How do I get people to actually visit my website?

The question contains an assumption worth challenging first. For most local businesses, website traffic is not the goal. Enquiries are, and a large share of those never touch the website at all: they come from the map listing, where somebody taps the phone number directly.

So the ranked answer below is about enquiries, not visits.

1. The Google Business Profile

The highest return available to a local business, and it is free.

When somebody searches for what you do near where you are, the map results appear above everything else. That listing carries your phone number, hours, photographs and reviews, and it is frequently the whole transaction. No website visit occurs.

Most profiles are half finished. Claimed, a category, a phone number, nothing else. Completing it properly, every category, services, hours, attributes, twenty photographs, is an afternoon and it is the single best-value afternoon in small business marketing. The list is in the profile checklist.

2. Reviews

Second, and closely related. Reviews affect where you appear in the map results, and they very strongly affect whether anyone chooses you once shown.

They also increasingly determine what AI assistants say about you, because reviews are the densest source of specific third-party language about a business anywhere online.

If you have fewer reviews than the businesses ranking above you, that gap is the most valuable thing you can work on, and it is a systems problem rather than an effort problem.

3. Pages that answer real questions

Now the website earns its place, and the useful version is narrower than "content marketing".

People search in questions. "How much does a boiler service cost", "do I need building regs for a garage conversion", "how long does a rewire take". Most business websites answer none of these, because they are written to describe the business rather than to help the reader.

A page per real question, answering it in the first paragraph, gets found by the people asking. It also gets quoted by AI assistants, which increasingly need a specific, attributable sentence rather than a brochure.

The rule that makes this work: one page per subject, at its own address, answering in the first line. Not one long page covering everything, which ranks for nothing in particular.

Where do the questions come from? Your phone. The three things customers ask you every week are your first three pages, and you already know what they are.

4. Being named on other sites

Directories, trade bodies, suppliers, the local chamber, a sponsored junior football team with a link from the club site. Each one is a small vote and a small confirmation that your business details are what you say they are.

Nothing exotic. Just accurate, consistent listings in places that are genuinely relevant to you.

What about paid advertising

It works. It is also a different kind of thing from everything above.

Google Ads puts you at the top today and stops the moment the card is declined. That is fine when one job pays for a month of clicks, which is true for emergency trades, high-value services and anything urgent. It is poor value for low-margin work where you would need many clicks per job.

Use it deliberately: to fill a quiet period, to test whether a service has demand before writing pages about it, or where the work is urgent enough that people click the first result. Do not use it as a substitute for the four above, because when you stop, you are back where you started with nothing accumulated.

What most people do instead, and why it disappoints

Social media, usually. It is visible, it feels like marketing, and for most local trades it returns less per hour than any of the four above.

That is not a rule. A cake maker, a barber, a builder with dramatic before-and-after shots can do very well on Instagram, because the work photographs and people browse for it. A commercial electrician generally cannot, because nobody browses for one. They search for one, at the moment they need one, which is a completely different behaviour and is served by everything on this list rather than by posting.

Be honest about which you are.

The order matters more than the list

Businesses usually start at three, occasionally at four, and often skip one and two entirely, because the website is the visible thing and the listing is not.

If you do one thing this month: complete the Google Business Profile and set up a way to ask every customer for a review. Both are free, both take an afternoon, and between them they beat a website redesign for almost every local business.