Work in this order
A quiet enquiry form has a small number of causes, and they sit in a sequence. There is no point rewriting your vetting page if nobody reaches it, and no point buying traffic if the page they land on cannot tell a family from a candidate. Work down this list and stop at the first thing that is clearly broken.
1. Nobody can tell which half of the site is theirs
Open your home page on your phone as if you were a mother with a three-month-old going back to work in May. Can you tell, in the first screen, where you are supposed to go? Now do it again as a nanny looking for a live-out role.
If the answer to either is no, this is your problem and everything below it is secondary. An agency home page needs two visible routes at the top: one for families, one for candidates. Not a dropdown. Not a paragraph mentioning both. Two blocks, plainly labelled, each leading into its own set of pages and its own form.
Fix: rebuild the first screen around the split. It is often a single afternoon of work and it is usually the largest single gain available.
2. The vetting page does not exist, or says nothing
A family can find a nanny themselves on a marketplace for nothing. They come to you and pay a placement fee for one reason: you check people and they cannot. If the site does not show that work, the fee looks arbitrary.
The phrase "all our nannies are fully vetted" is not that showing. What works is the sequence, written out: how identity is confirmed, how references are taken up and spoken to rather than just collected, what background checking you carry out and what it is called where you operate, how qualifications and paediatric first aid are verified, what the interview covers, and what you can show a family on request.
Fix: write the page in order, in your own words, and describe it as what your agency does rather than as a statement of law. Never publish certificate images or reference numbers.
3. Fees are not stated
Families compare agencies on fee. An agency that will not indicate a fee until a call is an agency families rank last, because the call feels like a sales appointment.
You do not need a single number. You need the basis: how the placement fee is calculated, what it includes, whether there is a replacement period, whether temporary placements are charged differently, and any ongoing or registration fee. That is enough to be compared fairly, which is what you want.
Fix: a fees page in plain terms, linked from the family route, with the basis stated even where the number varies.
4. The form asks for a message
If your family enquiry is name, email and message, every enquiry needs a phone call before it is usable, and a share of families never write the message at all.
Ask what a consultant asks: children and ages, hours and days needed, live-in or live-out, location, start date, budget band, and anything unusual about the household. Use conditional sections so nobody sees questions that do not apply. Then land it in your CRM as a record.
Fix: rebuild the form around the questions you actually ask. Long is fine when every question is obviously relevant. Vague is what people abandon.
5. Candidates and families share one form
A shared form produces a mailbox where a family with a September start sits under fourteen CVs. Consultants miss things, and reply times drift.
Fix: two forms, two destinations, two reply routines, and a stated reply window on each. Candidate registration takes a CV upload and availability. Family enquiry takes the role.
6. The site is slow, or breaks in an app browser
Test on mobile data with wifi off, from cold. If the first screen takes more than a few seconds, a share of your traffic is gone before the split you fixed in step one is ever seen. Then open the site from your own Instagram profile link, because in-app browsers break embedded forms quietly and nobody reports it.
Fix: compress the imagery, remove the sliders, and test the actual form to submission inside the in-app browser.
7. There is no reason to believe you
Team profiles with real faces and real names of consultants. Testimonials from both sides, families and nannies, first names only and no children named or pictured. A Google review link. Years in operation, areas covered, any professional association membership stated accurately.
Fix: put the proof next to the buttons, not on a page called Testimonials that nobody opens.
8. You are invisible for the searches that matter
Families search by role and place: nanny agency plus their town, live-in nanny plus their county, after-school nanny plus their area. If you have one page called Services, you are competing for none of them.
Fix: a page per role type and a page per area you genuinely cover, each written properly rather than spun. Then the ordinary local search foundation: consistent business details, a Google Business Profile, and the areas named as real places.
9. Only then, traffic
Advertising a site that fails steps one to five is paying to send families to a page that cannot sort them. Fix the structure, then spend.
Where this sits
Two routes, a vetting page written in order, fees stated, a detailed family enquiry and candidate registration with CV upload are the standard build for a nanny and au pair agency website, and the same diagnostic order applies across our childcare and family websites. What each package includes is on pricing. Start at the top of the list, not the bottom.