It takes time and effort to create and maintain a website. It takes money, too, if you use support to maintain it. Despite this investment of resources, your website may not be helping you as much as you hope. Let’s take a no-holds-barred look at some ways your website could be hurting you more than it’s helping.
Helps: Your site draws in organic traffic.
A great website draws in organic traffic by providing insightful information to people who are looking for it. Top-quality, search-engine optimized (SEO) material that’s written to connect with visitors will entice someone to your site and get them to stay, bookmark the site, and return often. Organic traffic is the best kind of traffic because it means someone who wanted to find you did and you made it easy for that person to do so.
Organic traffic costs nothing and, based on the volume of visitors, shows you that your content is catchy, written in a way to draw interest, and providing the right level of information people want.
If people arrive at your site following a search and don’t bounce away, if your site displays products cleanly and in an engaging way, if you offer the right level of information, then you’ve got it right.
Hurts: Your site is not mobile-responsive.
According to TechJury:
- Over 80% of internet users use mobile devices to surf the web.
- 83% of mobile users expect a flawless experience whenever they visit a website with any mobile device.
- Up to 70 percent of web traffic comes from mobile devices.
That means if your website isn’t mobile-responsive, you miss out on a large amount of traffic. You’ve likely experienced visiting a website on your mobile phone where menus or articles won’t show up correctly. Or maybe the text is hard to read because it doesn’t adjust to the mobile device screen.
In today’s marketplace, it’s critical that whatever content management system (CMS) you use has mobile-responsive templates that work across the spectrum of devices, including phones and tablets.
Helps: Your site gains newsletter signups.
Having a robust email list and continually engaging with website visitors through regular mailings or drip campaigns is one way to strengthen your connection with your audience. For that reason, having a signup form on your website is key. In addition, if you’re savvy, website visitors can opt-in to receive further information from you based on the type of products or services they’re most interested in.
Pop-up ads for signups can be annoying to visitors and they can slow your site. Instead, make your email signups friendlier and easy to find on every page. When people go to the trouble to enter their information, you know they genuinely want to continue the relationship.
Hurts: Your site isn’t updated regularly.
Google ranking is crucial because people won’t find you through the search engines without a high enough ranking. You want to land on the first page of search results. Google loves regularly updated content. It continually crawls the web and draws in indexing on a website where new content exists. For that reason, the only way to stay in the Google rankings is to add content to your website regularly.
And, of course, the more content you add, the more keywords you have available for searchers to find. Remember that adding even one blog post each week is enough. You don’t have to do more than that. Hire a content writer if you need help, but keep updating and adding content. Even revisiting old posts or pages and adding to them is valuable.
Helps: Your site showcases your products or services.
There is nothing like a great-looking website to keep people coming back. Your website is the front door to the equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store. Even as a service provider, think of your website as the way for a potential customer to walk through the door and have an engaging interaction with you about what you have to offer.
E-commerce sites that are well laid out and provide concise, accurate information on product materials and features get visitors to stay and browse longer. The longer they browse, the more likely they are to find something and make a purchase. Therefore, making an attractive site with products cleanly laid out and a streamlined purchasing process will likely lead to more visits and more purchases.
Hurts: Not having your contact details displayed.
With an abundance of scams and dummy websites, one thing you want to be transparent about and readily provide is contact details for your business. Depending on the nature of your business and whether it is fully remote or operating from a physical address, website visitors want to contact a person. They want to know where you are and how they can reach you.
Would you want to do business with an organization that provided no contact information on its website? Probably not, and reasonably so. Your website is the foundational place to build trust with potential clients or customers. Providing contact details is one key way of doing that.
Helps: Your site provides information about the people behind the business.
People do business with other people; they don’t do business with a business name only. Therefore, building a relationship is what is essential. Providing information about who you are, what you’re passionate about, why you started your business, and your goal or aim is all valuable information that will help a potential customer decide whether you are the right person for them to do business with. It also gives personality to your business.
With a great “About Us” page that showcases who you are and what you stand for, people will feel welcomed and connected with you. They may reach out to request more information on what you do or purchase from you based on your business philosophy.
If you notice that your site has even one thing that’s hurting you, you might want to do a website tune-up. First, monitor your site statistics and understand which pages are drawing visitors and which aren’t, and work on adding content that changes keywords or provides a different level of information. Finally, you may consider asking a group of people, customers and non-customers, to spend an hour or so exploring your website and giving you feedback. Your website truly is your front door for customers, so make sure it’s the very best it can be.
