How to Turn Website Visitors Into Inquiries: A Guide for Small Businesses
Getting someone to your website is a lovely thing.
They found you on Google. Clicked a Pinterest pin. Saw your name mentioned in a Facebook group. Followed a link from Instagram. A past client enthusiastically texted them your website and said, You need to talk to her.
However they arrived, someone who potentially needs what you sell is now standing at the digital front door of your business… fabulous! But, there's a pretty significant gap between someone visiting your website and someone actually becoming an inquiry.
This is where we sometimes expect our websites to perform a little bit of magic. We get someone onto the homepage and assume that, if she's interested enough, she'll figure out what to do from there. She'll read some things. Click around. Find the relevant service. Locate the pricing. Look through the portfolio. Decide she trusts us. Hunt down the Contact page. Fill out the form. And, frankly, maybe she will!
But I don't particularly want to build a website that relies on my potential clients being exceptionally motivated detectives. 😂 Because the job of a good small business website isn't simply to contain all the right information somewhere. It's to help someone move through that information in an order that makes sense.
From: Oh, this might be what I'm looking for.
to: Yep, this is relevant to me.
to: I like the way she approaches this.
to: This service sounds like what I need.
to: I think I trust her with this.
to, eventually: Okay. I'm ready to reach out!
That path is part website design, part messaging, part user experience, part psychology, and part understanding how people actually make decisions. And if you're getting people onto your website but not necessarily getting them to take that next step, the path between those two things is worth looking at.
Table of Contents
What Actually Happens Between a Website Visit and an Inquiry?
One of the easiest mistakes to make when thinking about a website is imagining the journey as something like:
Homepage → Contact → 🎉 Client!
Which would certainly be convenient. In reality, especially for a service-based business, the decision tends to be considerably messier. Someone might land directly on a blog post through Google. She reads half of it, clicks your name, visits your about page, and, leaves.
Sees you again on Instagram three weeks later. Returns to your website, looks at one service, checks the price, leaves again… Googles you, reads two reviews, comes back through your homepage, looks through three portfolio projects, and then, finally, fills out your inquiry form.
From your perspective, the inquiry appeared in your inbox on Tuesday afternoon. From her perspective, she may have been quietly evaluating your business for a month. This is why I think it's useful to stop thinking about website conversion as one magical button that makes people inquire.
There are usually a whole bunch of smaller decisions happening first.
Is this relevant to me?
Do I understand what she does?
Can she solve the problem I have?
Can I afford this?
Do I like her work?
Does she seem credible?
Do I understand what happens if I hire her?
Do I feel comfortable reaching out?
And your website can help answer every single one of those questions.
RELATED BLOG
10 Questions Your Squarespace Website Should Answer Before Someone Ever Contacts You →
Start With the Page Someone Actually Lands On
When we design websites, we tend to give the homepage a truly heroic amount of responsibility. And, to be fair, it is important. But not everyone enters your website through the homepage.
If you're investing in SEO, blogging, Pinterest, case studies, portfolio SEO, or any other form of content marketing, people may be entering your website through all kinds of little side doors.
Someone searches: Calgary home organizer for seniors, and lands directly on a service page.
Someone searches: Do doulas help with C-sections? and lands on a blog article.
Someone searches: Canmore wedding videographer, and lands on a portfolio project.
Someone finds an image on Pinterest and ends up three levels deep in your website without ever having seen your homepage. Which means every important landing page needs enough context to help someone who has never met your business before.
Can I figure out whose website I'm on?
What does this business do?
Is this relevant to the thing I searched for?
Where should I go next?
This doesn't mean repeating your entire homepage at the beginning of every blog post. It means thinking about your website less like a presentation someone watches obediently from slide one to slide fourteen and more like a little ecosystem people can enter from different places. Every entrance should give them a way to orient themselves. And every useful page should give them somewhere logical to go next.
Give People Context Before Asking Them to Take Action
Imagine walking into a shop you've never visited before.
Before you've had a chance to look around, someone immediately appears and says: WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY SOMETHING?! Um. (Confused pause.) Possibly? Could I perhaps first determine what you sell? 😂
Websites can accidentally do a version of this when they're filled with calls to action before we've given the visitor enough context to make the decision we're asking her to make.
BOOK NOW. Okay... what am I booking?
LET'S WORK TOGETHER. On what?
START YOUR TRANSFORMATION. I have literally been here for eleven seconds.
A call to action works much better when it follows information that naturally makes someone want to take that action.
For example:
You explain the problem your service solves. Then: See How I Can Help →
You introduce your three services. Then: Explore Services →
You show a project with measurable results. Then: View the Full Case Study →
You explain exactly what's included in your package, who it's for, the investment, and what the process looks like. Then: Start Your Project →
The CTA isn't doing all the persuasive work. The content before it is creating the reason to click. That's a really important distinction.
Make Your Services Easy to Find and Easy to Choose Between
Once someone thinks, I might want to hire this person, she needs to figure out what she can actually hire you for.
And this can become surprisingly complicated. Especially when you've been in business for a few years. Maybe you have six services. Two are essentially the same thing. One is technically still available but you secretly hope nobody ever asks for it again. One is your favourite but is buried halfway down the Services page. And one exists exclusively in an Instagram Highlight from March. (No shade, we’ve all been there!)
Your potential client should not need a degree in your business model to figure out which service applies to her. If you offer multiple options, make the differences meaningful and reasonably easy to understand.
Instead of simply:
Package One
A wonderful option for your business.
Package Two
A more comprehensive option for your business.
Package Three
The ultimate option for your business.
Tell me why I would choose one over another.
Maybe you're a professional organizer who offers:
The Home Reset
For someone whose home has gradually become overwhelming and needs hands-on help creating functional, sustainable systems.
versus:
Moving & Downsizing Support
For someone preparing for a move who needs help sorting belongings, making decisions, and getting organized before moving day.
Now I'm not comparing two vague lists of hours and deliverables. I'm recognizing which situation sounds like mine. And that makes choosing and connecting with you much easier.
IF YOUR WEBSITE HASN'T QUITE KEPT UP WITH YOUR BUSINESS...
Your business may not need an entirely new website. Sometimes the right next step is taking what you already have and making it clearer, more strategic, easier to navigate, and better aligned with where your business is now.
My Squarespace Website Reset is a focused five-day redesign for established businesses ready to make their existing website work harder.
Build Trust Along the Way
Once someone understands what you offer, another question starts running quietly underneath the decision: But are you actually good at it?bReasonable question! 😂
Especially when we're talking about services, your client usually has to commit before she can fully evaluate what she's buying. She can't see her finished wedding photos before hiring the photographer. She can't experience the beautifully organized house before hiring the organizer. She can't see the finished brand before hiring the designer. So she's using the evidence available to make a prediction about what working with you will be like.
And your website is full of opportunities to provide that evidence, such as:
Testimonials.
Reviews.
Portfolio pieces.
Case studies.
Results.
Credentials.
Before-and-afters.
Your process.
Specific examples.
Photos of you actually doing the work.
Even the quality and specificity of your writing can build trust.
But here's something I think matters: Don't make people go looking for all of it. Your testimonials don't need to live exclusively on a Testimonials page that someone may or may not ever visit. Put a relevant testimonial beside the service it talks about.
If a client had a particularly meaningful result from working with you, mention it while you're explaining the part of your service that helped create that outcome. If a past client can speak to exactly what you're promising in that section, put her testimonial right there instead of making someone hunt for it elsewhere. Your credibility can be woven throughout the journey. Because trust isn't one step people complete and then check off, instead, it’s accumulating the entire time.
Use Calls to Action That Match Where Someone Is in the Decision
Not every person on your website is ready to inquire. And that's okay.
Someone who discovered you through a blog article approximately four minutes ago may not be ready for: START YOUR PROJECT. But she might be perfectly happy to:
Read Another Article →
See an Example →
Explore Website Services →
View the Portfolio →
And someone who has spent twenty minutes on your Home Organization page, read the pricing, looked through your portfolio, and scrolled through four testimonials probably doesn't need: Learn More. Learn more WHERE?! She's done the learning. Here, she needs: Start Your Project →
This is where I like thinking about CTAs in two broad categories.
Lower-commitment next steps
These help someone continue exploring:
Read a related article
View a case study
Explore the portfolio
Learn about a service
See the process
Compare packages
Higher-commitment next steps
These help someone move toward becoming a client:
Start your project
Inquire
Book your service
Request a quote
Book a consultation
The closer someone gets to making a decision, the clearer and more direct your calls to action can become.
Create a Clear Primary Path Through Your Website
This doesn't mean every person needs to follow exactly the same path.
But your website should have some kind of hierarchy. For a service-based business, perhaps the main journey is:
Homepage → Services → Individual Service → Inquiry
And then you have supporting pathways feeding into it:
Blog → Service → Inquiry
Google → Portfolio → Service → Inquiry
Pinterest → Blog → Related Blog → Service → Inquiry
Instagram → Homepage → Portfolio → Service → Inquiry
There can be plenty of ways into the system. What matters is that they eventually connect. Because this is where websites sometimes become a collection of very nice individual pages that don't actually do much together. The blog has no service links. The portfolio projects don't tell me what service produced the work. The service pages don't show relevant portfolio pieces. The About page ends with... nothing. The homepage has six equally prominent buttons leading in six different directions. And the Contact page is sitting quietly in the navigation hoping someone remembers it exists.
Internal linking isn't only an SEO strategy. It's a user-experience strategy. You're helping people move between related pieces of information at the moment those pieces become relevant.
WANT TO SEE HOW ALL OF THIS FITS TOGETHER?
Before putting more time into driving traffic toward your website, it's worth making sure the experience waiting for people is actually ready for them.
Read: Before You Try to Get More Website Traffic, Fix These Things First →
Remove the Little Friction Points That Make People Hesitate
Not every conversion problem is dramatic. Sometimes it's death by seventeen tiny inconveniences. Your service sounds interesting, but there's no price. Your price is listed, but I can't tell whether it's CAD or USD. I want to inquire, but the Contact button says Connect, while another says Let's Chat, another says Get Started, and another says Say Hello, and I'm genuinely not sure whether they all do the same thing.
The inquiry form asks for seventeen required answers. I click a button and it opens a booking calendar even though I wasn't expecting to book a call. Your portfolio images take approximately the length of a Christopher Nolan film to load. The mobile navigation covers half the screen. I want to know whether you work in Calgary, but your location appears exactly once in six-point font in the footer.
None of these things alone necessarily destroys a conversion. But friction accumulates. And every little moment where someone has to stop and think: Wait... what? is a moment where she can also decide: Eh. I'll come back later.
Narrator: She did not come back later. 😂
Good user experience isn't about eliminating every possible moment of thought. It's about not wasting someone's attention on things that shouldn't require thought in the first place.
Make Your Contact Page Part of the Experience
The Contact page is sometimes treated like the administrative closet of the website.
Name. Email. Message. Submit. Done.
But someone arriving there may be on the verge of handing you hundreds or thousands of dollars. This is actually a pretty important moment!
Your Contact page can reassure her that she's in the right place, remind her what happens next, tell her when she can expect a response, explain whether she's booking something directly or starting a conversation, and tell her what information would be useful to include.
BUT, and perhaps most importantly, don't turn the inquiry form into onboarding before someone has even become a client. You probably need enough information to determine whether the project is a potential fit. You probably do not need her deepest hopes, five-year business goals, brand archetype, childhood memories, preferred Pantone colour, and exact feelings about serif typography.
We can ask those things later. The easier it feels to take the next logical step, the more likely someone who already wants to take it actually will.
Look for the Places People Are Quietly Dropping Off
At this point, it's worth looking at what people are actually doing rather than only what we think they're doing.
Because sometimes the website tells you something interesting. Maybe…
Your homepage gets plenty of traffic, but hardly anyone visits a service page.
One service gets dramatically more attention than everything else.
A blog article brings in hundreds of visitors every month but has absolutely nowhere for those people to go afterward.
People reach your Contact page but inquiries remain low.
A portfolio project ranks beautifully on Google but doesn't link to the service that produced it.
People are finding you through search, but they're landing on an old page that doesn't reflect your current offers.
Those are all different problems and they all need different solutions. This is why I'm much more interested in asking: Where is the journey breaking down? than immediately deciding: We need more traffic!
Because if 500 people are already walking into the shop every month and nobody can find the checkout counter, inviting another 500 people inside doesn't solve the problem. It just gives us 1,000 confused people… yikes!
NOT SURE WHERE YOUR WEBSITE IS LOSING PEOPLE?
My Website + SEO Assessment looks at your website as a whole—including design, messaging, structure, user journey, and SEO foundations—to identify what's working, what's getting in the way, and what I'd prioritize next.
You'll walk away with practical recommendations you can implement yourself or hand off with confidence.
A 15-Minute Website-to-Inquiry Audit
If you'd like to see how clear the path is on your own website, give yourself fifteen minutes and pretend you're someone encountering your business for the first time.
Start on your homepage. Then ask:
1. Can I immediately understand what this business does?
Not after reading seven paragraphs. Fairly quickly.
2. Do I know whether it's relevant to me?
Can your ideal client recognize herself, her problem, her industry, her location, or what she's looking for?
3. Can I easily find the services?
And once I find them, can I understand the difference between them?
4. Is there enough information to evaluate the investment?
Exact pricing isn't right for every business, but can someone get a reasonable idea of the financial commitment?
5. Have you given me reasons to trust you?
Can I see work, testimonials, results, reviews, credentials, examples, or evidence?
6. Do I understand what working together looks like?
How does it begin? How long does it take? What will you need from me? What do you take care of?
7. Is there an obvious next step on every important page?
Not necessarily the same next step.
The logical next step.
8. Do your pages connect to one another?
Does a blog lead somewhere? Does a portfolio project connect to a service? Does a service show relevant work?
9. Does the mobile experience make all of this easy?
Because if your beautifully planned customer journey falls apart the second someone opens it on an iPhone, we have a small problem. 🙃
10. Can I inquire without unnecessary friction?
Can I find the Contact page? Do I know what's going to happen? Is the form reasonable? Does the button work? And then I'd do one more thing. Hand your phone to someone who isn't deeply familiar with your business. Give them absolutely no instructions. Ask them to figure out what you sell and how they'd hire you. Then resist every urge in your body to explain anything. I know, terrifying.
But if you have to say:
“Oh, you need to click that first.”
or:
“That service is actually for…”
or:
“The pricing is on another page.”
or:
“That button isn't really where I'd want you to go…”
Pay attention.
Every explanation you're tempted to give is potentially information the website needs to communicate more clearly on its own.
Your Website Doesn't Need to Convince Everyone
And this might be the most important part. A high-converting website isn't a website that somehow convinces every visitor to become a client. I don't want that, and you probably don't either. Because some people aren't the right fit.
Some simply don't need your service. Some aren't ready. Some don't have the budget. Some want something you don't provide. Some simply prefer another person's style, personality, process, or approach. That's completely fine!
The goal isn't to manipulate more people into filling out your inquiry form. It's to make it easier for the right people to make a confident decision. That might mean someone visits your website and thinks: Yes. This is exactly what I've been looking for!
It might also mean someone reads your pricing and realizes the service isn't within her budget right now. Useful. Or realizes she actually needs a different service. Useful. Or decides your process isn't what she's looking for. Also useful.
A good website helps people qualify themselves. And when the right person does arrive, I want the website to give her what she needs to keep moving. I want her to understand the business without decoding it, the services to make sense, the portfolio to give her confidence, the testimonials to answer the quiet but can she actually do this? question, the process to remove uncertainty, and the pricing to provide context.
And when she finally thinks: Yep. I think I want to work with her. I want the next step to be sitting right there. Because getting someone to your website is only part of the job.
The real opportunity is creating an experience that helps the right person go from finding you to understanding you, trusting you, and eventually choosing you.
And that is when your website starts doing considerably more than sitting there looking pretty. 🫶
Keep Reading
10 Questions Your Squarespace Website Should Answer Before Someone Ever Contacts You →
Make sure your website is answering the questions potential clients are quietly asking before they decide to reach out.
Before You Try to Get More Website Traffic, Fix These Things First →
Before chasing more clicks, make sure your website is ready to do something useful with the attention you're already getting.
READY FOR A WEBSITE THAT DOES MORE OF THE HEAVY LIFTING?
Hi, I’m Kaylee!
I design strategic Squarespace & Wix websites for small businesses to help the right people find you, trust you, and choose you.
