I spend most of my working week looking at why local businesses are not getting enough leads from their Google and Facebook ads. Most owners assume the ads are the problem. They want to change the targeting, lift the budget, or sack the agency. Then I open the account and the ads are doing their job. People are clicking through and landing on the site. They just leave the moment they get there.
The click is the expensive bit. By the time someone arrives on your page, you have already paid for them. What happens next, a phone call or a wasted dollar, comes down to the page itself. Most pages exist to look good in a meeting, and getting a stranger to pick up the phone is a very different skill.
These are the seven things I check first on any page that takes paid traffic.
1. Match the page to the ad
This is the biggest leak I see. Someone searches “emergency electrician Gold Coast”, clicks an ad about emergency electricians, and lands on a generic homepage with a slider and three paragraphs about the company history. The page has to repeat the promise they just clicked on. If your ad says same day hot water repairs, the headline on the page should say the same thing straight back to them. When the message matches, people relax and keep reading. A mismatch sends them back to Google to click your competitor.
2. Give the page one job
A homepage lets people wander around and explore. A page taking paid traffic has a single purpose, which is to get someone to make contact. Take out the main navigation, the link to your blog, the about page, and anything else that offers an exit. Every extra option is a chance for someone to drift off and forget why they came. One page, one offer, one action.
3. Make the offer obvious and specific
“Contact us” is not an offer. “Get a free, fixed price quote within 24 hours” is. Tell people exactly what they get when they reach out, and what it costs them, which is usually nothing. Your button should describe what happens when someone taps it. “Get my free quote” will always beat “Submit”. Vague buttons make people hesitate, and hesitation is where you lose the lead.
4. Put your proof where people can see it
Nobody enquires with a business they do not trust, and a stranger who just clicked an ad has no reason to trust you yet. Get your Google review score and count near the top of the page. Use real photos of your team and your jobs. Stock images of people in suits shaking hands fool no one. Add your licence numbers, your guarantees, the years you have been going, and the brands you work with. Australians are sceptical of marketing, so the proof has to feel real. One honest five star review with a customer name on it does more than ten lines of you praising yourself.
5. Cut the form right down
Every field you add to a form costs you leads. I regularly see contact forms asking for a name, email, phone, company, budget, and a paragraph about the job before the person has spoken to a single human. Ask only for the few things you genuinely need to make contact and follow up. A name and a phone number is often plenty. You can get the rest on the call. If your form looks like a job application, most people will give up halfway through.
6. Make it fast and make it work on a phone
Most paid clicks come from a mobile, often from someone standing in their kitchen looking at a burst pipe. If your page takes five seconds to load, a good chunk of those people are gone before they read a word. If the phone number is not tap to call, or the form is fiddly on a small screen, you lose them too. Open your own page on your phone using mobile data and try to make an enquiry. Anything that annoys you is quietly costing you work.
7. Answer the questions people have before they ask
Every prospect has the same worries running through their head before they get in touch. They are wondering what it will cost, how soon you can get there, and whether you are any good. A page that answers those worries as someone scrolls down will beat one that forces them to email you to find out. Think about the questions that come up on every sales call and put the answers on the page where people can find them.
None of this is complicated. It is just rarely done, because most businesses pour all their attention into the ads and treat the landing page as an afterthought. Fix the page and the same budget starts bringing in more work. For a service business paying for every click, that is usually the cheapest growth on the table.
