When a business owner tells me their website isn’t bringing in calls, I don’t start with the design. I start with three questions. Most of the time, the answer is in one of them.
1. Can a customer call you in one tap on a phone? Most visitors are on a phone. If the number is buried in the footer, or shows up as an image they can’t tap, many of them will hit the back button and call the next business on the list. Put a tap-to-call button at the top of every page.
2. Does the top of the page say what you do and where, in plain words? “Excellence in service since 1998” doesn’t tell anyone anything. “Residential electrician in Hendersonville, Tennessee” does. Search engines need that sentence to know when to show you, and people need it to know they’re in the right place.
3. Can you update it yourself? Hours change. Prices change. Photos get old. If every small change needs a developer, the site slowly drifts out of date, and an out-of-date site quietly tells customers you might be out of date too.
If all three are in place and calls still aren’t coming in, then it’s time to look deeper: search visibility, reviews, and how the site loads on a slow connection. But start with these three. They’re free to check, and fixing them often makes the biggest difference.
Danielle Lemons is Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, a Nashville provider of business phone systems, managed IT services, websites and digital marketing. More about Danielle.
Also published on Medium.
