most advice starts, and it does matter. For a local service business it comes down to a short list, mostly about phones.
| What we checked | Result |
|---|---|
| A tappable phone number on the homepage | 109 of 122 (89%) |
| A contact form on the homepage | 64 of 122 (52%) |
| A contact form on the homepage or the contact page | 85 of 122 (70%) |
| Online booking | 30 of 122 (25%) |
Our own check of public page source, homepage and contact page, October 2026. “Tappable” means a tel: link a phone can dial in one tap.
Most of the basics are in place. Nine in ten homepages have a tappable phone number, and only 4 of 122 had neither a phone link nor a form on the homepage or the contact page. Three in ten had no form on either page, which is a reasonable choice for a business that wants calls, and a gap for the customer who is searching at eleven at night. For most of these sites, the page is not the main leak, which is why steps one, two and five come first.
Beyond the basics, the checks that matter for a local business:
- The phone number is in the first screen on a mobile, and tapping it dials.
- The page says what you do and where in the first sentence a visitor reads, not after a slider.
- There is a reason to call now: availability, response time, a price range, or what happens after they get in touch.
- The form asks for as little as possible. Name, phone or email, and what they need.
- Hours and service area are written out as text, so a visitor and a search engine can both read them.
When an owner tells me the website is not working, the first thing I do is fill in their form and ring their number. More often than you would think, one of the two fails. Neither shows up on any report, because a lost enquiry leaves no trace.
The second thing I ask is how many enquiries they got last month. If the answer is a guess, we fix the counting before we touch the design. Otherwise there is no way to know whether the redesign worked.
Step 5: how fast do you reply?
The best published evidence on lost leads is not about websites at all. In a study published in Harvard Business Review in 2011, researchers sent web enquiries to 2,241 US companies. 37% replied within an hour, 24% took more than a day, and 23% never replied at all. Firms that tried to contact the lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with the decision maker as those that waited even one hour longer.
Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011. The study is older and covers mostly larger firms, but nothing more rigorous has replaced it.
For a local service business the logic is sharper still. Someone with a leaking boiler fills in three forms and books whoever calls back first. A website that produces the enquiry and a reply that arrives the next morning looks, from the inside, exactly like a website that does not work.
You will also see a “five minute rule” quoted, with very large multipliers. It comes from an earlier study funded by a sales software vendor, and we would treat the exact numbers with caution. The direction, faster is better, is well supported.
What conversion rate should you expect?
There is no reliable benchmark for a whole local business website, and any article that gives you one precise number is guessing. The two most quoted figures come from different things entirely.
| Figure | What it actually measures | Use it as |
|---|---|---|
| 6.6% median | Campaign landing pages on one landing page platform, mostly fed by paid ads (Unbounce, 2024) | A ceiling for a page built to do one thing |
| 7.52% average | Clicks on search ads across industries (WordStream and LocaliQ, 2025) | A ceiling for paid traffic, not your whole site |
A whole website gets visits from existing customers checking your hours, job seekers and suppliers, so its overall rate will be lower than either. The useful comparison is not with a benchmark. It is with your own site last year, measured the same way.
If you are deciding whether to rebuild, do steps one to three first. They are free, and they sometimes find that the site was fine and the enquiries were going to an inbox nobody checks.
If they come back clean and the site still does nothing, then it is worth spending money, and what a website redesign costs has the real numbers.
Common questions
Why is my website not getting any leads?
Check in order: whether enquiries arrive at all (test your own form and phone), whether you can count them, whether visitors are potential buyers, whether the page makes contact obvious, and how quickly you reply. The first two are free to check and are often where the problem is.
Why is my website getting traffic but no leads?
Either the visitors are not buyers, for example people searching how to do the job themselves, or the enquiries are being lost after the page, in a form email that goes to spam or a call nobody answers. Look at your Search Console queries and test your own form before redesigning anything.
Why is my website not getting calls?
Check the number is tappable on a mobile and visible in the first screen, then ring it yourself. Many local calls come from the Google Business Profile rather than the website, so ask callers where they found you before deciding which one is failing.
What is a good conversion rate for a small business website?
There is no reliable benchmark for a whole local business site. The quoted 6.6% and 7.52% figures measure landing pages and paid ads, so treat them as ceilings. Compare your site with its own past performance instead, measured the same way.
How fast should I respond to a website enquiry?
Within the hour if you can. A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies found firms that tried to make contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to reach the decision maker as those that waited longer.
Want to know what the site looks like to Google and AI?
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