Why isn't my business getting enquiries?

When the phone goes quiet, the problem is almost always in one of three places. People can't find you, they find you and don't pick you, or they pick you and the enquiry never reaches anyone. Each has a different fix, so it's worth knowing which one you've got before you spend a cent.

First, check you're actually getting fewer

Count them. Pull the last twelve months of enquiries from wherever they land, like the website form, the main inbox, the phone and reception's notes, and line them up by month.

Plenty of businesses that feel quiet are getting about as many as last year, just spread across more inboxes and harder to see. If you can't count them at all, that's the first thing to fix, and our piece on where enquiries actually go explains why. Compare like with like, too. A slow January says less than a slow March.

Can people find you?

Search for what you sell the way a buyer would: on your phone, logged out, in the area you serve. Search "conveyor belt repairs Brisbane" or "commercial fit-out Gold Coast", not your business name. Your name only finds people who already know you.

If you're not on the first page or in the map, that's your gap. A few things to check:

• Do you have a page for each thing you sell? One services page listing twelve things rarely ranks for any of them.
• Is your Google Business Profile complete, with the right categories, your service area and some recent reviews? On local searches, the map often sits above the websites.
• Are competitors running ads on those searches while you're not? If they are, the people ready to buy today never see you.

Our SEO and Google Ads pages go into how each of those works.

Do they pick you once they find you?

Being found is only half of it. Someone buying anything complex looks at three or four suppliers before they ring anyone, and they're looking for reasons to cross names off. An old website, a phone number you have to hunt for, no address, no sign of who's behind the business: each one is a reason.

Open your site on your phone and give it five seconds. Can you tell what you sell, where, and how to get in touch? If the homepage talks about the company while the buyer is thinking about their own problem, that's worth fixing. I've written more on that in whose problem your homepage is about and how buyers check whether you're real.

Can they actually get in touch?

This is the one people least expect. Someone wants to enquire and it's harder than it should be:

• The form asks eleven questions when three would do. (More on that here.)
• The phone number isn't a link you can tap on a phone.
• The form goes to an inbox nobody checks, or straight into spam.

Test it yourself this week. Send an enquiry from your own website, on your phone, and time how long it takes to reach someone and get a reply. I'd be surprised if you didn't learn something.

What I'd do this week

1. Count last year's enquiries by month.
2. Search for your three main services the way a buyer would.
3. Look at your website on a phone for five seconds.
4. Send yourself an enquiry and follow it.

That's an afternoon, it costs nothing, and it tells you which of the three problems you have. Fixing the wrong one is how a business ends up paying for ads that send people to a website that then loses them.

If enquiries are fine but sales aren't

That's a different problem, and usually a cheaper one to find. It's somewhere between the enquiry and the quote, and this article walks through how to find it.