A clinic owner told me last month that his website gets around forty enquiries a month and he closes two of them. He wanted to know what was wrong with the website.

Nothing was wrong with the website. The problem was that the forty people filling in his form were not forty buyers. They were forty people trying to find out what a treatment costs, because the site would not tell them. The form was the only way to get a number, so they used the form. Then his receptionist spent her week quoting prices to people who were never going to book.

His two real buyers were in there somewhere. So were thirty-eight price checks. He was paying staff time to sort one from the other, and calling the result a lead problem.

Every business I have had this conversation with says the same thing when I ask why the price is not on the site. It depends on the job. We do not want to scare people off. We do not want competitors to see it. All three are real concerns and none of them survive the first look at the numbers.

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The fear is that a published price loses you work. It does lose you some. The question worth asking is which work.

Someone with no budget sees your number and leaves. You never hear from them, and you were never going to win them anyway. That is the loss, and it is a saving dressed as a loss.

Someone with the budget sees your number, decides it is reasonable, and gets in touch already half sold. That conversation starts at scope instead of starting at cost. It is shorter, it is calmer, and it closes more often.

Then there is the third person, and this is the one people forget. Someone with the budget who cannot find a number at all. They do not fill in your form. They open a second tab, find a competitor who did publish, and compare that competitor against nothing. You were not rejected. You were never in the comparison.

That third person is the expensive one, and no analytics dashboard will show them to you. They leave no trace except a bounce.

Most of the time it genuinely does depend. A kitchen fit-out, a legal case, a custom build. You cannot put one number on the page and honour it.

You do not have to. Publishing a price is not the same as publishing one price. There are three honest ways to put a number on the page when the final figure is unknown, and all three do the job.

The worked example is the one almost nobody uses, and it is the one that converts. A visitor reading a real project with a real total can place themselves against it in about ten seconds. Bigger than that, smaller than that, about the same. They arrive at your form having already done the qualifying you were hoping to do on the call.

Put two or three of these on the page at different sizes and you have given people a ruler instead of a quote.

This objection comes up every time, so it is worth answering directly. Your competitors already know roughly what you charge. They have heard it from clients who shopped both of you. They have seen your quotes, because prospects forward quotes. In some industries they have simply rung you and asked.

The only group your hidden price is successfully hiding from is your buyers.

And if your position rests on nobody being able to compare you, that is worth knowing now rather than later. A business that can only win in the dark has a pricing problem, not a marketing problem. Publishing the number is how you find out which one you have.

What a published price does do is force you to be clear about what is included. That is uncomfortable work. Most of the arguments against publishing turn out, when you push on them, to be arguments against doing that work.

You do not need a redesign for this. You need one section on your main service page and about an hour.

Enquiry volume will probably fall. That is the point, and it is why you should write down today’s numbers before you publish, so you can tell the difference between fewer enquiries and fewer sales.

The clinic owner published a starting figure and two worked examples. His enquiries dropped from forty a month to twenty-three. He booked six. His receptionist got her week back.

If you want a second opinion on where the number should sit on your own site, we do a free audit and we will tell you if the page is already fine.

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