What could be going wrong with your website?
You have worked hard on your website, you added EVERYTHING you had! You have pictures, every single service you offer, and lots and lots of text explaining how awesome your company is.
So why aren’t you getting leads from your website?
No traffic
Your website might be out there on the great big interwebs, but it’s essentially an island until you start building bridges to get to you. You have to build a series of links into and out of your website, building bridges that connect you to all the other sites already indexed by the search engines. If you don’t get indexed by search engines like Google or Bing, then you aren’t going to get any traffic that wasn’t sent there directly by you. At that point, your site is essentially a digital brochure you are telling people to check out. They are leads you already had.
You have to build those links (in and out!) to get indexed. Then you need to put out your “sign” so people know what you do. Imagine how a doctor used to hang that shingle outside with his name and specialty. Your website also needs that shingle. On a website, that’s a mixture of content and keywords that tell the search engines what you do. Without that, no one will find you because you don’t have any sign out.
Poor website design
The ads you see on tv and the web make it seem like building a website is as simple as clicking a few buttons and typing in some text. However, they fail to mention there is a science to the design process. Certain elements can cause people to just HAVE TO click what you want them to click, and certain elements can make people click that “close window” button faster than the speed of light. Do you know which is which?
Is your site easy to follow? A lot of text may seem like the way to share what your business does, but is it easy to follow or does it give people a headache? Overloading your visitors won’t be beneficial to your goals. Is your site driving people away because it’s poorly designed?
Lack of trust
An unprofessional design, more keywords than actual human based messages, and inconsistent messages across platforms (including print advertising) will leave people confused and a little leary about hiring you for whatever you do. Your website is there to greet people you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. Do you want them to think you are a reputable business that they can trust? Or that a room full of chain smoking monkeys cranked out a bunch of pages to try to get people to part with their hard earned cash?
Your message needs to be clear and written for your audience, not the search engines. A lot of companies claim to be able to get you to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) by loading your site with keywords. That makes it hard to read for humans, and Google actually penalizes that behavior. You get higher ranking if you write your message for humans.
If your ads in the local paper look like a different company than your website, or they offer one thing and the website offers something conflicting, then how will people know it’s you they are dealing with? If they aren’t sure, people will back away and go elsewhere. Your ads need to be consistent across the board. Whether you are advertising on a bus, Nana’s bridge tables, or in the local Chamber of Commerce newsletter…every instance should resemble the feeling of your website, or at the very least have enough elements that match to make people feel secure that they’ve arrived in the right place.
Website is too slow
Do people leave the website before your logo has a chance to make an appearance? Then your site is too slow. This could be because your site has too much going on behind the scenes (more add-ons and flashy-spinny things are not always a good thing), OR your server is just not capable of handling your website’s needs.
You can ask your web host or webmaster to see what could be slowing it down, or check on a service like Pingdom.com
Need help figuring out why your website isn’t working?
We can take a look and let you know what might need work, and what definitely needs work. You can contact us here.