It’s difficult to ignore the mounting evidence that the Internet is playing a larger role in the purchasing decision of a potential buyer. However, not all small business websites are performing to their potential.
Why is that the case? There are 3 major factors that come into play if your business website is not living up to its potential. Making the appropriate changes to the design, marketing, and sales strategies can help you get the ROI that you want.
1) Poor User Experience Destroys Conversions
If your website is not offering the reader enough reasons to stay within 7 seconds, then you’re not getting any conversions, even with good traffic. Whether it takes forever to load or has a design that never grew out of the 1990s, people are going to leave your website faster than they would visit.
Poor user experience is bad for your business in more ways than one. For example, if your website is not mobile friendly, then you are going to be penalized with low ranking by Google. This is because Google is actively transitioning to a mobile first index. Similarly, if users have a hard time navigating through your website, you can count on them to never return again.
Getting a professional web design that is simple and functional should be on top of your agenda. If you don’t have the budget to hire a developer, go for content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or Shopify. These platforms allow you to create a website by using and editing professionally designed templates with ease.
If you are going to upload images, always compress, rather than just resizing them. Compressing your images will reduce the time that it takes to load a page, thus making your website faster. Implementing this would help ensure that your website visitors stay on your pages longer.
2) You Are Not Doing Enough or Ignoring SEO
Consider this: You want to get your dining table repaired, so what’s the first thing you do? You look for furniture repair services in your local area. How do you do that? By searching on Google, unless of course you ignore the convenience of the Internet and pick up a phone book.
Now as the owner of the furniture repair service, you want to make sure that your small business website is as prominent in search results as possible. Without good search engine optimization (SEO) and quality content, you can’t make it to the first page of search engines.
This is because the competition is high and ever increasing, ignoring SEO can actually get your website downgraded to the latter pages of search results. Here are some ways that you can optimize your website for search:
- Use the most relevant keywords in the home, services, and other core pages.
- Location based keywords can help improve your local rankings.
- Always put title and description on all the pages of your website.
- Good content goes a long way in improving SEO and user experience, so ensure a steady stream of fresh publications.
Good SEO will help you drive healthy traffic to your website on a regular basis. Even then, your website may fail to convert despite providing good user experience and getting healthy traffic, here’s why:
3) Bad Copywriting or Weak Punchline
Excellent copywriting is the most important aspect of every business, whether online or otherwise. One could say terrible copywriting is the same as having a bad sales team. Once your website goes live, the way to convert or keep people on your website is to rouse them to take action.
Action can be navigating to a new web page, buying something, reading, or signing up for your newsletter. Whatever the goal is, you can’t convince them with a bad pitch.
The call to action (CTA) is the most important part of your website in terms of sales. It’s the turning point where an interested visitor may become a paying customer. So if your CTA doesn’t have a punch to it, you are most probably losing a potential customer to a competitor.
Using a one-size fit all approach to CTA doesn’t necessarily work. For example, an article on “5 Tips for Buying Used Furniture” could have a CTA like this:
“If you are looking for a safe and reliable second hand furniture store, you can check out our products here!”
Now if you were to create a landing page for used furniture, this CTA wouldn’t really work, but would make for a good starting sentence. For a landing page, the CTA would be something like this:
“Furniture can be expensive, but doesn’t always have to be. Get the best used furniture that looks and feels as good as new!”
See what’s happening here? The CTA for the landing page is encouraging the target audience to buy, whereas the CTA for the article is presenting an option. This is why you should take time to prepare CTA’s for different types of content on your website for optimum conversion.
You shouldn’t think small for your business website. Effective marketing strategies and routine audits of your website can go a long way in getting you the results that you desire!
If you are strapped for time and need a good team to handle your design, marketing or copywriting, feel free to reach out.
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I’m a freelance copywriter and SEO specialist. I aim to empower individuals and businesses with impactful marketing solutions and insights. In my downtime, I recharge by embracing the beauty of nature or cherishing moments with my loved ones. If you found value in this post, please consider sharing it.
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