Or, why thinking of your website like a brochure is an old and tired concept.
There is so, so much money spent on websites by businesses. Even in a world where today you ‘can vibe-code one in like 93 seconds, bro1‘, most of this budget is going on how the site looks, not what it actually does. And they’re not cheap marketing expenditures.
Almost half of UK SMEs report spending between £2,500 and £10,000 on their websites.
2
Especially when you consider that the average lifespan of these sites is less than two and a half years3. If there’s one thing a business owner — and often sadly, a marketing department — loves, it’s a new website build.
The trouble is:
The brief is ‘we need a new website’. Not ‘we need more leads’.
The new site arrives (late). It looks amazing. It’s got a branded corporate video as the header (of course). An AI chatbot (yawn). But it doesn’t bring any more leads than the last site did. It might even bring in fewer.
It’s not an uncommon problem, in fact,
96.6% of websites receive zero traffic from Google Search4
When you consider the capital expenditure that goes on these sites, it’s a bit depressing.
This is among the most common issues I see, and it’s been the same for twenty years. The site is never bad — it’s just that performance is an afterthought. But, and I bang my head against a wall on a frequent basis on this one — the website should be the performance. That’s the whole point.
What is a ‘brochure site’?
No beef towards web agencies, but they love selling these. They’re templated, they require the least amount of work, and the process is more about visual identity than performance. It’s their bread and butter work. You’ll spend more time picking colours and making the logo bigger, adding a homepage slider (sigh), and images of the HQ than deciding what the page actually says. Think about which of those two things your customers care most about.
A brochure site often looks like:
☑️ Fewer than ten pages
☑️ Homepage that either does nothing or tries to pack in absolutely everything
☑️ Service pages that describe what you do, not why anyone should care
☑️ Common customer questions aren’t addressed on key pages
☑️ No thought to customer journey beyond home → service → contact
☑️ All of the expertise within your team’s brilliant brains is still there — not on the page where it needs to be.
☑️ Blog hasn’t been touched since it was populated with a ‘new site’ post
☑️ CTAs that just link to the contact page
❌ Drives leads inbound on autopilot
These sites are built as if they were a PDF brochure. They’re for the business, not for the customer.
This isn’t a web agency problem
Web agencies build websites. They’re teams of designers, creatives, and developers, and their job is the look, the feel, the responsiveness. They’re not content strategists, and they shouldn’t need to be. Some agencies can manage both. They’re rare though.
The disconnect is between what the business owner asks for and what a website should do. The agency was tasked with ‘making it pop’, not making it deliver leads. Too many people were involved in the project, so the site gets designed by committee. And not one of those people considered content strategy, search visibility, lead quality, or content design.
Someone might have shouted ‘it needs to be fast’. Good on you, Ian, it’s a start. Someone might have skimmed it on their iPhone. ‘Testing’. But was anyone benchmarking leads before and measuring leads after the launch? Probably not.
And the cost of doing nothing just went up
Therein lies the problem, Search is changing — fast. AI Overviews, Claude, Perplexity — more and more people are getting answers without clicking through to a website at all. If your content is thin or generic, AI crawlers have nothing to work with. You don’t get cited, you don’t get surfaced.
1.9x
Websites updated regularly are 1.9x more likely to appear in AI answers5
55%
Businesses that blog get 55% more traffic than those that don’t6
84%
Of sites are considered dormant — receiving no new content7
Standing out in a sea of AI-generated sameness requires content that’s actually worth indexing. The businesses with clear, well-structured, genuinely useful content on their sites are the ones being pulled into AI answers. The ones with five thin pages and an abandoned blog? Invisible. Or possibly even worse for you and your customers — your CFO said ‘let’s just get ChatGPT to write it’. Quelle horreur.
Great website design is not an inbound lead strategy.
What actually works
The good news: if your site looks great, you’ve already got solid foundations. The design, the brand, the infrastructure — that’s done. What’s missing is the content strategy to make it perform.
That means building pages around what your customers are actually searching for, not just what you want to tell them. It means service pages that target real intent, answer real questions, and give your site something meaningful to rank for. Most businesses can identify three or four of these in a single conversation.
And a blog isn’t just a blog. There’s a difference between one that exists for the sake of it and one that drives traffic. Keyword strategy, search intent, structure, internal links — relatively minor additions to the way posts are planned and written can turn a dead blog into a genuine acquisition channel.
Businesses have buckets of useful information contained within the heads of their staff. It needs to come out on the page. If you don’t outwardly say that you offer a service on your site, how are customers meant to know — never mind ChatGPT?
Getting a content strategist involved during the scoping process — or even after launch — is more cost-effective than carrying on with a site that looks the part but doesn’t deliver. It saves time, and it means those worries about traffic can be turned into traffic opportunities.
What this looks like in practice
A property business came to me with a site that ticked every brochure-site box: five pages, a homepage that tried to do everything, and service pages that described what they did without once mentioning what their customers were searching for. Within six months of adding intent-led content and a properly structured blog, their organic traffic had become their primary source of inbound leads — ahead of paid search, referrals, and social combined.
That’s not unusual. It’s what happens when the content matches what people are actually looking for.
Don’t get stuck in the cycle of a new site every few years to fix an inbound lead problem.
Start with a free audit
Your site’s already there and it looks ace. That investment is locked in.
To hit your leads target this year, the site just needs the content strategy behind it. This is what I do every day. If any of this sounds familiar, book a free 30-minute call and I’ll assess how much work needs to be done.
- Some AI bro on LinkedIn, obviously ↩︎
- https://www.dotgo.uk/lp-web-design/how-much-does-a-website-cost ↩︎
- https://huemor.rocks/blog/how-often-should-you-redesign-a-website/ ↩︎
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/ ↩︎
- https://www.searchable.com/blog/ai-visibility-tracking ↩︎
- https://offers.hubspot.com/lessons-from-marketing-stats ↩︎
- https://www.convergine.com/blog/must-know-website-statistics-in-2025-trends-insights-and-what-they-mean-for-you/ ↩︎