The website with no clear call to action

A website with no clear call to action can look perfectly fine on first glance. The photos are decent, the copy reads well enough, the pages load. Then you try to actually book the plumber, or ring the salon, or ask the joiner for a quote, and there is nothing to click. A landscaper in Taunton might have a beautiful gallery of finished gardens and not one button anywhere on the page that tells a visitor what to do next. The site was built to be looked at, not used.

What this actually looks like on a real site

It rarely shows up as a single glaring gap. More often it is a collection of small ones stacked together. A phone number that exists somewhere on the site, but only in a footer in grey text at ten point size, never repeated near the top of the page where someone would actually look for it. A “Contact” link sitting in the navigation bar as one option among six, carrying no more weight than “About Us” or “Gallery”, instead of standing out as the thing the business most wants a visitor to do. Sometimes there is a form, but it sits at the very bottom of a long page, below several screens of text a mobile visitor would have to scroll through first. On a site like this, a genuinely interested customer has to go looking for a way to get in touch, and a fair number will not bother.

Why it happens even on sites that look otherwise fine

Nobody builds a site intending to make it hard to contact them. Most of the time this comes from a site being designed around what the business wants to say rather than what a visitor is trying to do. The homepage gets written to describe the business: how long they've been trading, what areas they cover, why they're different. All of that has a place, but it can crowd out the one thing that actually matters on the page: a single, obvious way to take the next step. It also happens because whoever built the site, a freelancer working from a template, a general web builder, a relative who was good with computers, was thinking about the site looking presentable rather than converting a visit into an enquiry. Presentable and usable are not the same job, and a lot of small business sites only got the first one.

What it costs the business

A visitor who cannot immediately see how to get in touch does not usually go hunting through the site for five minutes to find out. They open a new tab and search again, and the next result they click on gets the enquiry instead. This is a quieter version of the same problem covered in dead booking links and broken forms, where the mechanism for contacting the business is present but broken. A missing call to action is often worse, because there is nothing broken to point at. The site works exactly as built. It was just never built to ask for the sale.

Checking a site for this properly

Open the homepage on a phone, not a desktop, since that is how most local searches actually happen. Ask a few plain questions as you look at it. Is there a phone number visible without scrolling, and is it a tappable link rather than plain text someone has to copy out by hand? Is there one obvious action on the page, a button that says “Book a call” or “Get a quote”, or is the visitor left to work out for themselves which of several links might get them somewhere? Does that action repeat further down the page, so someone who reads to the bottom before deciding still has something to click, rather than having to scroll back up to find it again? Then check the service and gallery pages on their own, since a site can get this right on the homepage and still lose the thread on every page after it, leaving a visitor who landed straight on a services page with no next step at all.

Raising it with the business

This is a fix that is easy to explain and hard to argue with, which makes it a good one to lead with. Rather than saying the site “needs a clearer call to action”, which means little to someone outside web design, show them. Pull the homepage up on a phone in front of them and ask where they would tap to book an appointment. Watching someone else hesitate on their own site tends to make the point faster than any explanation would. It is also a genuinely small job, adding a visible number, making one button the obvious action, repeating it further down the page, which makes it an easy first piece of work to agree to before proposing anything larger, in the same way an audit report gives a prospect something concrete to react to rather than a general pitch, covered in using a website audit as a sales tool.

Spotting this from a search results page alone is difficult, since you cannot tell whether a site buries its phone number until you actually open it. Patchscout audits speed, SEO, mobile behaviour, SSL and the site builder for every business it finds in a search, so you can go into that manual check on the businesses most likely to need it rather than opening every site in a town one by one. The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see it against a trade and town you already know.