You launched the site. A week passes, then a month. The contact form is quiet, and you start to wonder if something is broken.
Most answers online fall into two camps. One says "wait six to twelve months". The other quotes a conversion rate and leaves you to guess your traffic. Neither helps you decide whether to wait, fix something or spend more.
I'm Ilya, a solo developer in Bali. I build websites and run SEO for small businesses. I don't have a benchmark from thousands of sites, so I won't invent one. Here are two real numbers from my own projects, then the arithmetic you can run on your own site.
One caveat before the numbers
Both projects below serve Russian-speaking customers. Your market, niche and city are different, and your numbers will be too. Treat these as examples of the order of magnitude for a small business, not as a promise.
An "enquiry" here means a real request from a visitor: a form, a Telegram message or a call. It is not a sale. Plenty of enquiries never turn into a customer, and that is a separate problem from getting them.
Example 1: a legal-services site with 40+ pages
Nexora Legal is a legal-services company. The site has 40+ pages. Enquiries arrive in Telegram, so every request lands in one chat.
Result: 3 enquiries in 2 weeks.
That is about one every four to five days. For a niche where one client can be worth a lot, it is a workable number. For a shop that needs fifty orders a day, it would be a disaster. The same figure means different things for different businesses.
Example 2: an auto repair shop
Quality Lab is an auto repair shop. I built its website and I run its SEO.
Result: 1–2 enquiries per week.
An auto shop is a local business. People search for a service near them, then call or write. A steady trickle of one or two a week is the kind of flow a small service business can handle, and it only grows as the site earns visibility for more of the searches people run.
What the two numbers say together
Look at what they share.
- Neither site produces dozens of enquiries a day.
- Both produce a small, steady flow.
- Both sit in niches where a few good enquiries matter more than a crowd of casual visitors.
If you expected 20 enquiries a week from a new site for a local service, the numbers above are a useful reality check. If you expected two or three, you are in line.
The arithmetic you can run yourself
Enquiries are a product of two things:
enquiries = visitors × share of visitors who get in touch
Both pieces are measurable, and the first one is usually the problem.
Visitors. A new site starts with almost no visitors from search. Search engines need time to find, index and rank the pages. Until then, your traffic comes from people you send there: your social profiles, your email list, your business card, your business listing on a map service.
The share who get in touch. This depends on whether the page answers the visitor's question and makes the next step obvious. I don't have a universal percentage for you, and I'd distrust any article that gives one without naming the niche.
A quick sanity check. Say the phrase people use to find your service gets 200 searches a month in your area. Even if you ranked first for all of them, only some of those people would click and only some of them would write to you. The ceiling is set by the size of the niche before anything about your website matters. That is why a local plumber and a national online shop can't be compared.
Why a new site often brings little at first
These are the usual reasons, in the order I'd check them.
- Nobody can find it yet. The pages are new. Rankings take time to build. This is normal and not a sign of a broken site.
- The site answers the wrong question. If your pages describe the company and not the problem the customer types into a search box, they won't match what people search for.
- The next step is hidden. A contact form at the bottom of a long page, or a phone number in a small grey font, loses people who were ready to write.
- Replies are slow. An enquiry that waits a day often goes to a competitor who answered in an hour. This one is the cheapest to fix. A chat on the site can answer common questions at once, but only if it sticks to your own content: see how to stop a website AI chatbot making things up.
- You can't see the enquiries. Messages land in three different inboxes and nobody counts them. If you don't count, you can't tell whether things are improving. Also check that the analytics and Search Console accounts are in your name: see the website ownership checklist.
A simple plan for the first 90 days
Week 1. Choose one place where all enquiries land, such as a Telegram chat, one email address or a spreadsheet, and write down each message with the date and its source.
Weeks 2–4. Send people to the site yourself: your own social accounts, existing customers, partners, local listings. Look at how many of them write. If many visit and none write, the problem is the page. If few visit, the problem is traffic.
Months 2–3. Check which pages get visits from search and which searches bring them. Add or rewrite pages for the real questions people ask. Compare your enquiry count month to month.
At the end of 90 days you will know three things you did not know before: how many people come, how many of them write, and from where. That is worth more than any industry average.
How much does it cost to find out?
A website from me starts at $300. If you want help with search visibility, the SEO service page explains what is included. Payment is by bank transfer (to an Indonesian account), PayPal or crypto (USDT or USDC).
Summary
- Two real projects: 3 enquiries in 2 weeks for a 40+ page legal-services site, and 1–2 enquiries per week for an auto shop whose site and SEO I run.
- Both serve Russian-speaking customers. Your niche and city set your own numbers.
- Enquiries = visitors × share who get in touch. Check visitors first.
- Count every enquiry in one place from the first week.
Published: . By Ilya Litau, more on the About page.
Want a site you can measure from day one?
Tell me your niche and city. I'll tell you what a realistic first three months look like.