Your Website Absolutely Sucks! Here’s Why

The old saying "if you build it, they will come” is long gone when it comes to the internet. While your business must have a website to have a good chance of succeeding, putting up a website is far from enough to succeed. Your website is the first impression many people generate about your business. Let’s look at some of the reasons why your website might be failing and what you can do to correct them.

Poor Functional Performance

Your website will fail if it takes too long to load. Search engines reward websites that load quickly and penalize those that take too long to load. For example, Google penalizes sites that can’t be crawled in a few seconds. Sites that load so slowly that your potential visitor bounce away are registered as a poor match with searchers’ intent, destroying your search engine optimization efforts and ranking in response to queries. Every second a site takes to load costs you around 10% of the potential visitors that did click on your link.

The solution is a web design that loads quickly. And the site must be mobile friendly or else search engines will penalize it, even if it loads fast.

You Aren’t Running the Right Numbers

Your website’s performance shouldn’t be measured by the number of visits. You should be looking at your conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who actually buy a product or sign up for the service. You should be looking at your search engine results ranking for key search terms that bring in paying customers, not the search engine ranking for popular terms that don’t lead to sales. Search engine optimization is now a science, relying on statistical analysis to determine the best key search terms to put in your website and at what density and the ads with the best return on investment.

You can even call in the professionals to run A/B testing of different marketing messages and ads in conjunction with different key search terms to determine the ideal combination. Marketing automation captures much of this information for you such as the percentage of recipients who open an email based on the subject line and the percentage that click on links within the emails. The same data can be generated by testing different landing pages to see which ones result in the most signups or clickthroughs.

Your Website Is Only an Online Brochure

A pretty web design may give people a good impression of the product or service, but if they can’t then act on that information, your website fails. Your website design must give people the ability to order your products in as simple a manner as possible. They need to have clear calls to action to sign up for your newsletter for long term content marketing or obvious instructions on how to call your service people. Streamline the purchasing process to require as little data entry as possible to maximize sales while designing an interface that works on a smart phone as well as a personal computer.

Interactive content on a website is ideal for keeping people engaged, as long as it doesn’t slow down load times. So, design an infographic that loads fast instead of a game that takes so long to load that no one will ever play it. Note that Adobe Flash should never be used on your website, since it is utterly incompatible with mobile devices, and mobile users perform the majority of web searches now.

Your content must also take the users’ preferences into account. Show them the information they are most likely to want like your business’ location and contact information on the top of the home page. Don’t start playing videos as soon as they come onto the site, but instead let them see an attractive starting image and give them the option to play it. Eliminate any background music on your website and avoid narration.

Conclusion

If you want your website to be competitive, it must be performant if you don’t want your rankings to suffer. Your site must also be optimized for mobile devices to rank well with search engines and be accessible to the majority of potential customers. Give customers clear indicators on how to use your website. Run A/B tests to determine which marketing messages and key search terms work best with your desired customer base.