Guide · Leads

Visits, but
no phone calls?

A small business website can get steady visits and still not make the phone ring. Usually the visitors are real; the page just makes calling or writing harder than leaving. This guide covers what turns a visit into an enquiry, and then how to see which enquiries the website actually produced. Without the second part, you cannot tell whether any change helped.

Published 2026-11-09 · Formory Marketing Group

Someone who lands on a local service site wants three things answered quickly: do you do this job, do you work in my area, and roughly what will it cost. If the page answers those and the next step is easy, some of them get in touch. If it does not, they go back to the search results and try the next business. Nothing on your side records that they left.

So when a site gets visits but no leads, look at it on your own phone, as a stranger would, before blaming the traffic. The fixes below are cheap, and most take an afternoon.

1. A phone number you can tap. On a phone, the number should be a link (tel:) so one tap starts the call. A number inside an image, or typed as plain text, makes people copy it by hand, and some will not bother. Put it in the header so it is on every page.
2. A form in the first screens. Not only on a separate Contact page. Name, a phone number or email, and a box for what they need is enough.
3. A clear offer. One line that says what you do and where: “Furnace repair and replacement in Vaughan and Richmond Hill.” Not a slogan, not “Welcome to our website”.
4. A price signal. A starting price, a range, or what the price depends on. “Call for a quote” with nothing else loses the person who wanted a ballpark first. Our guide to showing prices on your website covers how to do it honestly under Canadian rules.
5. Answers to the questions people ask before calling. Do you charge for estimates, how soon can you come, are you licensed and insured, which areas do you cover, how does payment work. Five short answers on the page remove five reasons to hesitate.

Of the 27,080 GTA business home pages we opened in August 2026, 12,024 (44%) had no enquiry form in the home page code. We loaded each home page once and read its HTML without running scripts, so a contact form on another page, or one added by a script, is not counted. Even so, for close to half of these businesses a visitor on the home page has one way to act: phone. People who would rather write, or who are looking at 10 p.m., leave.

Keep the form short; every extra field is a reason to stop. Then test it. Send yourself an enquiry from your phone and check that it arrives, including in the spam folder. Forms can stop delivering after an email address or hosting change, and the site shows no sign of it.

The second half of the problem is knowing what works. In the same survey, 11,594 home pages (43%) had no Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager tag in the home page code, and 6,121 (23%) had neither a form nor an analytics tag. We checked only for Google's tags, so some of these sites may use another tool. For the rest, the website is a black box: no record of visits, and no form whose messages could be counted.

Without measurement, every change to the site is a guess. You want three numbers each month, kept apart: enquiries from the website form, calls from the website, and calls from ads or from your Google Business Profile.

Google Analytics 4 records page views by itself. With enhanced measurement switched on, it also records outbound clicks to other websites and form interactions, including a form_submit event when someone submits a form. Its list does not include phone links, so a tap on your number needs an event of its own.

Google's recommended events include generate_lead, which it describes as measuring when a lead has been generated, for example through a form. A simple setup for a local business:

• Send generate_lead when the form has gone through, on the thank-you message rather than on the button click, so failed attempts are not counted.
• Send a separate event, for example click_call, when someone taps a tel: link.
• In the GA4 Admin area, under Data display, mark both as key events.

Google defines a key event as an event that measures an action particularly important to the success of your business. For a local service business, an enquiry and a call tap are exactly that. Test both yourself after setting them up. And remember that a tap is not a call: people tap and hang up. Treat the tap count as an upper limit.

If you run Google Ads, call reporting uses a Google forwarding number: a number from Google that appears in your ad and forwards to your line. Canada is on Google's list of countries where these numbers are available. Google Ads records the time, duration, campaign and ad group of each call. The numbers belong to Google and can change, so never print one on a van or a flyer.

For anything else you pay for, such as a flyer, a van wrap or a directory listing, a separate number from your phone provider that rings through to your main line does the same job: calls to that number came from that source.

Then ask. Add one optional field to the form, “How did you hear about us?”, with a short list: Google search, Google Maps, an ad, a friend, a van or sign, other. Ask the same question on the phone and write the answer down. People misremember, but it catches word of mouth, which no tag can see.

Your Google Business Profile has its own report. Google's performance help page defines calls as the number of times a customer clicked the call button on your profile, and website clicks as clicks on the website link. Someone who reads the number off the profile and dials it by hand is not in that count.

To see what those visitors do once they reach your site, add UTM tags to the website link in the profile, for example https://yourbusiness.ca/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp. Google Analytics' guidance on campaign URLs is to always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, and to use lowercase, because values are case sensitive: Google and google are counted as different sources. Google's Campaign URL Builder assembles the address for you.

1. Open your site on your phone. Can you start a call with one tap from the first screen?
2. Is there a form without opening another page? Send yourself a test enquiry and confirm it arrives.
3. Does the first screen say what you do, where, and roughly what it costs?
4. View the page source and search for “gtag” or “googletagmanager”. If neither appears, Google's tags are probably not installed.
5. Check whether the website link on your Business Profile carries UTM tags.

Our free site check looks at several of these in a few seconds. If the site needs rebuilding rather than patching, a site of up to six pages is $990, paid after delivery, and we reply to every request within one business day.

• Google Analytics Help — About key events
• Google Analytics Help — Create or modify key events
• Google Analytics Help — Enhanced measurement events
• Google Analytics for developers — Recommended events (generate_lead)
• Google Analytics Help — URL builders: Collect campaign data with custom URLs
• Google Business Profile Help — Understand your Business Profile performance and insights
• Google Ads Help — Google forwarding number
• Formory GTA small business website report (our survey of 49,994 listings)

Or call (416) 989-3208. One of us answers; there is no sales team.

What Belongs on a Service Business Home Page · How to Write a Service Page That Actually Ranks · Google Local Services Ads in Canada: How They Work in 2026

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