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How to Get More Enquiries From Your Website

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Your website gets visitors. What it doesn’t get is enough phone calls, form fills or quote requests. This page is about closing that gap. It covers what actually counts as a conversion, how to measure it properly, what the people using your site are trying to tell you, and which parts of a page tend to decide whether someone gets in touch. There’s a bit of law in here too, on cookies and reviews, so nothing you change to win more enquiries lands you in a new mess.

In brief

  • A conversion rate is a ratio. You can move it by changing the page, or by changing who lands on it.
  • Get enquiry tracking set up as GA4 key events before you touch anything, or you’re guessing.
  • Session recordings and other tools that log individual visitors need consent under the ICO’s current guidance, unless they’re for security.
  • Fake reviews, and reviews shown selectively, have been banned in the UK since 6 April 2025.

What counts as an enquiry, and why the rate is a ratio

A conversion is just the thing you built the page to make happen. For an online shop that’s normally a completed order. Service businesses are messier, and that’s where the confusion starts. A roofing contractor might count phone calls, quote forms and WhatsApp messages. An accountancy practice probably cares most about booked discovery calls. A wedding venue might treat a brochure download as the first real sign of interest, even though no money moves for months.

So before you look at a single number, write down which actions matter to you and put them in order. A finished quote request is worth more than a newsletter sign-up. Lump them all together and you can end up celebrating a jump in ‘conversions’ that’s really just people grabbing a free PDF and disappearing.

The rate itself is simple. Take the number of those actions and divide it by visits or visitors over the same period. Because it’s a ratio, it can drop when things are actually going well. Say a blog post starts ranking for a broad question and pulls in thousands of readers who were never going to hire you. The rate falls. Real enquiries don’t. Keep the count and the rate side by side, and ignore any generic ‘good conversion rate’ figure you see quoted online. Your market, prices and mix of traffic make comparing yourself with other businesses close to pointless.

Measure before you change anything

Google Analytics 4 now calls what most people still think of as a conversion a ‘key event’. Google defines a key event as “an event that measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business”, and you turn an existing event into one by clicking the star next to it in the Events list. ‘Conversion’ hasn’t disappeared, it just means something narrower now. In Google’s current terms it’s the version of that action used in Google Ads, which you can create from a GA4 key event once a Google Ads account is linked. If you run paid search that difference matters, and it’s covered in our guide to running Google Ads for a business.

GA4’s enhanced measurement can pick up form activity by itself, including a form_start event the first time someone interacts with a form in a session and a form_submit event when they send it. Handy as a starting point. Don’t take it on trust, though. Send a few test enquiries and make sure they show up, then compare a month of form_submit events with the enquiries that actually hit your inbox. You may get more reliable numbers by firing an event when the thank-you page or confirmation message loads, and by tracking taps on your phone number and email address separately so you can see how people prefer to get in touch.

Search Console gives you the other half. Its Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and you can split it by page as well as by search query. Look at it page by page and you’ll see which landing pages really bring people in from search. Put that next to GA4 and the pages with loads of visitors but hardly any enquiries jump out. That’s usually where to start.

Watching real behaviour, and staying within the privacy rules

Numbers show you where people drop off. They’re much worse at telling you why. For that you need to see how people actually use the site.

Heatmaps and session recordings show where visitors click, how far they scroll and where they hesitate, which can expose a button nobody spots or a section nobody reaches. Just asking is cheaper and often tells you more. Ask new customers what nearly put them off getting in touch. Ask whoever answers the phone which questions keep coming up, because each one is something the website failed to answer. And watch a friend try to request a quote on their own phone without any help from you. It’s painful. It’s also incredibly useful.

The tools come with legal strings attached. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) say you have to tell people about storage and access technologies such as cookies, explain what they do and get consent before using them, unless an exception applies. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 added new exceptions, which came into force on 5 February 2026, including one for collecting statistical information about how a service is used so you can improve it. The ICO has confirmed all the data protection provisions in the Act are now in force, and it finalised its guidance on storage and access technologies in April 2026 to reflect the changes.

That statistics exception comes with conditions. You have to give people clear and comprehensive information about the purpose, and a simple, free way to object. You can only use the data to improve your service or website. And you can’t share it except with someone helping you make those improvements. More importantly, the ICO’s guidance says you must get consent for “logs or recordings of individual visitors to your website and the actions they took” unless it’s for security. Put simply, session replay tools belong behind your cookie consent, and your cookie banner and privacy notice should describe them properly. This is general information, not legal advice, and if you run a lot of third-party tools it’s worth going through each one.

Service pages that answer the real questions

On most service business sites, the individual service pages do more work than the home page. Someone searching for ‘commercial EICR testing’ or ‘shareholder agreement solicitor’ usually lands straight on the matching page, so that page has to work as a front door by itself.

The ones that bring in enquiries tend to get a few things right. They say plainly what the service is and who it’s for, on the first screen, without a slogan to decode. They explain what happens after someone gets in touch, because not knowing the next step puts plenty of people off. They answer the objections your staff hear on the phone, like how soon you can start, which areas you cover, whether you’ll take small jobs and roughly what drives the price. They show you’ve done it before, with photos, case notes or accreditations you really hold. And they give the reader an easy way to act wherever they’re likely to be ready, which on a long page is usually more than once.

Layout matters as much as the words. Short sections with clear subheadings let people jump to the bit they care about, and that same clarity tends to help search engines understand the page. There’s more on the design side in seven UX considerations worth building into your site, and if you’re starting from nothing, our guide to planning a business website shows how to map out service pages before any design happens. If your current site just can’t support pages like this, a rebuild through our website design service may make more sense than patching.

Calls to action and contact options on mobile

A lot of enquiries happen on a phone, in a spare minute between other things. Someone standing next to a leaking pipe. A facilities manager checking out a supplier between meetings.

So make phone numbers tappable. An HTML link using a ‘tel:’ URL lets a phone dial the number directly. It’s a tiny detail and easy to miss, and it can’t work at all if the number’s baked into an image or a header graphic. Buttons need to be big enough for a thumb. WCAG 2.2, the current W3C accessibility standard, sets a Level AA minimum of 24 by 24 CSS pixels for pointer targets, with some exceptions. The stricter Level AAA criterion asks for 44 by 44 CSS pixels, which is a good size to aim for on your main buttons.

Button wording deserves more thought than it gets. ‘Submit’ tells nobody anything. ‘Book a callback’ or ‘Check availability’ tells them exactly what happens next. A second way to get in touch helps people who’d rather not phone, but six contact options all fighting for attention can be as bad as one hidden one.

Speed comes into it as well. A page that takes ages to become usable on a patchy mobile signal loses people before they ever see your button. The technical side is in our guide to website speed and performance, and plenty of the quick wins overlap with the common website problems worth fixing first.

Forms that people actually finish

The contact form is where interest turns into an enquiry. It’s also where a lot of that interest quietly dies. The usual culprits are too many fields, baffling error messages and forms that behave badly with a phone keyboard.

Accessibility standards make a good checklist here, because most of what they protect against annoys everybody to some degree. WCAG 2.2 requires labels or instructions wherever content asks for user input, and a visible label that stays put is a safer way to meet that than placeholder text that vanishes the moment someone starts typing. It also says that if an input error is automatically detected, the item in error has to be identified and the error described to the user in text. A red outline on its own won’t do. ‘Please enter a phone number we can call you on’ beats ‘Invalid input’ every time. At Level AA, fields collecting information about the user should have their purpose programmatically identifiable too, which in practice means using the right autocomplete attributes so browsers can fill in names, emails and addresses.

Then go through every field and ask if you really need it. UK GDPR says personal data must be “adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary” for the purpose you’re collecting it for. That’s data minimisation, and it lines up nicely with getting more enquiries. A home improvement firm probably does need a postcode to know whether the job’s in its area. A management consultancy asking for company turnover on a first contact form may be collecting more than it needs, and putting off people who aren’t ready to share that yet. If you can get it on the first phone call, think about dropping it from the form.

Trust signals, reviews and the rules around them

People rarely contact a business they’re unsure about. Reviews, testimonials, accreditations people recognise, real photos of your team and your work, a physical address and clear terms all help a cautious visitor feel safe enough to get in touch. For a retailer, a clear returns policy does much the same job.

The rules on reviews got a lot tighter in 2025. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, it’s a banned practice to submit or commission a fake consumer review, or one that hides the fact it was incentivised, and to publish consumer reviews in a misleading way. The Act defines a fake review as one that claims to be based on someone’s genuine experience but isn’t. Publishing reviews in a misleading way includes showing the positive ones and leaving out the negative, giving positive reviews more prominence, or not mentioning that a review was commissioned. The government confirmed these measures came into force on 6 April 2025, and the Competition and Markets Authority can now fine a company up to 10% of its global turnover for breaking consumer protection law. The CMA’s guidance also says businesses publishing reviews need to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove banned content.

Advertising rules point the same way. The CAP Code, which the Advertising Standards Authority applies to marketing on a company’s own website as well as paid ads, says you must hold documentary evidence that a testimonial is genuine, along with contact details for the person who gave it. It also says you have to make it clear where consumer reviews have been incentivised. So keep the email or form behind every testimonial you quote. Never tidy a customer’s words into something they didn’t say. And don’t cherry-pick when you display reviews from an independent platform. This is general information rather than legal advice.

Testing changes properly

Once you’re measuring properly and you’ve got a list of likely problems, change one thing at a time where you can, and give each change long enough to show something. A quiet site might need weeks to collect enough enquiries to tell whether a new layout helped, and one good or bad week proves almost nothing. Keep a simple log of what you changed and when, so a jump in enquiries can be traced back to its likely cause.

On busier sites, A/B testing gives cleaner answers by splitting visitors between two versions of a page. Google has published guidance on doing this without hurting your search visibility. Don’t show one set of URLs to Googlebot and another to humans. Use rel=”canonical” on alternate URLs pointing back to the original. Use a 302 temporary redirect rather than a 301 permanent one when sending people to a variant. And, Google says, remove every trace of the test as soon as possible once it’s finished.

Don’t forget the ratio point from earlier. Sometimes the best way to more enquiries is better traffic rather than a better page. Better-targeted search visibility through our SEO service, which our SEO for business websites guide explains in plain terms, or tighter keyword targeting through Google Ads management, can bring in people who were already looking for exactly what you do.

Where to go from here

You can get a long way on your own with a free GA4 property, Search Console and an afternoon spent using your site on a phone. If you’d rather have someone go through the measurement, the pages and the forms with you and test the changes properly, we offer conversion rate optimisation for business websites. You can read more about how our CRO work is structured, or get in touch with the team to talk through what your site’s doing now.

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