The enquiries you never knew you lost

Where do lost enquiries go?

Nowhere you can see. A customer who gives up never fills in the form, so nobody counts the enquiry. A month later the phone has been quieter, and it’s easy to blame the market.

In our work, the losses cluster in five places.

Is your website too slow on a phone?

People leave slow pages. In 2017 Google trained a model on bounce and conversion data and found that as a mobile page’s load time grows from one second to seven, the chance a visitor leaves without doing anything rises by 113% (Think with Google, Find Out How You Stack Up to New Industry Benchmarks for Mobile Page Speed, Feb 2017). That’s old data. In a split test on a landing page, published by Google’s web.dev in 2021, Vodafone made its main content appear 31% faster and saw 8% more sales and a 15% better lead to visit rate (web.dev, Vodafone case study, 17 Mar 2021).

How to see it

Paste your homepage and your busiest service page into PageSpeed Insights and read the Mobile tab. The top section shows how real Chrome users experienced the page over the last 28 days. The section below it is a test run on a simulated mid-range phone on a mobile network (Google, About PageSpeed Insights, 21 Oct 2024). If your site doesn’t get much traffic, the top section may be empty, so use the test result.

Look at Largest Contentful Paint, the time until the main image or headline appears. Google calls it good at 2.5 seconds or less (web.dev, Web Vitals, 31 Oct 2024). If your site is verified in Search Console, its Core Web Vitals report groups slow pages together, split by phone and desktop (Search Console Help, Core Web Vitals report).

The fix

The usual culprits we find are oversized photos, sliders, chat widgets and themes that load far more code than the page uses. Compress the big image at the top, remove what nobody uses, and test again.

Can a stranger reach you in two taps?

Pick up your phone, search for your business the way a new customer would, and open your site. Count the taps until you can call, message on WhatsApp or send the form. Then check each one works: the number starts a call, the WhatsApp link opens a chat, and the form is easy to fill in on a small screen.

Search Console gives a second clue. In the Performance report, the Queries tab shows what people typed before they found you (Search Console Help, Performance report). If many of them are your name plus “phone number” or “contact”, people are hunting for something your pages should hand them.

The fix

Put a call button and a WhatsApp button on every page, where a thumb can reach them, and use one number everywhere: on the site, on your Google listing and on your cards.

Does anyone answer your contact form?

Often, nobody does. In a study published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011, researchers sent a test enquiry to 2,241 US companies. 37% replied within an hour, 24% took more than a day, and 23% never replied. A separate study by the same team, across 1.25 million leads, found that firms who tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with a decision maker as firms who waited even an hour longer (Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, Mar 2011). The data is from 2011, the companies were in the US, and one author ran a sales software company, so read the exact figures with care.

How to see it

Send an enquiry through every form on your site from a personal email address, once on a weekday afternoon and once on a Friday night. Time the reply. Check whether the form lands in a spam folder, or in the inbox of someone who left the company.

The fix

Send every form to two people, add an automatic reply that says when you’ll answer, and name one person who owns the reply each day. There’s more on reply speed in why enquiries go cold.

What happens to a call or WhatsApp at 9 pm?

Some enquiries arrive after you close. Google’s own records won’t show you what you missed: since 31 July 2024, Business Profile no longer keeps a call history (Google Business Profile Help, Changes to chat and call history).

How to see it

Open Performance in your Business Profile. Calls is the number of times someone tapped the call button on your profile (Google Business Profile Help, Understand your Business Profile performance). Compare last month’s figure with the calls your team actually answered. A big gap is worth a question, because some of those taps may be calls that rang out. Then message your own WhatsApp number from another phone at 9 pm and see what comes back.

The fix

Turn on away messages in the WhatsApp Business app, which reply automatically outside your business hours and tell people when you’ll be back (WhatsApp Business, Business app features). Record a voicemail greeting that says the same, and start each morning by calling back every missed number.

Is your Google listing out of date?

Your listing can change without you. Google gathers business details from user reports and licensed content, may apply some suggested edits without review where policy requires it, and may publish others if you don’t respond within four days and other public information backs them (Google Business Profile Help, Google updates on your Business Profile). Wrong hours send people to a closed door, and a wrong number sends them to nobody.

How to see it

Search your business name in Google Maps on your phone and read every line: hours, phone, address, website link and category. In your Business Profile, look for Google updates waiting for review.

The fix

Correct what’s wrong, and set special hours ahead of public holidays such as Eid or Diwali. Google says confirming holiday hours makes it clear to customers they’re accurate (Google Business Profile Help, How to set special hours). Then copy the same details to your other listings. Listings that disagree can confuse AI assistants too, as our guide on why AI assistants don’t recommend your business explains.

Put these five checks in your calendar for the first Monday of each month. They take about an hour.