You've spent countless hours and a considerable amount of money on your website, but the results aren't what you expected.
It seems like your competitors are getting loads of traffic and sales, but you just can't figure out why your site is not performing in the same way.
Most business owners take the set-and-forget approach to their websites, and that's a big mistake. There are many elements to consider when trying to captivate and convert your target market.
Let's take a deeper look at 9 of the most overlooked areas where your website is underperforming and what steps you can take now to attract your ideal customers and get the sales rolling in.
1. Your website design is outdated
An outdated website design more often than not turns off potential customers from exploring and interacting with your site.
When you choose a style for your website, you want to make sure it conforms to today's standards of style, not last decade's.
An old-fashioned website does not instill confidence in a visitor that you are a trusted source or that you provide quality service.
Usually, there are many professionally designed, up-to-date templates for whatever website platform you're using. These are a great starting point, but they often need some tweaking to add a little uniqueness and to match your content.
It's best to consult with a website designer or a development team who has a good grasp of today's design, development, SEO, and digital marketing standards, as well as extensive experience. You definitely need a good blend of each to ensure your website performs most effectively.
2. You're targeting the wrong audience
Spend a little time to reflect on the type of people you're trying to reach.
An all-purpose website is great for reaching a wide variety of individuals, but it's not ideal if your business caters specifically to one niche market.
Your website's layout and user flow should be somewhat similar to your top competitors' sites.
For example, if you're in the restaurant service industry and your competitors have websites that are easy to navigate with full menus and pricing information prominently displayed, your website should too.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Your brand's styling, images, and unique selling propositions will give you differentiation, but straying too far from the norm with your website will confuse and repel your target audience.
3. You have too much clutter on your site, which makes it hard for a visitor to find what they're looking for
Clutter can include too many links on your homepage, no logical organization to your content (or lack of), or poor navigation.
If you have a lot going on in the background that's distracting or unappealing, it's probably hurting the user experience and deterring visitors from exploring your site any further.
Make sure your website is so easy to use that visitors can find what they're looking for with just a few clicks.
4. The content on your site isn't relevant or engaging enough to generate leads and sales
If your website content does not include what your potential customers are looking for, they will find it elsewhere.
Make sure you're focusing on what your customers want and need, not just you. Don't assume that they know what you do or that they're automatically going to be interested.
Boring, repetitive text is a turn-off for any reader and will make them leave quickly. Make sure you hit on your audience's pain points and explain how your products or services will help solve their problems.
5. Your website is not mobile-friendly
Mobile technology is now ubiquitous. This means that your website's content needs to be geared towards smartphones and tablets, and not just desktop or laptop users.
Your site's content should layout cleanly on all screens, have easy-to-navigate menus and buttons, and have text legible enough to read comfortably at small sizes.
Google now uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking, so if your website is not mobile-responsive, then your site's pages will likely not appear in Google's search results.
If part (or all) of your marketing strategy is organic search traffic, then it's absolutely critical that your website provide an ideal mobile device experience, or else you'll lose any high rankings in the search result pages.
6. There is no call-to-action that tells visitors what they should do next
When a visitor lands on any of your web pages, they should be directed with a clear call to action.
This could be anything from purchase, free trial sign-up, or downloading an ebook. The visitor will either do one of those three things because you have told them what the next step is on your website.
Without a clear call-to-action, the visitor is left with nothing but confusion and will likely bounce off your website due to a poor user experience.
A clear call-to-action can be as simple as "Sign Up For A Free Trial" on a button that leads to a sign up form.
7. Visitors can't find contact information anywhere on the site
Many sites suppress their contact information. This is a big mistake. Make sure you have contact info or a contact form that's easily accessible on every page of your site.
Some of the best practices are to make sure your phone number or a "contact us" navigation link or call-to-action button is at the top of the page.
Also, add your phone number, address, and any other relevant contact information in your website's footer. Not only does this allow qualified prospects, leads, or existing customers get in touch with you, it also increases your trust factor, which is important for optimizing conversions.
8. Your website doesn't load quickly on desktop computers or mobile devices
If your website takes too long to load then potential customers will abandon the site and go elsewhere.
One of the top causes of slow loading sites is too many (and too heavy) scripts loading on the page. This is typically caused by poorly coded website themes, and unminified and uncompressed files. Your best bet is to hire an experienced developer to optimize your site's scripts and to make sure that each page only loads scripts that are actually used on the page.
Another culprit is cheap, shared hosting. If you have a small site with very little content and images, then you might get away with this. But if you're running a ecommerce site with lots of products and concurrent users, or a site with a significant amount of content and traffic, then you want to make sure you have the right hosting plan.
Keep in mind that Google will begin taking page load speed into serious consideration when ranking sites in their search engine results pages (SERPs) beginning in mid-June 2021.
9. You haven't updated your content in a while
If you don't update your site content regularly then potential customers will see it as a sign that the company is no longer active.
This will most likely cause them to look for another website from which they can find information about your products and/or services.
You should plan on updating at least once per week in order to keep your website fresh.
These updates could be on your static pages, like the services, about, and resources pages. However, the best updates are newly published blog posts.
By publishing blog posts regularly, Google will be more inclined to rank your website's pages higher in the search results. Make sure your blog content is relevant and provides good value to your target audience because the longer they stay on the page and click to see your other posts, the better you will rank as well.
If you pay attention to these 9 areas where your website may be falling short and take the appropriate action to fix the discrepancies, then you'll be amazed at how your site will transform from stagnancy to an automated lead generation machine!
If all this sounds overwhelming or if you need some guidance implementing these ideas on your website, don't hesitate to reach out. We'll be happy to do a no-obligation website assessment for you...just fill out the form below.
