Writing
What I Check First When a Client's Enquiries Dry Up
The reflex is to blame the ads or the website. Here's the actual order I work through before I touch either, and why it usually isn't what people expect.
Someone calls me and says the phone’s stopped ringing. Nine times out of ten, the first thing they want to talk about is the ads. Turn the budget up, try a different platform, get someone to “do more SEO.” That’s rarely where the problem is, and jumping straight to spend is how a lot of small businesses waste money without ever finding out what actually broke.
Before I touch a campaign or a page, I check the boring stuff. In order:
Is the number itself still working. Sounds obvious. It isn’t. I’ve seen a Google Business Profile phone number quietly changed during a “quick update” by someone in the business, or a tracking number expire because a subscription lapsed. If the number on the listing doesn’t ring through, no amount of extra spend fixes it.
Is the page it points to actually live. A plugin update, a hosting migration, a “we redid the website” moment, any of these can leave a page returning an error or sitting behind a login screen that nobody checked after launch. I’ve had clients running ads to a page that hadn’t loaded properly in weeks.
Has anything changed on the listing itself. Hours, category, service area. A business gets marked temporarily closed by mistake, or a category gets changed and the profile stops matching the searches it used to catch. This one’s invisible unless you go looking, because nothing on the business’s end feels different.
Only then, the campaign and the page. Tracking still firing, budget still active, nothing paused by accident. This is usually where people start, and it’s usually the least likely cause.
What’s telling is how often the fix costs nothing. A wrong phone number, a broken redirect, a mismatched category, none of that needs a bigger ad budget. It needs someone to actually look. I’d rather tell a client “your number’s wrong, fix that first” than sell them a campaign increase that papers over the real problem for a month before it shows up again.
That’s the bit I think gets missed in how most of this industry talks about itself. The pitch is always more: more spend, more content, more platforms. The useful work is usually smaller and less billable than that. A client doesn’t need to hear that I’m clever. They need to know that if something’s actually broken, I’ll tell them what it is before I tell them what it costs to fix.
If your enquiries have dropped off and nobody’s walked you through this list yet, it’s worth doing yourself before you spend anything. Most of it takes ten minutes and a phone.