Today, it’s customary for businesses to have a presence online, especially if they want to be competitive in their industry. However, many of these business owners think they can piece together anything, and just put it online. If you have an outdated website, then it will never fulfill its potential, making it a waste of cyber space. This is obviously not a good thing, as there are tons of potential clients that you are losing as a result of it.
Your website is where you generate the bulk of your sales, for this reason, you need to ensure that it is operating at maximum efficiency. The sad reality however, is that many sites are not doing as well as they could or should. For whatever reason, there must be something wrong with your website that is leading to your site failing.
If you have a website that is not converting your site visitors into customers, then you must find out why that is. Below is a list of the 5 most common reasons why websites fail. I suggest you read and adopt where applicable.
1. No Content Strategy
Your content is what makes your site, but are you creating the kind of content that is properly focussed to what you’re trying to sale? You need to, not only post articles, but also think about what you’re posting, when you’re doing it. You need to spend some time to think about your target audience, your brand, you’re SEO efforts and how you intend to distribute your content. You want your content to be new and accessible, and you want your visitors to fulfil whatever goal you’ve laid out for them.
2. Site Is Not Mobile Ready
Most people access the web on their mobile devices, nowadays. This has been shown, by the number of mobile queries that are made on the major search engines. Visitors are now looking for sites and buying things from them directly from their site. The reason why, is because visitors are now doing these things while out and about, and because of convenience and speed. You can count on this trend continuing, for the foreseeable future, so you need to ensure that your site is able to handle all these would-be clients, and the only way to do that, is by making your site mobile ready.
If you have a website that is not mobile ready, then, right from the beginning, you have a major problem, as it is almost certainly hurting your sites ability to generate sales. This can also adversely affect your sites rankings, as search engines such as Google take these factors into consideration when ranking your site.
In order to make your website mobile ready, you will need to use a responsive site theme. You can usually acquire these, free of charge, so it shouldn’t be any problem. The only thing you’ll need to do is shift everything over to this new theme, while trying to stay true to your original theme.
3. No Promotional Efforts
One of the biggest reasons why people’s sites fail is due to a lack of promotion. Once you have your site up and running, you’ll want to start driving traffic to it. In order to do that, you have several options, these include the following:
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Referral links
- Organic traffic
- Paid advertising
If you’re not continuously promoting your site to the world, then your site is never going to reach its full potential. A website will do considerably better if it’s promoted, and you should see a marked increase in customers and sales.
You don’t need to utilize all the different promotional methods I’ve outlined above, but you should be active in several of them. Organic traffic should be standard, along with any social media platforms. Depending on the kind of business, you may also want to consider paid advertising and email marketing.
4. Site Has No SEO Strategy
Over 75% of those who use search engines, never go past the first page of a search results query, so if your site isn’t properly optimized for the search engines, then you’ll forever miss out on this traffic. You can’t simply stuff your articles with keywords, as there’s much more to the search engines than that. Today, if you want to adopt a proper SEO campaign, there are a number of things for you to consider. You need to select the right keywords, through research, then you need a clear idea of how to intend to get links, using proper methods, then social media and other things need to be factored in (as described above).
5. No Conversion Strategy
Every website created, should have a particular purpose to it. You want your website to be welcoming, a place where people can gather to learn more about what you want to push to them. In order to effectively do that, you need to consider your call-to-action. You need to have understanding of the various on-page and off-page factors when thinking about conversion strategies. From the information gathered you should be able to put together a more effective conversion funnel that will produce the kinds of results that you’ve always longed for.
–AUTHOR INFO—
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website where he writes extensively on computer related issues.