You can tell a website is working by the sales leads that come through the form. More messages means more business, and a quiet inbox means trouble. Every owner I meet keeps score this way, and honestly, it feels right. A lead arrives, you can see it, you can bill it. That’s the scoreboard.
Hold that thought, because I want to tell you about the scariest thing I have ever done on purpose.
Learning to fly blind
When I was working on my pilot’s license, there came a day my instructor covered the windows. That’s the actual training method for instrument flying: they blanket the cockpit so you can see nothing outside, and you fly the airplane on the gauges alone. Every landing after that was an act of faith in a handful of small dials.
Here’s the part they warn you about in ground school, and the part I didn’t believe until I felt it. Fun fact: in the dark, flying perfectly level, your inner ear tells you that you’re climbing. Not subtly. Your whole body insists on it. And pilots who believe their body do the natural thing: they push the nose down to feel level again. Which means they fly a smooth, comfortable, confident descent straight into the ground. There’s a technical name for the illusion, but the plain version is the one that matters: your body lies to you.
The entire discipline of instrument flying comes down to one uncomfortable habit. When your gut says climbing and the altimeter says level, you believe the altimeter. Every time. No matter how loudly your gut argues. The instruments don’t get scared, and they never get fooled by the dark.
I have never been more certain of anything than I was certain we were climbing that day. We were not. Bill, the navy pilot riding beside me, had the good manners to let the gauges do the arguing.
Your website has instruments too
So. Your website.
Those sales leads in your inbox are your inner ear. They feel like altitude. A good week of enquiries feels exactly like a business gaining height, and a quiet week feels like sinking, and neither feeling tells you what the airplane is actually doing.
The instruments are sitting right there: Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Free, connected to your site, quietly recording the truth while you and I go by feel. They’ll keep telling you the truth even on the weeks you’d rather they didn’t. And here’s what they show that your inbox never will: the keyword you stopped ranking for in March. The pages on your own site quietly competing against each other for the same search. The page that gets a thousand impressions and no clicks because the title reads like a filing label. The business listing with your old phone number on it, sending callers somewhere else because the NAP is wrong. Heck, maybe you didn’t know NAP means name, address, phone number until this paragraph, and that’s fine, because now you do, and now you can check yours.
It’s not about how many leads you got this week. It’s about how many you lost without ever seeing them, because nobody was watching the gauges.
The instrument check
This week, do one landing on instruments, or have someone who reads gauges for a living do the first one with you. Open Search Console and look at which searches show your site and whether anyone clicks. Open Analytics and look at where your visitors actually come from, not where you assume they do. Then search your own business name and check that the phone number Google shows is one you still answer.
Twenty minutes, maybe. If everything matches your gut, wonderful, enjoy the rare pleasure of a gut that matches the gauges. And if it doesn’t, you just caught a smooth, comfortable, confident descent while there was still altitude to fix it.
I still hate flying blind. I just hate guessing more.
If you are making decisions on analytics you have never verified, that is worth catching. Checking that your measurement reports what you think it does is part of my site audit. If your numbers feel off, book a call and we will check the plumbing.
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