My Leads Dropped This Spring. Is It My Website?

When calls fall off, the website gets blamed first because it is the thing you can see. In our experience it is usually one of five causes, and only two of them involve the site. Check them in this order, because the first three are free to check and fix.

1. Your Google Business Profile changed

This is the first thing to check because it is the most common and the least visible. Search your company name and look at the map listing. Is it there? Does it say "suspended" or "temporarily closed"? Did your category change? Did reviews disappear? Google suspends profiles for reasons that have nothing to do with you (a competitor reported it, an address check failed, a listing got merged). A suspended profile can cut local calls in half overnight while your website is fine.

Fix: reinstate it through Google's form, make sure the address and category match your site exactly, and ask recent customers for reviews to get the profile active again.

2. A competitor started running ads or moved above you on the map

Search your main service plus your town, in an incognito window, from your phone. Who is in the ads now? Who is in the top three map results? If a competitor started Local Services Ads or Google Ads two months ago, they are now above you for the searches that used to be yours, even if your rankings did not move.

Fix: this one is not free. Either run ads to compete for the same spots, or build out service-area pages and reviews to hold the map positions you can win. Know which one you are doing and why.

3. It is seasonal, or the market shifted

Compare this spring to last spring, not to last month. Pull up your call log or Google Analytics for the same 90 days a year ago. If the drop is 10 to 15 percent and the whole trade is slow, it may be interest rates, weather, or a local slowdown. That still matters, but it is not a website problem and a rebuild will not fix it.

Fix: tighten what you have. Follow up faster on the leads that do come in. This is also the season to do the content work you never have time for in June.

4. The site broke on mobile, or got slow

Now check the site. Open it on your phone on cellular, not wifi. Does it load in under three seconds? Does the phone number tap to call? Does the form submit, and does the submission actually reach your email? A plugin update, an expired SSL certificate, or a form that silently stopped sending can zero out your leads while the site looks normal on your desktop.

Fix: test the form yourself today. Then put the site on a care plan so someone checks it monthly. Ours start at $79 a month.

5. The phone goes to voicemail

Last, and most uncomfortable: the leads may be arriving and dying. Call your own number from a different phone at 2pm on a Tuesday. If you get voicemail, so does the homeowner, and most of them call the next contractor instead of leaving a message.

Fix: an answering service, a text-back for missed calls, or a family member on the phone during the day. If you are big enough, a call center through an agency like RYNO. The best website in Maryland cannot fix a phone nobody answers.

How to know which one it is

If you have call tracking and Google Analytics set up in your own account, you can answer this in ten minutes: did visits drop (causes 1, 2, 3), did visits hold but calls drop (causes 4, 5), or did calls hold but booked jobs drop (your follow-up, not your marketing). If you do not have tracking, that is the first thing to fix, because next spring you will be guessing again.

We set up tracking in your name on every site we build, and we will set it up on a site we did not build. It is the cheapest insurance against a question like this.