Most small business websites are a brochure that never asks for the order. They describe the business accurately, they look reasonable, and they do not do very much.
Here are six jobs a website should be doing, with a way to check whether yours does each.
1. Be found for what you actually do
Not for your business name — people who search that have already decided. For the thing you sell, in the place you sell it.
Check: search for the three things you most want work for, with your town added. Are you on the first page? If not, the problem is usually structural — no page dedicated to that service, or a single services page trying to cover eleven things at once.
Fix: one page per service, properly written, each answering the questions somebody searching for that service has. For local businesses, add the geographical dimension covered in local SEO.
2. Answer the questions that block a decision
Every buyer has three or four questions they need answered before they will make contact. If your site does not answer them, they go and find a site that does.
The universal ones: Do they do exactly what I need? Do they cover my area? Roughly what does it cost? Have they done this before, for someone like me?
Check: ask three recent customers what they wanted to know before they called. Then look at whether your website answers those things within one click of the homepage.
Fix: put the answers on the page. Including a price signal — even a range with an explanation of what moves it. Buyers eliminate suppliers who give no indication at all, because they cannot tell whether you are in their bracket.
3. Prove you are credible
Anybody can build a website. What distinguishes a real business is evidence.
Check: does your site show actual work you have done, with enough detail that somebody can see themselves in it? Real testimonials with names? Accreditations? A physical address?
Fix: case studies beat a portfolio grid, because the story is what persuades — what the problem was, what you did, what happened. Three well-written ones outperform twenty thumbnails. That is what our portfolio is built around.
A photograph of finished work says you can do the job. A short account of what was difficult about it says you can be trusted with mine.
4. Make contact effortless
Every additional step loses a proportion of people who were ready to enquire.
Check: on a phone, how many taps from the homepage to a phone call? How many fields on your contact form? Does the page say when you will respond?
Fix:
- Phone number in the header, tappable, on every page
- Contact form with four fields at most — name, contact detail, what they need, and that is genuinely enough
- A stated response time, and then meet it
- A physical address, which matters more for trust than people expect
Eleven-field forms exist because somebody wanted the data. They cost more enquiries than the data is worth.
5. Capture the enquiry properly
The job that most small business websites fail entirely.
Check: when somebody submits your contact form, what happens? If the answer is "it emails us", then you cannot say how many enquiries you received last month, which ones were answered, how quickly or what happened to them.
Fix: enquiries should create a tracked record with an owner and a status, and trigger an automatic acknowledgement to the enquirer. That is a small piece of automation and it changes what you can see about your own pipeline. The pattern is in connecting your CRM to your inbox.
6. Tell you what is working
Check: can you say how many enquiries came from the website last month, and which pages the enquirers visited first?
Fix: track enquiries by source, not page views. Page views tell you about activity. Enquiries by source tell you where to spend money.
Set up conversion tracking properly, and record where each enquiry came from in whatever you use to manage them. Six months of that data is worth more than any amount of analytics you never open.
What to fix first
In this order, because each makes the next more valuable:
- Make contact effortless. Cheapest change, most immediate effect.
- Answer the blocking questions, price signal included.
- Capture enquiries properly so you can see what is happening.
- Add real evidence — two or three proper case studies.
- Then work on being found. There is no point driving traffic to a site that does not convert it.
That last point is worth emphasising. Businesses routinely spend on advertising to send more people to a site that answers none of their questions and makes contact difficult. Fix the site first and the same traffic produces more work.
If you would like an honest assessment of which of the six your site currently does, send us the address and we will tell you plainly. Our bespoke websites team builds around these six jobs rather than around a page count.
