Conversion rate: what it is and how to get more enquiries
Short answer: A conversion is when a visitor does what you want them to do, for example sends an enquiry, calls or books. The conversion rate is the number of enquiries divided by the number of visits, times 100. More enquiries do not always need more traffic. There is often a lot to gain by first removing what stops the visitors you already have.
This article is written for service businesses that depend on people getting in touch: tradespeople, consultants, clinics and agencies. You get the formula, a test that shows how your website looks to a mobile visitor, the obstacles we see most often and a checklist to go through on your own website.
What you’ll get from this article
What is a conversion?
A conversion is an action that takes the visitor one step closer to becoming a customer. For an online shop it is a purchase. For a service business it is nearly always a contact:
- An enquiry through a form, for example a quote request or a contact form.
- A call, when the visitor taps your phone number on their mobile.
- A booking of a meeting, a visit or a time slot in a booking system.
- An email through an email link on the website.
There are also smaller steps along the way, often called micro-conversions: someone downloads a price list, signs up for a newsletter or reads your case studies page. They say something about interest, but it is the enquiries that pay the wages. So decide which action or actions are your main conversion, and measure them separately.
How to calculate your conversion rate
The formula is simple:
Conversion rate = number of conversions / number of visits × 100
Say you run a cleaning company (an example with made-up numbers). In one month the website has 1,200 visits, and you get 18 enquiries through the form and 12 calls from the website. That makes 30 conversions. 30 / 1,200 × 100 = 2.5 per cent.
Three things to keep in mind when you calculate:
- Count the same thing every time. Visits or unique visitors, forms or forms plus calls. If you change the definition from one month to the next, the figures cannot be compared.
- Compare yourself with yourself. The industry averages that circulate online mix online shops, landing pages and business websites with completely different conditions. What matters is whether your own figure goes up after a change.
- Look per page and per channel. A single total hides a lot. Visitors from Google Ads landing on a service page behave differently from someone who found a blog post through search.
The conversion rate is only half the picture. Ten enquiries about the wrong kind of job are worse than five about the right kind. So also note how many of the enquiries turned into quotes and deals.
The buyer’s journey: from question to contact
For a service business the buyer’s journey is rarely long, but it has a few clear steps. The visitor:
- Has a problem or a question and searches on Google, asks an AI assistant or asks for recommendations.
- Compares a few options, often by reading reviews and clicking through to two or three websites.
- Looks for reasons to trust you: that you do exactly this, in the right area, and that others have been happy.
- Tries to understand what happens if they get in touch: roughly what it costs, how quickly you can start, what they need to send.
- Gets in touch, if it is easy enough at that very moment.
Reviews carry a lot of weight already at step two. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of US consumers, 97 per cent say they read reviews of local businesses, and 74 per cent look for reviews from the last three months. The survey covers the US, but it suggests that a steady flow of new reviews counts for more than many old ones. With Tokig Reviews you get new ones in continuously, without nagging.
Every step is a place where the visitor can drop off. Conversion optimisation is about finding where that happens and why, and then fixing it.
The most common obstacles on a business website
When we go through service businesses’ websites, it is rarely the design itself that stops the enquiries. It is nearly always some of these:
- An unclear service. The home page says “quality and service” but not what you do, for whom and where. The visitor should understand that within a few seconds.
- Nothing about price or process. You do not need a price list, but the visitor wants to know how it works: a free site visit or not, hourly rate or fixed price, how long it usually takes. Without that, getting in touch feels like a bigger step than it is.
- Hidden ways to get in touch. The phone number is only at the very bottom in the footer, the form sits on a separate page and the button says “Read more” instead of what happens.
- A slow mobile site. Many of your visitors come from their phones. If the page loads slowly or the content jumps around while it loads, they leave for the next search result. Google measures loading with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in Core Web Vitals. For a good experience it should take no more than 2.5 seconds for at least 75 per cent of page views.
- Forms with too many fields. A field for company name, one for company registration number, one for budget and a required field for “how did you find us”. Unnecessary required fields raise the threshold for sending.
- No reviews or references. A good rating on Google helps little if it is not visible where the visitor makes the decision, that is on the service page and close to the contact button.
How your website looks on a phone
Several of the obstacles above are visible before the visitor has even scrolled. Test your own website and see it the way a mobile visitor does.
What does the visitor see in the first few seconds?
Enter your address. Google loads the page on a phone, and you see how long it takes and what the visitor meets on the first screen.
The test uses Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The times are estimates for a phone on a typical connection.
What to fix, in order of priority
To increase your conversion rate, start with what is cheapest to change and affects the most visitors. The order below works for most service businesses.
1. Set up measurement first
Before you change anything, you should know how many enquiries and calls the website brings in today, and from which pages. Otherwise you will not know whether the changes made a difference. More on that further down.
2. Make contact visible and easy
- A tappable phone number at the top on mobile.
- A clear button on every service page, with text that says what happens: “Request a quote”, “Book a site visit”.
- Forms with as few fields as possible. Name, phone or email and a free-text field are often enough. Ask the rest when you call back.
3. Say what you do, for whom and how it works
Every service page should answer: what is included, which area you cover, what the process looks like from first contact to finished job, and how you price. A short section with three steps (“You get in touch, we come and take a look, you get a quote”) goes a long way.
4. Show trust where the decision is made
Put a few recent reviews, photos from real jobs and any certifications on the service pages, not just on a separate references page. With Tokig Reviews every customer automatically gets a review request after a finished job, so the flow of new reviews does not depend on someone remembering to ask.
5. Speed up the mobile site
Compress images, remove plugins and scripts that are not used and test the pages in Google’s PageSpeed Insights. If the website is built in a way that makes it hard to speed up, it is a question of the foundation rather than of adjustments. We describe the difference between the two in web design or web development.
6. Test and follow up
Change one thing at a time where you can, and compare the number of enquiries before and after. A/B tests need a lot of traffic to give reliable answers, so for most smaller businesses a careful before-and-after comparison over a long enough period is more realistic.
Only when the website converts well is it time to increase traffic. Which channel suits you to start with is covered in SEO, Google Ads or Meta.
Measure enquiries, not clicks
The most common mistake we see is measuring what is easy to measure: visits, clicks and time on page. The ad platforms also report conversions based on their own attribution models and conversion windows. The same customer can be counted in several channels, and the totals do not have to match the number of enquiries you actually received. The result is figures that look good in a report but do not match what actually arrived in the inbox.
What you need to know is simpler:
- How many enquiries and calls came in this month?
- Where did they come from: Google, ads, Facebook, an AI assistant, direct?
- Which pages did they read before they got in touch?
- What did each enquiry cost in the paid channels?
Tokig Analytics shows the traffic, where it comes from and which pages visitors read before they sent an enquiry. The data is collected through your own domain and sent to our server in Sweden. Tokig Insights shows the enquiries that actually came in, per channel, and what has been passed on to Google and Meta. That makes it possible to see whether a change on the website brought more real contacts, not just more clicks.
The same data can also help the ad platforms. When Google and Meta get accurate conversion signals, automated campaigns can optimise for what you actually value, instead of for clicks and visits.
Heatmaps: see what visitors actually do
The figures show that visitors drop off, but not why. A heatmap analysis shows where they click, how far they scroll and where they get stuck. In an online shop it is especially valuable in the flow from product page via basket to checkout, where small obstacles cost many purchases.
Checklist: go through your website today
Go through your website
Tick what is already true. What is left is your to-do list.
What most people won’t tell you
More traffic is not always the first thing you need. If the website turns few visitors into enquiries, every new visitor becomes more expensive. Then it can pay off to improve conversion first and increase traffic afterwards.
A/B tests need volume. With a few hundred visits a month, a test takes a long time to give a reliable answer. Start with the obvious obstacles: a form that is awkward to use, a missing phone number or a page that loads slowly on mobile.
A conversion rate without enquiries is a trap. A website can get more clicks on a button without getting more customers. Measure what eventually turns into business.
How we work
Conversion optimisation is an add-on you can choose after launch. We mainly recommend it for websites that already have traffic or run ads, because that is where every drop-off costs the most. This is how it works:
- We measure first. Before we change anything, we find out how many enquiries and calls the website brings in today, and from which pages.
- The biggest drop-offs first. Usually contact options, forms and mobile speed, because they affect the most visitors.
- Heatmaps where needed. We follow the subpages, run heatmap analyses when the figures are not enough to understand why visitors leave, and adjust until the pages do their job.
- Every change is compared against real enquiries in Tokig Insights, not against clicks.
- Trust where the decision is made. With Tokig Reviews every customer gets a review request after a finished job, so recent reviews can be shown on the service pages.
Want more enquiries from the visitors you already have?
We go through your website and show you the three biggest drop-offs and what we would change first.
Book a free review or call +46 8 545 222 22, weekdays 08:00–17:00 (CET)
Frequently asked questions
What is a good conversion rate?
It varies a lot between industries and traffic sources. It is better to compare your own website over time and between channels than with an average.
Do calls count as conversions?
Yes. For most service businesses calls are among the most important. Measure taps on the phone number and, if possible, which calls came from the website.
Should we remove fields from the form?
Often, yes. Unnecessary required fields make it harder to send. Only ask for what you need for the next step and take the rest in the conversation.
Do we need to run A/B tests?
Not at the start. A/B tests need a lot of traffic to give reliable answers. With a few hundred visits a month, a careful comparison before and after a change is more realistic.
How quickly will we see results?
Obvious obstacles, such as a form that does not work on mobile, can have an effect straight away. Bigger changes need enough visits to be measured reliably.
Project manager at Pixeltokig. David leads our clients’ projects, from the first review to the finished website and the ongoing work on visibility.
Read next
- SEO, Google Ads or Meta: which channel should you start with?
- Web design or web development: what’s the difference and what do you need?
- Tokig Reviews: collect Google reviews continuously
- Tokig Insights: see which channels bring in enquiries