You don't need a bigger ad budget. You don't need to post on social media five times a day. In fact, most small businesses are sitting on a goldmine of potential enquiries that they're losing through simple, fixable problems on their website. The traffic is already there — it's just leaking out before it converts.
Here are eight practical things you can do right now to get more enquiries from your existing website, without spending a penny on advertising. Some are quick fixes. Others might require a bigger conversation. But each one, on its own, can measurably increase the number of people who pick up the phone or fill in your enquiry form.
1. Check Where You Actually Rank on Google
Before you change anything, you need a baseline. Open an incognito/private browser window (so your previous searches don't skew the results) and search for your core service in your area. “Plumber Swindon.” “Kitchen fitter Wiltshire.” “Accountant near me.”
If you're not on page one, you're invisible to 75% of searchers. If you're on page one but below position five, you're getting a fraction of the clicks. The top three results get roughly 55% of all clicks. Everything else splits the remaining 45%.
If you have access to Google Search Console (and you should — it's free), check your average position, total impressions, and click-through rate. These three numbers tell you exactly where you stand and where the opportunities are.
2. Fix Your Loading Speed
Every additional second your site takes to load costs you roughly 20% of your conversions. That's well-documented research from Google and Akamai. A site loading in 5 seconds instead of 2 has lost nearly half its potential customers before they've even read a word.
Test your site right now at pagespeed.web.dev (Google's own tool). If your mobile score is below 70, you have a speed problem. The most common culprits:
- Uncompressed images (the single biggest speed killer for most sites)
- Too many plugins loading unnecessary CSS and JavaScript
- Cheap shared hosting that responds slowly under load
- No caching configured
- Render-blocking scripts in the header
Some of these you can fix yourself. Compress your images, remove plugins you're not using, upgrade your hosting. If the problems are structural — a bloated WordPress theme, a page builder loading 300KB of unused CSS — you might need more fundamental changes. For context, every Simple Day website loads in under 1.5 seconds because the code is written lean from the start, with no unnecessary dependencies.
3. Replace Your Contact Form With a Quiz Funnel
This is the single highest-impact change you can make. Traditional contact forms convert at 2–5%. Quiz funnels convert at 15–28%. That's not a tweak — it's a transformation. We've written a full breakdown of why contact forms fail and why quiz funnels work.
The short version: a quiz funnel guides visitors through 4–5 simple questions, one at a time, with tap-to-select answers. It feels like a conversation, works brilliantly on mobile, and collects pre-qualified lead data so you know exactly what the prospect needs before you call them back.
If your website gets 500 visitors per month and you switch from a 3% contact form to a 18% quiz funnel, you go from 15 enquiries to 90. That's 75 extra enquiries a month from the same traffic. At £500 per average job and a 25% close rate, that's an additional £9,375 per month.
Try it yourself: See how our quiz funnels work or experience the live demo in 60 seconds.
4. Move Your Social Proof to the Point of Decision
Most businesses put their testimonials on the homepage, or worse, on a dedicated “Reviews” page that nobody visits. That's putting social proof in the window instead of at the till.
Social proof is most powerful at the moment of decision — when someone is deciding whether to contact you, request a quote, or book a call. That means:
- Next to your contact form (or within your quiz funnel).
- On your service pages, near the call-to-action button.
- On your pricing page, right where people are weighing up the cost.
The testimonial doesn't need to be a paragraph. A short line — “Brilliant work, on time and on budget. Would recommend to anyone.” — placed right next to the “Get a Quote” button is worth more than a page of reviews nobody reads.
5. Make Mobile Your Priority, Not an Afterthought
61% of UK web traffic is mobile. Google uses mobile-first indexing. If your website is designed for desktop and “also works on mobile”, you've got it backwards.
Pull up your website on your phone right now. Check for:
- Text that's too small to read without zooming
- Buttons that are too close together (you should be able to tap them easily with a thumb)
- Images that overflow or cause horizontal scrolling
- A contact form that's painful to fill in on a small screen
- A navigation menu that's cluttered or hard to use
- Pop-ups or overlays that are impossible to close on mobile
Each of these problems drives mobile visitors away. And since mobile visitors are your majority, that's the majority of your potential customers leaving with a bad impression.
6. Put a Clear Call to Action on Every Page
Not just the homepage. Not just the contact page. Every single page on your website should have a clear, visible call to action. “Get a free quote.” “Book a call.” “Start your project.” Whatever the next step is for your business, it should be obvious and accessible from wherever the visitor is.
People don't always enter your site through the homepage. They might land on a blog post, a service page, or your portfolio. If the page they land on doesn't tell them what to do next, they'll leave. A visitor who's ready to act but can't find the button is the most expensive kind of lost enquiry.
Simple rules: one primary CTA per page, above the fold on mobile, visually distinct from everything else, and with clear action-oriented text (not “Submit” or “Click here”).
7. Get Your Local SEO Basics Right
You don't need an expensive SEO agency for this. These are the fundamentals that every local business should have sorted:
- Google Business Profile: Claim it, complete every field, add photos regularly, and respond to every review (positive or negative). This is free and directly affects your visibility in local search and Google Maps.
- Directory listings: Get listed on Yell, Thomson, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and any industry-specific directories. These create “citations” that reinforce your location and business details with Google.
- NAP consistency: Your Name, Address, and Phone number must be identical everywhere — your website, Google Business, directories, social media. Even small differences (like “St” vs “Street” or a missing postcode) confuse search engines and dilute your local authority.
- Location-specific content: Make sure your website mentions your service area naturally. “Plumbing services in Swindon, Wiltshire” should appear in your title tags, headings, and body content — not stuffed in, but naturally present.
These aren't magic tricks. They're hygiene factors. But a shocking number of small businesses haven't done them, and they're leaving visibility on the table.
8. Know When Tweaks Aren't Enough
Here's the honest part. If your website was built on a slow template, loaded with plugins, and never had SEO considered during the build — no amount of tweaking will fix the underlying problems. You can compress images and add testimonials, but if the foundation is rotten, you're renovating a condemned building.
Signs you need a rebuild rather than a tweak:
- Your site loads in 4+ seconds and you can't get it below 3
- You're on page two or three of Google for your core searches
- Your site is built on WordPress with 20+ plugins and nobody maintaining them
- The design looks dated and you're embarrassed to share the link
- Your conversion rate is below 2% and you've already tried the basics
In these cases, a fresh build on clean, fast code with SEO built in from day one will outperform months of patching. That's not a sales pitch — it's engineering reality.
Proof This Works
We built bbqpods.uk from a 15-page supplier PDF. No existing website, no previous SEO work, no brand presence. The site was custom-coded with clean, fast architecture and proper technical SEO built into every page.
- #1 on Google for “bbq pods uk” within 8 weeks
- 905 clicks from organic search
- 7,024 impressions on Google
- 114 countries reached organically
- Zero paid advertising or ongoing SEO retainer
That's not magic. It's what happens when a website is built properly — fast code, clean structure, SEO from the ground up, and a conversion path that actually works.
What to Do Next
Start with the quick wins: check your Google ranking, test your speed, review your mobile experience, and look at where your social proof is placed. These cost nothing and can make an immediate difference.
If you want to know where you really stand — and what it would take to fix things properly — take our 60-second quiz. We'll give you an honest assessment. If your current site just needs a few tweaks, we'll tell you that. If it needs a rebuild, we'll explain why and what it would cost. No pressure, no obligation.
The traffic is already coming to your website. The question is how much of it you're converting — and how much you're letting walk away.
