Straight answers on getting more enquiries for your business

There’s a particular kind of website problem that never announces itself. The site loads. It looks fine. Nobody’s complained. But somewhere in the last six or twelve months, it slid from page one to page two, or from page two to page three, and the only visible symptom is a phone that rings slightly less often than it used to.

Website neglect doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like a slow, undramatic decline in enquiries that’s easy to blame on the market, or the time of year, or just a quiet patch. The actual cause is almost always more mechanical than that.

Every booking through an OTA costs commission. Booking.com takes 15% to 20%. For an independent hotel or hostel, that’s not a marketing cost with a clear return. It’s a permanent margin reduction on every guest who could have booked direct.

A property averaging 50 bookings a month through OTAs at £100 per night is paying roughly £1,500 to £2,000 a month in commission alone. Redirecting even a quarter to direct would more than fund the infrastructure that makes it possible.

When someone searches for a care provider or a private clinic, the circumstances behind the search are usually urgent, stressful, or both. A family looking for live-in care. A patient searching for a private consultation after a long NHS wait.

These aren’t browsing sessions. They’re high-stakes decisions made under time pressure, and the provider who responds first almost always wins.

A kitchen or bathroom renovation isn’t a quick decision. It’s a project that typically costs five figures, takes weeks to complete, and involves trusting someone with the most used rooms in the house.

That makes every missed enquiry expensive. Not in a vague, motivational sense, but in a directly calculable way.