The Top 10 Reasons Websites Fail
Sometimes websites fail to generate valuable online leads and don’t drive sales. If your website isn’t providing a real and measurable return on your investment, then it isn’t performing as well as it should.
From our experience, here are the top 10 reasons why your website might not be helping you to achieve your business goals.
1. Poorly promoted
Once you have created an attractive looking website with excellent functionality and great content, you will need visitors.
To start, you need to help people find your site online. There are number of things you can do, including:
search engine optimisation (SEO)
social media marketing
online marketing
public relations
pay per click (PPC) advertising
offline advertising
If you haven’t tried some of these options yet, then they are worth considering.
2. Not being responsive for mobile devices
People now use their mobile devices to view websites more than desktop or laptop computers, so your website needs to perform well on smartphones and tablets.
This is called being ‘responsive’ and it means your website needs to look just as great and work perfectly on all kinds of devices. Search engines like Google have already started to prioritise mobile performance and non-responsive sites will appear further down their rankings.
3. Lacking a purpose
Yogi Berra was right when he said: “If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else.”
Every page on your website needs a clearly defined purpose. If you aren’t clear what you want to happen when visitors come to your site, then they probably won’t do anything except leave.
Before creating your website, it’s important to think about:
the impression you want to make
your target audience
the actions you want visitors to take
This information will then help you to design and structure your site to deliver the results you want.
4. Disappointing design
Your business website is probably the first point of contact for your potential customers, so you need to make the right impression. When they arrive, you need to convince them quickly that they have found the right business to meet their needs.
If your website looks out of date, is difficult to navigate, or hasn’t been designed with your ideal customers in mind, it won’t be delivering the right results for your business.
5. Taking too long to load
Especially on mobile devices, people expect websites to load quickly. According to Google, the majority of web users now expect a site to load in 3 seconds or less. If a page takes longer than this your customers will start to look somewhere else and you will have lost a sales opportunity.
Make sure that your website is mobile friendly, properly configured and optimised to make sure your pages load quickly. Investing in high quality, reliable hosting is also important to deliver fast page loading times. If you want to know how your website currently performs, Google provides a helpful online page speed checker.
6. Unclear calls to action
When someone comes to your site you will want them to take some action whether it’s subscribing to your newsletter, visiting your blog, completing an online enquiry form or giving you a call.
Whatever you want them to do, it’s important that you tell them clearly, so make sure your call to action is prominent and tells them exactly what to do next.
7. Difficult navigation
You don’t have long to attract someone’s attention. Your website’s visitors need to be able to find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily.
If your navigation is difficult to find and even harder to follow, they will quickly become frustrated and go somewhere else.
Imagine what people will be looking for when they come to your site. Keep everything as simple as you can and make sure you make their journey as interesting and rewarding as possible.
8. Things that don’t work properly
Your visitors won’t be impressed if parts of your website don’t work properly or if links are broken. When you make changes on your site make sure you check that they all work as you expected on your live site.
Broken links to other websites are a common problem, so make sure you check them regularly and repair them quickly. There are free tools available like Screaming Frog (yes, that really is its name), which will allow you to check up to 500 links on your site.
9. Poor quality content
Provide your visitors with good quality content that is engaging and well written and you will make a good impression, even if your business isn’t exactly what they’re looking for.
Making sure your keywords are included naturally in your on-page content will also help to improve your search engine result page (SERP) performance.
On the other hand, if your content is dull, inaccurate or has spelling mistakes and poor grammar, your performance will be affected, and you won’t be improving the reputation of your business.
10. Not being optimised for search engines
The performance of your website depends on how easily it can be found. If customers find your competitors’ sites first, you could be missing out on sales opportunities.
Many people now start their buying process with an online search, so a good search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy will improve your visibility and encourage the right sort of people to take a look at your site.
Why us....
An it’seeze website makes it easy to tackle all of these problems so that your business website performs well online. It will be custom designed to meet your needs and you can edit it yourself, so it will always be up to date.
Talk to Andy Axtell, your local it’seeze consultant, to find out just how easy it really is.
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