Your website is oftentimes your potential customer’s first impression of your company, and that makes it a pretty powerful marketing tool. Having a great website can win you customers around the world without any effort from a salesman. However, if your website isn’t created with the right things in mind, it can send the wrong...
Your website is oftentimes your potential customer’s first impression of your company, and that makes it a pretty powerful marketing tool. Having a great website can win you customers around the world without any effort from a salesman. However, if your website isn’t created with the right things in mind, it can send the wrong message to thousands of people, and eventually lead to a big loss in business.
Are you driving your visitor’s away? It’s possible, if you haven’t given your website a lot of thought. In our experience, there are 5 major things that will cause your visitors to rethink their decision to visit your site. We discuss them below.
1. Poor Content
The first and major thing that will drive away your visitors is poor content. If your content is confusing, poorly written, or lacking reliable references, you can pretty much guarantee your visitor is not going to make a habit of returning to your site. Visitors can also see right through content that is simply written to get clicks or satisfy a SEO keyword test.
If you want to keep your visitors on your page, keep your website interesting with informative videos, free downloads, and a blog. Not only will you make your visitors happy, you’ll learn more about them by reading blog comments or requiring them to fill out a form before a download. Make your content high quality and meaningful and you’ll get quality customers.
2. Unclear Directives
If you want to win customers using your website, don’t expect that people will email you for a quote or call you with their questions. Visitors to your site will expect to find the information they need once they go to your page. After all, this is 2017, and if you don’t have information and directions clearly stated on your site, people will think your business is out of touch, and will likely ditch you to go with one of your better prepared competitors. Make sure your website is clear, concise, and user-friendly.
3. Lack of Credibility
Another reason companies lose their web visitors is because they do not seem credible. The fastest way to establish trust with people who aren’t already familiar with your brand is to talk about your successes with other companies, hopefully companies that everyone is familiar with. For example, testimonials are a great way to win over a web visitor’s trust: they are statements saying that you’re reliable and promise success.
Other than testimonials, a great way to build credibility is to include the logos of companies you have worked with.
It also helps to make your website look professional and high quality, which brings us to number 4.
4. Looking Cheap
Quite possibly the worst thing you can do when making your website is skimp on getting a professional look. If you don’t put the time and resources into making your website look professionally made, you might as well not have a website. How many times have you clicked on a google search result just to find a page that was written with zero formatting and that was full of typos and paid advertisements? How fast have you clicked away from that site? You do not want your visitors arriving at a page that is badly maintained, containing poor grammar, or cheaply made.
Remember: When a visitor clicks on your page, and then quickly clicks “back”, Google takes note, and it reduces your SEO rating.
5. Too much information
This might seem counterintuitive, but having too much information on your site can drive away visitors as well. This is because you don’t want to make your visitors think too hard about what your company is and what they have to offer. You need to do the thinking for them – and this means putting a clear statement of what you do at the top of the page that quickly and easily explains to your visitors what your site is about and what you have to offer. We often refer to the “five second rule” as a good guideline for if your website is driving away visitors. The logic behind it is that if it takes a web visitor more than five seconds of looking at your site to figure out what you do as a business, it’s too late. That’s because most visitors will click away after that.
It’s sometimes hard to test the five second rule on yourself, because you are already familiar with your company and therefore you have the context to know what your business is about before looking at the page. Therefore, to test the five second rule, it can be a good idea to send out a survey asking people to give feedback on your site. If done the right way, this can also bring you some potential leads and useful customer knowledge, as you are directing people to your site and getting them to read about it.
Finding the right balance between informative and easy to understand, and between professional looking but clean and basic is difficult for any marketer, but it can be the key to successful online selling. Whether you are using a free tool like Wix to create your site, or have hired outside help to build a site from scratch, tackling these five concerns should be pretty easy as long as you take your time and do some research.
