Most marketers and business owners focus all of their efforts on the design part of their website, and while design is an important aspect of the website development process, they tend to forget that it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
For modern businesses, it is important that your website brings value to your business.
Does it have a high conversion rate? If not, your design is probably not as perfect as you think.
7 indicators your website is killing your business
1. Does your website tell your company’s story?
Can visitors immediately discern from the home page what your business is about and why they should become your client?
Sometimes, particularly if a company uses ready-made templates for their website, the focus of the business is lost. Try looking at your website from the perspective of a client, or ask for a third opinion.
2. Multi-purpose pages
In reality, most people don’t like a lot of choices; they want to be led. Make sure your website has a focal call-to-action, and lead your visitors to the choices that you recommend through careful and thoughtful copy.
3. No call to action (CTA) on the website
According to the research of Small Biz Trends, 70% of small B2B websites don’t have a CTA at all. You have around 15 seconds to attract the attention of new visitors to your website. Not having a CTA means there is no clear communication of what should be the next step for your visitors. The best practice is that one page has one, or occasionally two, clear CTAs, for instance, ‘buy now’ for returning customers, or ‘get more information’ for new visitors.
Here is a great example of two calls to action used effectively:
4. Don’t try to put all information on the home page
Nowadays each page of your website is a landing page for Google.
Your company’s home page is more like an online ad for your business; like the cover of a book.
Its main purpose is for the visitors to understand who you are and why they should stay with/try/buy from you.
5. No functionality to build a client database
Not all visitors of your website are ready to become your clients from the first interaction. In these digital games, the winner is the one who doesn’t only attract visitors, but keeps them and puts them into a ‘conversion tunnel’.
6. Poor search engine optimisation (SEO)
You can have an attractive, high converting, optimised website, but if no one knows that it exists, you’ll have have no visitors. Did you know that if you have “noindex” code or incorrect robots.txt pages on your website, Google won’t be able to see your website? Have you done research into the keywords people type into Google when they search for your products or services? And do you use these same keywords for the description of your business and on your website? Talking to an SEO expert can solve these, and so many other, problems.
7. Your website is not mobile friendly
More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the Internet and make purchases. Have a look at this Mobile Marketing Statistics compilation and these Australian Internet and Social Media Statistics to see just how important being mobile friendly is. For example, for medical clinics or cosmetic brands, the percentage of visitors from mobile devices is often as high as 70-80%.
