If you’ve got an attractive looking website and a bunch of content uploaded, you may be wondering why customers aren’t visiting in greater numbers and, when they do, why they aren’t converting to sales.
Here we take a closer look at 5 reasons your website appears to be stagnating and what to do about it.
1. Your SEO Isn’t Working
In the old days of the internet, SEO was almost all about throwing in your main keyword as many times as possible and getting spurious inbound links from various spam blogging sites as you could find. Hit the right numbers and you usually ended up near the top of the rankings.
Thankfully for those who prefer good content, Google algorithms have become a lot more sophisticated in recent years.
This means that SEO is a nuanced practice that takes thought and effort. It not only means you can’t flood your content with keywords but that the content also has to be of high quality. You can’t link from any old site to get incoming link brownie points, you have to choose reputable locations that have a decent ranking themselves.
Also, you need to focus on design aspects like the speed of page download, whether your site is mobile friendly and how seamless the user experience is.
2. You Don’t Harness the Power of Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool when used in the right way. We see so many business websites that don’t, for example, have social media sharing tools on them. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get your page content out there. People love to share and buttons on each page improve the chance of that happening.
We also find that businesses use platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the wrong way. They are more concerned about pushing services or products than actually engaging with their audience.
To boost visits to your website, you need to carefully think through your social media strategy – what platforms you are going to focus on, what you are going to post, how do you measure interaction and what do you want the endpoint to be?
3. It’s All About You
Content is really important, especially on the main pages of your website. These service pages should be designed for one thing only and that’s to get customers to buy your product or hire your service.
All too often businesses talk about themselves on these pages. They say things like: ‘We have this to offer’ or ‘we have this or that sort of function’.
What they talk less about is what benefit their product or service is to the customer. If you are not converting on your website, it may be that you’re not offering the solution that your customer is looking for.
This comes down to the old marketing features vs benefits debate. You need to focus on benefits at least 70% of the time in your content. What can you achieve for your customer? How will it change their lives?
4. Your Content is Static
Search engines love sites that have new content. If you simply upload your service or product pages and haven’t added any new information in months or even years it can affect your ranking.
The easiest way to create new content for your website is to have a regular blog. This not only keeps your site live but gives you the option of targeting certain keywords that attract more traffic. It also gives your audience more information to share on social media which can increase visibility.
5. You’re Making it Difficult to Buy
Finally, one of the biggest barriers to online conversions is a clogged up sales funnel. Ideally, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customer to hit a page and then buy your product or hire your service. Too often, we see sites where the navigation is too complicated or pages lack a clear call to action.
If you are struggling to convert customers, start going through your site to see where you may have inadvertently set up barriers to buying. Changing these might make a big difference to your conversion rate.
Contact Us
If you have a site that is not attracting customers or converting them in large enough numbers, the team at Web Design Portsmouth will run an audit and help you understand where things can be improved.
