You have a website. It exists, it is online, sometimes it has been for several years. And yet the phone does not ring any more than before, customers never mention finding you online. This is almost never a question of design. It is usually one or more of these five problems, easy to spot once you know where to look.
1. Nobody can find it
Type your business name into Google, in a private browsing window so your history does not skew the result. If your website does not appear among the first results, or does not appear at all, that is the problem: a website nobody finds cannot bring in any customers, however good it is once they reach it.
The most common cause is a website that was never submitted for Google indexing, or content too thin for Google to understand what the page is about. No tool can guarantee a specific ranking or a fixed timeframe: be wary of any promise along those lines. What you can check yourself, at no cost, is explained in this article on indexing.
2. It does not say what people are looking for
A customer who lands on your website has a specific question in mind: do you do what they are looking for, where are you, what time are you open, roughly how much does it cost. If the answer is not visible within a few seconds, they leave and call the next competitor on the Google list.
The fix here is not about design, it is editorial: replace vague phrases such as "at your service since forever" with concrete answers. The full list of information customers expect to find is detailed in this article.
3. It is unreadable on mobile
Most visits to a local business website come from a phone, often in the street, sometimes with a weak connection. Text that needs zooming in on, a button too small to tap, a page that takes several seconds to load: each of these faults drives the visitor away before they have even read your address.
Open your own website on your phone, with wifi switched off, to simulate an ordinary mobile connection. If you have to zoom in, scroll sideways or wait, the problem is not a matter of taste but a direct obstacle to the call you are waiting for.
4. It has no obvious way to get in touch
A website can be found, read and well understood on mobile, and still generate no calls because the phone number cannot be found, because visitors have to fill in a ten-field form, or because the address is not linked to a map.
- The phone number is written in plain text, not clickable, right at the bottom of the page.
- The only way to get in touch is a form, with no guaranteed reply.
- The address is shown without a link to a map or directions.
The fix is almost always the same: a clickable number visible as soon as the page loads, and an address linked to a map. Nothing more is needed for a local business, which does not sell online but is trying to prompt a call or a visit to the shop.
5. It displays false information
This is the most serious problem, because it turns an interested visitor into a lost customer, or worse, into an unhappy customer who turned up for nothing. Opening hours left over from before a change, an address that was never updated after a move, a phone number that has been disconnected: each of these mistakes costs more than having no website at all, because it disappoints someone who made the effort to come.
The most reliable source for this information remains your Google Business Profile listing, which you probably already update first. On active SiteServi websites, opening hours, address and phone number sync automatically from that listing, usually within a week of a change. This does not mean you can skip checking, from time to time, that what is displayed still matches reality.
How to check your own website in five minutes
Before rebuilding an entire website, start with this check, which requires no technical skill.
- Type your business name into Google, in private browsing mode, and look at what actually appears.
- Open your website on your own phone, with wifi switched off.
- Look for the phone number without scrolling for more than three seconds.
- Check that the opening hours shown are today's, not the ones from two years ago.
- Ask someone who does not know your business to find your address in under ten seconds.
Even a SiteServi website can fall into these traps
A website generated from a Google listing is not automatically protected against these five problems. If the service pages stay empty, if the number shown is already the one that no longer answers, or if nobody checks the final result, the website inherits the problem instead of fixing it. No tool replaces a proper check: reading through your own website as an impatient customer would remains the most useful habit, whichever solution was used to build it.