Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Why your website gets no enquiries
For anybody who already has a site Five checks, your own phone, about twenty minutes

Your website is probably not the problem.

Between somebody needing what you do and your phone ringing there are five stages, and a website is only responsible for the last two. A site that produces nothing is usually a serviceable site that nobody is reaching — which matters, because the fix for that is $395 and the fix you are about to be sold is $3,450. This page is how to tell which one you have, tonight, without paying anybody for the answer.

Find the broken stage Skip to the five checks
Stages in the chainFive
Ones a website ownsThe last two
What the checks costNothing
Ask us anything022 584 0585
01 / THE CHAIN

Five stages.
A website owns
the last two.

Nobody decides to ring you in one step. They go looking, they get a list, they pick one, they read it, and then they do something. People fall out at every stage, and the stage they fell out of decides what the fix is. A rebuild aimed at stage four cannot recover anybody who was lost at stage two, which is why so many redesigns change nothing and nobody can explain why.

01
Before any website

Whether they search for what you call it

People type the job, not the trade. Blocked drain, not drainlaying. Hot water gone cold, not plumbing services. If everything you have written is named the way the industry names it, the search and the answer never meet, and nothing downstream of that gets a chance.

Where they go insteadTo whoever used the customer's words. Usually somebody smaller than you with a worse site. What fixes itRewording, on the listing and the pages. It is free and it is an afternoon, and it is the one most often skipped because it feels too small to matter.
02
Before any website

Whether you appear at all

Most local searching ends in the map result rather than on anybody's site — around two thirds of searches now finish without a click. If your listing is unclaimed, filed under the wrong category, has no service areas set or says you are closed, you are not losing to a better website. You are not in the list.

Where they go insteadTo the three businesses in the box above the results, which most people never scroll past. What fixes itThe Google listing, not the site. Free if you do it yourself over an evening, $395 if we do it properly in a day.
03
Before any website

Whether they pick you out of three

Three results, one screen, about fifteen seconds. What decides it is reviews, photographs and whether you look open. Of the people who say they chose not to contact a local business at all, the reason given is most often something to do with reviews — too few, too old, or badly answered — and price does not come into it.

Where they go insteadTo the one with more recent reviews. Often that is the only difference between you. What fixes itAsking, at the end of every job, with a link that opens straight on the review box. Free, and slow — this is the one that takes months rather than an afternoon.
04
This one is the website

Whether the page answers what they arrived with

Somebody has tapped through with one question and about eight seconds of patience, standing outside, on one bar of signal. Do you do this exact job, do you come to this exact suburb, roughly what does it cost, and can you come this week. A site that opens with a paragraph about our passion for quality answers none of them.

Where they go insteadBack to the results. The back button is the most-used feature on most small business websites. What fixes itSometimes a fortnight of work on the site you have. Sometimes a rebuild. This is the first stage on the list where spending real money is the honest answer.
05
This one is the website, and it is the cheapest

Whether there is something to do, and whether it reaches you

A number they have to hunt for, a number that is not tappable, a form that has been failing quietly since a plugin updated in March. This is the stage where the loss is total — the person wanted to contact you, tried, and you never found out. It is also, by a long way, the cheapest thing on this page to fix.

Where they go insteadNowhere. They assume you are busy, or shut, and they ring the next one down. What fixes itCheck five in the next section, and an hour of somebody's time. Do this one before you spend a dollar on anything else on this page.

Three of the five happen before anybody reaches a website, and no developer can touch them. That is not an excuse for websites — it is the reason a redesign so often changes nothing, and the reason the honest first question is which stage you are losing people at rather than what the site should look like. If stage two is where you are stuck, the listing is a $395 job and not a website at all.

02 / FIVE CHECKS

Five checks.
Your own phone.
About twenty minutes.

Do these before you talk to anybody, us included. None of them need any technical knowledge, none of them cost anything, and between them they will tell you which stage you are losing people at — which is the only question worth answering before money moves. Write the five answers down. They are what turns a conversation about a rebuild into a conversation about a problem.

  1. Check 1

    Search for the job, not for yourself

    On a phone, in a private window so the browser does not recognise you, and away from your own premises if you can manage it. Type what a customer would type — the problem and the suburb — rather than your business name. Searching your own name proves only that Google can spell it.

  2. Check 2

    Read your own listing like a stranger

    Not the version you see logged in. The category it is filed under, today's hours, whether the service areas are set, whether the photographs are from this year, and what the most recent review says and when. Four of those five you can change yourself in ten minutes.

  3. Check 3

    Open your own site with the wifi off, and count

    Out loud, from the tap. On mobile data, not on the office connection that makes everything look fast. Past about five seconds a real share of people have already gone, and you will never see them in any report because they were never there long enough to be counted.

  4. Check 4

    Find your phone number without scrolling

    Top of the screen, readable without pinching, and tappable — one press, the phone dials. Then try to find what you charge to come out, and which suburbs you cover. If either takes more than one tap, that is not a design opinion, it is stage five.

  5. Check 5

    Send yourself an enquiry through your own form

    From your phone, as a stranger would, with a real message. Then wait an hour and check everything including the junk folder. This is the check nobody runs and the one most likely to come back broken, because a form that stopped delivering in April is indistinguishable from a quiet autumn.

  6. Nobody runs

    Ring the last three customers and ask how they found you

    Not a report, not a guess — three phone calls, and they take five minutes each. If all three say somebody gave them your number, your website is not underperforming: it has never been the channel, and nothing you spend on it will change that until stage one does. That is a genuinely different problem and it is worth knowing before you buy anything.

03 / WHAT IT MEANS

The cheapest thing
that fixes it is
usually not a website.

Take the five answers in order and stop at the first no. That is where you are losing people, and it is almost always further up the chain than the part you were about to pay to replace. Everything below has a free version, because for three of the five the free version is the right one.

If check 1 or 2 failed

You did not come up at all

Then no amount of work on the website will be noticed by anybody, because nobody is getting to it. This is the most common answer of the five and the one that gets misdiagnosed most often, because from the owner's own phone, at the owner's own address, everything looks fine.

Doing it yourself: claim the listing, set the primary category to the job rather than the trade, set the areas you actually drive to, and fix today's hours. Free, one evening, and it is the highest-value hour you will spend this year. Ours: the whole listing, claimed, verified, categorised and handed over, for $395, and it is registered to you rather than to us.

If check 2 looked thin

You came up, and they picked the other one

Two businesses, one screen, and the difference is four reviews from this year against one from 2023. This is not a website problem and it cannot be bought. It is also the one thing on this page that compounds: every job you finish is another chance at it, and every job you finish without asking is one you do not get back.

Doing it yourself: ask at the end of the job, while you are still parked outside, using a short link that opens straight on the review box. That is the whole method and it costs nothing. Ours: we set the link and the routine up as part of the $395. We do not write them, we do not buy them, and we will tell you why that is not worth the risk.

If check 5 failed

The enquiry never arrived

Fix this week, whatever else you decide. It is the only failure on the page where somebody actively chose you, took the trouble, and you never heard about it — and it has usually been going on for months by the time anybody notices, because it looks exactly like nobody being interested.

Doing it yourself: whoever built the site can normally repoint the form in under an hour, and then you send yourself one every month from your own phone forever. That habit costs nothing and it is the single best one in this trade. Ours: the form and the backups are checked every month on the care plan, at $169.

If checks 3 and 4 failed

It was slow, or it did not answer the question

Now it is genuinely the website, and this is the one worth spending money on. But the question is still which version of spending: plenty of sites are structurally sound and losing people on four or five specific things — a heavy image on the front page, a number that is not tappable, no prices, no service areas, no page for the job people actually search for.

Doing it yourself: if you can edit your own site, the four things above are a weekend and they are worth more than most redesigns. Ours: if what you have is fundamentally sound we will say so and tell you what it would take to put right, rather than quote you a new one. If it is not, the tiers are in section 06 and the homepage gets built before you pay anything.

If everything passed

It all worked, and the phone still is not ringing

Then you do not have a fault, you have a volume problem, and they are not the same thing. Either not enough people in your area are searching for that job in a given month, or you are in a business that has always run on referral and always will. Both are real answers and neither is improved by replacing a working website.

Doing it yourself: the three phone calls at the foot of section 02 will tell you which of the two it is, and that is a better use of an afternoon than any quote. Ours: nothing. If this is where you have landed we would rather say so and leave you with your money — it is the same answer we give people who do not need a website in the first place.

Nothing above needs us, and three of the five answers are free to act on. If you can only do one thing this week, do check five: an enquiry that was sent and never arrived is worse than any design fault on this page. And if you cannot get in to change your own hours, the rebuild question has already been answered for you by whoever holds the logins.

04 / YOUR ANSWERS

Six answers in,
and the order
to deal with them.

Put in what you actually saw when you ran the six above — the five checks plus the one nobody runs. It gives you back the same six answers sorted the way the chain sorts them — earliest stage first, free fixes before paid ones — and prints on one page so you can take it to whoever you are about to pay. It cannot see your website. Nothing on this page can. Every line it prints is either your own answer or a sentence already written further up.

With scripting off

The six checks are in 02 and what each answer means is in 03. Write the six down the side of a page in that order and stop at the first no — that is the stage you are losing people at, and the free fix for it is named against it in 03.

The order to deal with them never changes: a form that never delivered comes first whatever else is wrong, then the listing, then the reviews, then the site itself. Three of the six are free to act on and the first one costs nothing but an evening.

05 / PROBABLY NOT IT

Four things you
will be told it is,
and usually is not.

"It needs a redesign." A redesign is a change to stage four, and stage four is rarely where people were lost. It is the easiest thing to sell because it is the only stage anybody can see in a screenshot, and it is the reason so many businesses are on their third website with the same silence around it. If checks one and two failed, a new site is a new site that nobody finds. Ask whoever is proposing it which of the five stages it addresses, and what happens if the answer turns out to be stage two.

"You need an SEO package." Some of this work is real and some of it is a monthly invoice with a report attached. The parts that reliably matter for a local business are unglamorous and mostly free: the listing filled in properly, a page for each job you want more of, reviews asked for at the end of every job, and the words the customer uses rather than the ones the trade uses. Anything sold with a position on Google attached to it is being sold by somebody who does not control the thing they are promising.

"You need to be advertising." Possibly, eventually. But paying for traffic while stage five is broken is paying to send people to a form that does not deliver, and paying while stage four is broken is paying for the privilege of being rejected faster. Advertising multiplies whatever the chain already does, including nothing. Fix the chain, then decide whether you still want to.

"You need to be on a new platform." Rebuilding onto a different system changes what the site is made of, not whether anybody arrives at it. There are good reasons to move — you cannot edit your own content, it is unbearably slow, or you do not own it — and those are worth doing on their own merits. "Enquiries are down" is not one of them, and it is the reason most often given.

06 / WHAT IT COSTS

Starting with
the one that
costs nothing.

Put these against your five answers rather than against each other. Most people reading this page need the first row and possibly the second, and a good number need nothing at all after a Tuesday evening with their own phone. Every figure includes GST and nothing is added at the end.

Nothing — and do this first

Test the form. Fix today's hours. Set the category to the job rather than the trade. Make the number tappable. Ask the next three customers for a review. That is most of stages one, two, three and five, it is yours to do this week, and we would rather you did it and never rang us than paid us while the form was still broken.

$0this week

Google Business Profile setup

The listing done properly in a day: claimed, verified, categorised, service areas set, hours right including the awkward ones, photographs, the questions answered in your words and a review routine you can work from the van. No website involved. For a lot of the people reading this it is the only thing that needed doing.

$395one-off

Care plan

The reason stage five broke in the first place: nobody was watching. Hosting, updates, backups, security, the small changes you text through, a monthly tune-up of the listing, and the enquiry form tested every month so a silent failure lasts weeks rather than a year. No lock-in, and you still own everything.

$169per month, or $1,690 a year

Essential — up to four pages

When the site you have cannot be repaired and the job is genuinely small: home, what you do, who you are, how to reach you. The right size when the website only has to be somewhere credible for a name to land at nine at night.

$2,450founding price $1,950

Standard — up to eight pages

A page for each job you want more of, which is stage one answered in your favour and stage four with it. The tier most businesses should take, and the one that actually addresses what people are searching for rather than how the front page looks.

$3,450founding price $2,950

Lead Engine — services and suburbs

Everything in Standard, plus a page for each area worth having, a local search campaign at launch, the after-hours enquiry assistant for twelve months and three months of the care plan. Sensible when the areas you cover are the thing people search by.

$5,950founding price $5,450

If the site you have is fundamentally sound and needs work rather than replacing, we will tell you that and what it would take — there is no figure for it on this page because it depends entirely on what is there, and putting a number on it before looking would be a guess. Nothing is payable before you have seen your own homepage on your own screen. The founding price is $500 off for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a discount, and there is nothing below it. What a website costs in New Zealand, and how to read a quote.

07 / QUESTIONS

Five from people
who already
paid for one.

Can you just look at it and tell me what is wrong?

Yes, and there is nothing to pay for it. Send the address and we will go through the five stages on it and write back with what we find, including where the answer is that it is fine. The reason the checks are on this page rather than behind a form is that you should not have to give anybody your details to find out whether your own form works.

My site is four years old. Is that too old?

Age on its own means very little. What matters is whether it loads quickly on a phone, whether it answers the question people arrive with, and whether you can still change it yourself. A tidy four-year-old site that does those three things is in better shape than plenty of sites built last year. What does age badly is prices, hours, staff and photographs — and all four of those are editing rather than rebuilding.

I have been told I should be posting every week.

For most trades, no. One honest page about a job you actually did — the problem, the photographs, what it took, roughly what it cost — is worth more than ten short posts, because it answers something somebody is typing. If writing weekly is being sold to you as the fix for no enquiries, ask which of the five stages it addresses. Usually the answer is none of them yet.

I cannot get into my own site to change anything.

Then that is the first thing to sort out, ahead of everything else on this page, because every free fix above assumes you can make a change. Find out who holds the domain, the hosting and the logins, and get them in your own name. It is a common arrangement and it is not always deliberate, but it decides what your options are. Who owns your website goes through how to find out and what to ask for.

If I fix all this, how long before the phone rings?

We do not know, and anybody who gives you a figure is guessing with your money. What we can say about the shape of it: a broken form is fixed the day it is fixed, listing changes tend to show up within days to weeks, and reviews are the slow one because they arrive one job at a time. There is no promise of a number of enquiries anywhere on this site, and there is not going to be one.

ALSO WRITTEN

Three places to
go from here.

One for each answer the five checks can give you: the listing, the reason the search you just ran was not the search your customers run, and the one where it really is the website.

$395

Stage two, and it is not a website.

The listing most people see instead of your site, what goes wrong with it, and what the day of work on it involves. It is the cheapest useful thing we sell and for a lot of the people reading this page it is the only thing that needed doing.

 Where you stand

Why the result you see is not the result they see.

A map result is assembled around whoever is searching, so checking from your own kitchen gives you the most flattering answer the city can produce. How local results are actually decided, and how to pick the areas worth a page.

 If it is a rebuild

What one costs, and how to read the quote.

If checks three and four are where it fell over, this is the next question. Two honest quotes can be four thousand dollars apart, and the gap is a list of decisions somebody has already made for you without writing them down.
08 / START

Send the address.
We will run
the five checks on it.

No charge and no obligation, because it takes us about twenty minutes and it is the same twenty minutes described above. You will get back which stage is losing people, what the free fix is where there is one, and whether the site you have is worth repairing rather than replacing — including, where it is the truth, that nothing is wrong with it.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz The full listPricing, tier by tier

Josh reads these himself. Nothing is passed to a salesperson, because there is not one, and asking what is wrong with your website does not put you on a list.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. No spam, no obligation, no sales sequence. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.