If you expected your website to generate lots of leads for you and instead you’re watching it flounder, you’re not alone. For any business owner, optimizing your website to generate leads, and convert sales, should be a top priority. But it’s surprisingly easy to commit these 7 key mistakes – we see it all the time.
Take a look at the most common ‘problem areas’ that are likely to be slowing down your website’s success. Make these changes and start seeing your leads grow!
Problem Area 1:
You’re over-complicating your information
Within five seconds your website (or any landing page on your site) should be able to inform your customers that they’re in the right place and that you can help them with what they’re looking for.
This is what your customer wants to know:
- Who are you?
- What can you do for me?
- Why should I buy from you?
- What’s included in your products?
- Why will this product benefit me?
And remember, it’s not just your website they’re browsing, it’s all your competitors too. So, if you can’t clearly and quickly communicate how and why they should buy from you, you can be sure your visitors will happily buy from a competitor instead.
Problem Area 2:
No call to action? Then don’t expect customers to take any action!
A call-to-action (CTA) is an image, line of text, or call button that prompts your customer to take an action. This might be to phone you, to register for an event or newsletter, or to purchase. While a good product or offer is critical, your website conversions will often come down to the strength of your call to action. So take a look at your existing site: do you have obvious, easy to access CTAs for your customers?
Problem Area 3:
You’re talking about yourself instead of what you can offer the customer
Revisit your website and bring the focus back to the customer – they don’t care about you, they care about value for themselves. Instead of rabbiting on about your business objectives, your long and boring history and what you hope to provide, give your customers a punchy offer. Show them how your offer will meet their needs, and why they should choose you.
Problem Area 4:
You haven’t built trust:
This might come as a shock, but visitors to your site won’t judge you on prettiness – research shows that they’re much more concerned with how trustworthy you seem and whether they feel your business can add value to them.
So think about ways that you can clearly convey that your business, product or service can be relied upon. For example:
- Does your business have lots of experience?
- Do you have reviews and testimonials that can give potential customers confidence in you?
- Is your website secure and safe to buy from?
- Is your business easy to contact and deal with?
- Do you have amazing case studies or results to show?
Problem Area 5:
Have you ignored SEO?
In a lot of ways, this point should be number one on this list. After all, we know that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. And we also know that leads generated through SEO have a much higher opt-in rate than other digital marketing channels. So, no matter how good your website is, if people aren’t finding you-you’re not in the race.
Local SEO and on-site optimization can be an incredibly cost-effective form of online marketing for small business. Targeting local terms, such as suburbs, with long-form content (1000+ words) can often help your site reach the first page for search terms overnight.
So don’t let SEO be an afterthought: you should view your website as an investment rather than an expense, and SEO is one of the best ways to start investing in getting quality leads.
Problem Area 6:
Your website design and content is out of date
Lots of websites were originally designed just to give an online presence – like a detail on a business card so your customers could gather a little more info before calling you back. That’s not the case anymore.
Now, websites are powerful point-of-sale tools where customers expect to be able to seek, find and complete their purchase.
There are major benefits in overhauling your website every 2-3 years. You want to make things as easy as possible for your potential customers; keep it up to date with your latest information so that your visitors have everything they need to make their decision.
Besides, your business is or should be, in a constant state of change which means the key messages you’ll need to get across on your website will also need updating too.
Problem Area 7:
You’ve forgotten the importance of being mobile friendly
Responsive web design is the way in which your website responds when it’s viewed on different devices, i.e. mobile, tablets, desktops. According to Google, you’re likely to lose 61 percent of visitors if your mobile website is difficult to navigate. The flip side of this is that if your users enjoy a positive experience with your site, they are 67 percent more likely to convert and tell their friends about it. So which side of that equation do you want your site to be on?
So what are some of the key elements that every website should have:
- Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Your main headline plus a supporting headline
- The hero shot: Relevant hero shot of your business, product, services or team.
- The benefits of your offer: A bullet point list summary of benefits, followed by benefits and features in detail
- Trust indicators: reviews, testimonials, where you’ve been featured, brands who’ve used you.
- Your Call-To-Action (CTA): call us, sign up, buy now, etc., using color to make your CTAs pop.
Remember that your website is the backbone of your digital marketing success. If won’t matter how much you spend on any digital marketing if your website fails to convert.
Even if you have mediocre success you’ll be leaving a tonne of money on the table if you don’t fix these critical elements of your website.
Remember, you don’t need to pay for expensive landing page software if you build your website with conversions and trust in mind. Don’t waste your money by making the mistakes we’ve outlined in this article.
If you feel your website has long past it’s used to date, then it might be the time you reached out to a digital marketing expert so you can maximise the return you can generate online.