When I ran my handyman business, my website never paid a single invoice. People did. The website had one job: get the right person to pick up the phone and ring me. Like a first year apprentice, it got there some days.
These days I build websites and look after Google listings for tradies, and one question comes up more than any other. “The traffic’s going up. So why isn’t the phone?”
Usually the answer is sitting in plain sight. Here’s where I’d look before spending another cent getting more people to your site.
Not every visit is a visitor
Most website reports lead with one big number, and it’s often sessions, not people. In Google Analytics, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity by default. So the bloke who looks at your site on his lunch break and again after tea counts twice. He’s still one bloke, and he still hasn’t rung.
That doesn’t make the number useless. It just means a jump in traffic is a question, not an answer.
Find out who turned up
Say you’re a plumber in Geelong and your visits have doubled. Great, until you see half of them are from Perth. Lovely city. Bit of a hike for a dripping tap.
Google Analytics can show you roughly where visitors are and which pages they landed on, and that second bit matters more than people think. A spike on your emergency callout page is people with water on the floor. A spike on an old blog post about unblocking a sink yourself is people who’d rather not pay you. Both are traffic. Only one is work.
Ring yourself
This is the cheapest test in marketing, and hardly anyone does it.
Pull up your website on your phone like you’ve never seen it before. Can you tell in five seconds what you do and where? Is the number easy to find? Tap it. Does your phone actually offer to call?
Then fill in your own contact form and see where it lands. Your inbox, your spam folder, or the email address of whoever built the site in 2019? And if the form wants a name, email, phone, address, budget and their dog’s birthday before someone can ask for a quote, that’s not a quote form, that’s a password reset. Cut it back.
A click on “call” isn’t a phone call
This one catches a lot of people out.
Your Google Business Profile shows you a calls figure, and it’s easy to read that as phone calls. It isn’t. Google counts clicks on the call button. It can’t tell you whether you answered, whether they hung up, or whether the job was any good.
Your website reports can be just as vague. Google Analytics lets you mark the actions that matter, like a form being sent or a tap on your number, as key events. If nobody has set that up, your report can show you plenty of visitors and nothing much about enquiries. And no report will ever show you the missed call you forgot to return.
The leak might be you
Not every quiet week is the website’s fault. Picture a painter up a ladder who misses a call, means to ring back, and remembers at nine that night. Or a fencer whose quote sits in the ute for a week under three servo pie wrappers. No amount of extra traffic fixes that.
So for one month, keep a tally. Every call and form that came in, whether you got back to them, and whether it turned into a job. A notebook on the dash is fine. You’re not writing a thesis, you’re looking for the snag.
Tell people where you work
One last check, and it takes five minutes. Look at your homepage title, the words that show up in the browser tab. Do they say what you do and where?
When 5 Star Tradie looked at 2,444 Australian tradie homepages, 86% didn’t name the business’s suburb in that title. That’s only businesses where we had both a title and a recorded suburb, so it isn’t every tradie site in the country. Still, that’s a lot of homepages that don’t say where the business works.
Fixing it won’t magically move you up Google, and the study doesn’t show it brings more traffic. It just tells the person reading that they’re in the right place.
Before you pay for more traffic
Here’s the afternoon I’d spend. Work out which number went up and who it was. Ring yourself and send yourself a quote request. Check what your Google calls figure really means. Then keep that tally for a month.
Change one thing at a time and note the date, so you know what actually worked.
More traffic isn’t bad news. It’s just not the whole story. I build websites for a living, so I’m not neutral here, but most of these checks are free and you can do them yourself. Find the leak before you pay to pour more water in.
