What a business website needs to bring in enquiries (checklist)

Most small businesses already have a website. The trouble is that the phone doesn’t ring because of it. When we look at sites like that, the same things are usually missing: the opening screen doesn’t say what the business does, the phone number is tucked away in the footer, and every service is squeezed onto one page.

Below is what a business website should have, grouped by the questions a visitor works through: am I in the right place, can I trust these people, roughly what will it cost, and how do I get in touch. At the end there’s a checklist you can copy and run against your own site.

What should a visitor understand in five seconds?

Someone arriving from Google or Maps decides quickly. Without scrolling, your home page needs to answer three questions:

• What you do. Specifically, in the customer’s words. “Boiler repairs and servicing” rather than “complete heating solutions”.
• Where. The town or area you cover. A customer in Reading wants to know whether you’ll come to them.
• Who it’s for. Homeowners, businesses or both. For a clinic, perhaps adults and children.

An example headline for a tradesperson: “Electrical installation and testing in Bristol and surrounding areas, for homes, landlords and shops.” Underneath, one sentence on what the customer gets and a button that says “Call us” or “Request a visit”.

A simple test: show your home page on a phone to someone who doesn’t know your business, for five seconds. Then ask them what you do and where. If they can’t say, rewrite the headline.

Contact details that work with one thumb

Contact is where interest turns into an enquiry or doesn’t. Three mistakes come up again and again: a phone number shown as an image, a form with ten required fields, and nothing saying when the business will reply.

A tap-to-call phone number

Make the phone number a clickable link (in the code, tel:+44...) so a tap on a mobile dials it straight away. Put it in the header and, on mobile, ideally in a bar that stays visible as the visitor scrolls. If you can’t answer while you’re working, say when people can reach you, or that you call back.

A short form

For a first contact, a name, a phone number or email address and one box asking “What do you need help with?” is usually enough. For trades, add the postcode. Every extra required field gives people a reason to close the form. You can ask for measurements, photos and dates on the first call.

When you’ll reply

Under the form, say when you reply, for example “We’ll get back to you by the end of the next working day”. Only promise a time you’ll actually keep. A customer who knows when to expect your reply has less reason to ring round your competitors in the meantime.

Proof that people can trust you

A new customer doesn’t know you. They want to see that you’ve done similar work before and that people were happy with it.

Google reviews on your site

A widget showing reviews from your Google Business Profile displays a rating the customer can check on Maps. If you publish reviews on your own site, though, UK consumer law applies to you as a publisher. The Competition and Markets Authority’s short guide for businesses says publishers must take “reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove fake reviews”, and that “you should have a published policy that clearly prohibits fake reviews”.

For a small business, that can be a short paragraph on your reviews page: where the reviews come from, that you show them as written, that you don’t remove negative ones and that you don’t pay or reward anyone for a review. Ask an adviser to confirm the wording fits your setup. How to collect reviews within the rules is covered in How to get Google reviews.

A technical note: don’t add ratings of your own business to your site’s structured data. Google’s LocalBusiness documentation recommends the review and aggregateRating properties only for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses.

Testimonials with permission

A customer’s name, photo or a picture of their house on your website is personal data. Get their permission before you publish a testimonial, ideally in writing, an email is fine. Use the quote as the customer wrote it and never make one up.

Photos of real work

Customers can usually spot stock photos, and those photos show someone else’s work. Photos from your own jobs work better, even if they’re taken on a phone: before and after, a close-up of the finish, a completed bathroom, the team by the van. Ten good photos with a line on what was done and where is enough to start.

A separate page for each service

When all your services sit on one page, Google can’t tell which one to show someone searching for “EICR Bristol”. Visitors also have to read about things they don’t need.

Each main service needs its own page with its own heading. On that page, include:

• what the service covers and what it doesn’t,
• who it’s for and the situations in which people usually look for it,
• how it works, from the first call to handover,
• a guide to price (see the next section),
• photos from that particular service,
• answers to the questions customers actually ask on the phone,
• contact details or a form at the bottom.

For example, a garage shouldn’t have one “Services” page. It should have separate pages for tyres, air conditioning, MOT preparation and brake repairs, because people search for each of them in different words.

How to talk about price without a price list

Many service businesses can’t publish a fixed price list because every job is different. Saying nothing about price is still a mistake: the visitor can’t tell whether you’re in their budget, so they call someone who gave at least a rough idea.

Ways to give a guide without a binding price list:

• A “from” price for typical jobs, with a note on what pushes it up.
• A range for a common job, such as a bathroom of a typical size.
• What affects the price. Materials, scope, access, timing.
• How quotes work. Is the survey free or paid? How soon do you send the quote?
• A worked example. One job described with its final price, clearly marked as an example.

You don’t need all of these. After reading, the visitor should know roughly what range you work in and what happens when they get in touch.

Mobile and loading speed

Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. It says so in its documentation on mobile-first indexing. A site that looks good on a laptop and falls apart on a phone also loses out in search.

Google measures speed with the Core Web Vitals. According to web.dev, these are the thresholds for a good result:

Metric	What it measures	Good result
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)	how quickly the main content loads	2.5 s or less
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)	how quickly the page responds to a tap	200 ms or less
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)	whether content jumps around while loading	0.1 or less

The thresholds apply at the 75th percentile of page loads, measured separately for mobile and desktop. You can check your own site for free with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The usual culprits on small business sites are photos uploaded straight from a camera, full-width sliders and plugins nobody uses.

Local SEO: Google Maps, NAP and structured data

For a business that serves a local area, many customers arrive through Maps and local search results. Your website and your Google Business Profile have to agree with each other.

Google Business Profile. Create and verify it, fill in the category, opening hours, services and photos, and link to your website. Google’s help pages say that “businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results”. Google also says the number of reviews and positive ratings count towards local ranking, which is why it pays to collect reviews steadily, as we describe on our Google reviews page.

The same details everywhere (NAP). NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. Keep them identical on your website, your Google profile, Bing, Apple Maps and directories such as Yell. Google’s guidelines say your business name should reflect your real-world name “as used consistently on your storefront”, website and stationery, and that adding unnecessary information to the name isn’t permitted.

LocalBusiness structured data. This is code in the page that tells Google, in a machine-readable way, what the business is called, where it is and when it’s open. Google lists the name (name) and address (address) as required. Recommended properties include the phone number, opening hours, website address and map coordinates. Google also says it “does not guarantee” that features using structured data will appear in results. It’s quick to add, but it won’t lift your rankings on its own.

What UK law requires on a business website

Treat this section as an overview, not legal advice. If you’re unsure, ask a solicitor or adviser to look over your site.

Company details

If you trade as a limited company, regulations 24 and 25 of the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 require your website to show:

• your registered company name,
• the part of the UK where the company is registered (England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland),
• your registered number,
• your registered office address.

GOV.UK adds that the site should make clear the company is limited, usually by spelling out the full name with “Limited” or “Ltd”.

Separately, regulation 6 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 applies to “information society services”, which in practice covers most business websites, sole traders included. It requires your name, the geographic address where you’re established and contact details including an email address. Where they apply, it also requires your VAT number, any trade register you’re on with your registration number, and your professional body or regulator. The details must be “easily, directly and permanently accessible”, so a footer on every page plus the full set on your contact page is the simplest way to cover it.

Privacy information (UK GDPR)

A contact form collects personal data. The ICO’s guidance on the right to be informed sets out what you must tell people when you collect it, mainly:

• who you are and how to contact you,
• why you use the data and your lawful basis for doing so,
• who you share it with and whether it leaves the UK,
• how long you keep it,
• what rights people have, including the right to complain to the ICO.

In practice that’s a separate privacy page with a short link next to the form. Think about the tools your enquiries go into as well. If you use a CRM built on HighLevel, for example, data is stored in the US (Google Cloud, AWS) under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and that belongs in your privacy information too.

A cookie banner only where you need one

Regulation 6 of PECR says you must not store information on a visitor’s device, or access information stored there, unless one of the exceptions in Schedule A1 applies. Consent is one of them. Others cover storage that is strictly necessary for a service the visitor asked for and, since 5 February 2026, analytics used only to collect statistics about how the site is used so you can improve it.

The analytics exception has conditions. The information can’t be shared with anyone except to help you make those improvements, visitors must get clear information about it, and they must have a simple, free way to object. The ICO is clear that online advertising can’t rely on any of the exceptions.

For a website, this means:

• Strictly necessary cookies don’t need consent.
• Simple analytics used only to improve the site can run without consent if you explain it and give visitors a way to opt out.
• Advertising pixels and tracking shared with ad platforms still need consent before they load.

If your site uses nothing beyond the first two, you may not need a consent banner at all, only clear information and an opt-out. If you do use advertising tools, they mustn’t load until the visitor agrees.

Every enquiry has to end up in a CRM

A site can tick every box above and the business can still lose enquiries. All it takes is a form that goes to an inbox nobody checks, or a missed call from the website that stays on an engineer’s mobile.

That’s why we connect every form, phone number and chat on a website to Clientee CRM. The enquiry appears on the sales board, the customer gets a confirmation that their message arrived, and you get a notification. You can see who got in touch, who replied and what stage the job is at. When we build a custom website, this is where we start: what happens to an enquiry the moment the customer sends it.

What a business website should have: a checklist to copy

A website checklist you can paste into your notes and work through point by point:

Home page

• The headline says what you do, where and for whom
• A call or enquiry button is visible without scrolling
• Phone test: a stranger can tell what you do within five seconds

Contact

• Phone number is a tap-to-call link, in the header and always visible on mobile
• The form has four fields at most
• The form says when you’ll reply
• You actually reply within that time

Proof

• A widget with Google reviews
• A published review policy: where reviews come from and that fake or rewarded reviews aren’t allowed
• Testimonials only with the customer’s permission
• Photos of real jobs instead of stock images

Services and prices

• Each main service has its own page
• Each service page covers the process, photos, common questions and contact details
• A guide to price: a “from” price, a range or what affects the price

Mobile and speed

• The site is easy to use on a phone
• PageSpeed Insights: LCP 2.5 s or less, INP 200 ms or less, CLS 0.1 or less
• Images resized and compressed

Local SEO

• Verified, complete Google Business Profile linking to your website
• Name, address and phone number identical on your site, Google, Bing, Apple Maps and directories
• LocalBusiness structured data (at least name, address, phone and opening hours)

Legal details

• Limited company: registered name, number, registered office and part of the UK where registered (2015 trading disclosures regulations)
• Name, geographic address, email and, where relevant, VAT number (Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002, regulation 6)
• Privacy information, linked from the form (UK GDPR)
• Advertising and tracking cookies load only after consent; analytics only under the PECR exception, with an opt-out

Enquiries

• Forms, calls and chats from the site all end up in a CRM
• The customer gets a confirmation and you get a notification
• Every enquiry shows who is handling it and what stage it’s at