Twelve reasons a small business website brings in nothing
Sites rarely fail for one big reason. They fail for six small ones stacked on top of each other. This walks through the twelve we find most often, with a way to check each on your own site.
Foundations: can Google read the site at all?
If these are wrong, nothing else matters. Good design and good writing reach nobody if the site cannot be crawled or will not load.
- 1. Dead linksEvery 404 is a visitor who leaves and a signal the site is not maintained. Check: run our broken link checker, which scans the whole site in a couple of minutes. Fix: update the link or redirect the old URL. More on dead links.
- 2. Slow loadingSpeed is a ranking input rather than a penalty, but a slow page loses visitors before they see anything. Check: PageSpeed Insights, and read the field data rather than the lab score. Fix: compress your images first — it is almost always the images. More on site speed.
- 3. Pages Google cannot seeA stray noindex tag or a robots.txt rule can hide pages entirely. Check: search
site:yourwebsite.co.ukand compare what appears against your actual pages, then open the Pages report in Search Console for the reasons. Fix: submit a sitemap and clear whatever is blocking. More on indexing.
Usability: does anybody stay once they arrive?
- 4. Navigation nobody can followIf a visitor cannot reach your main service in two clicks, they will not hunt for it. Deeply buried pages also read as unimportant to Google. Check: ask somebody who has never seen the site to find your prices. Fix: shorter menus, plain names, no clever labels. More on navigation.
- 5. Broken on a phoneGoogle indexes the mobile version of your site, so a broken mobile layout is the version being judged — and it is what most of your visitors see. Check: open your own site on your own phone. Fix: a responsive theme, or your developer. More on mobile.
- 6. Content that has not been touched in yearsOld prices, old services, staff who left. Every inaccuracy is a reason to ring somebody else, and a site nobody maintains looks like a business nobody is running. Check: read your own homepage as a stranger would. Fix: review service pages quarterly. More on neglected sites.
Content: is there anything worth ranking?
- 7. Copy that appears on other websitesSupplier descriptions, template text, anything generated in bulk. Check: paste a distinctive sentence from your homepage into Google inside quotation marks. If it appears elsewhere, it was not written for you. Fix: rewrite it in your own words, which is also the only version that sounds like your business.
- 8. Nothing published since launchYour service pages target a handful of searches. Every question a customer asks is a search somebody is running and a page you do not have. Check: count the pages on your site, then count your competitor’s. Fix: two useful pieces a month, sustained. More on publishing.
- 9. Contact details that take effort to findA phone number in the footer of one page is a phone number nobody rings. Check: load a random page on your phone and see how long it takes to find a way to contact you. Fix: header, footer, and every service page. More on contact details.
Conversion: does traffic turn into anything?
- 10. Built cheaply, with the invisible parts left outA £149 build is real work at a real price. What it cannot cover is SEO structure, original copy, compliance, and room to grow. Check: can you add a page and edit your own titles without ringing anybody? Fix: usually a refresh rather than a rebuild. More on cheap builds.
- 11. No reviews, or none recentReviews feed the prominence signal Google uses for local results, and they decide who gets clicked in the map pack. Check: when was your newest one? Fix: ask everyone, every job, and never conceal an incentive — that became a banned practice in April 2025. More on reviews and the law.
- 12. Traffic arrives and nothing happensThe one people miss. Visitors landing, nobody enquiring, usually because no page says clearly what to do next. Check: open Search Console — if clicks are healthy and the phone is not ringing, this is your problem, not visibility. Fix: one obvious action per page.
Where to start if you cannot do all twelve
Work top to bottom. There is no point writing content for pages Google cannot reach, and no point driving traffic to a page with no phone number on it.
If you only have an afternoon, do the three checks in part one. They are free, they take about twenty minutes between them, and they will tell you whether you have a visibility problem or a conversion problem — which are completely different jobs.
What this looks like done properly
Paramount Space Cleaning in Coventry came to us in October 2025 with no search visibility. Most of the twelve above applied. In seven months they went from nothing to position one for “deep cleaning coventry”, page one for 55 search terms, and a £7,000 commercial contract traced back to organic search.
The caveat we attach to everything: one business, one city, one sector that is competitive but not brutal. Not a forecast for anyone else, and we will tell you which category you are in before you commit rather than after. Nora approved every figure before we published it.
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. You deal with us directly, and every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.
Or let us run the twelve for you
The free audit works through all of the above on your site and tells you which ones actually apply, in the order worth fixing them. Written by one of us. It is lead generation and we are not pretending otherwise, but you get it without a call first.
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