How to Make your Website Fail in 5 Easy Steps
It takes a lot of time and effort to create a website that gains you new customers, as well as increasing your sales.
Unfortunately, there are lots of common mistakes people make with their website. These mistakes significantly decrease the chances of the website being a successful marketing tool for their business.
Given how important a website can be to the success of a business it is best to get things right from the start.
Here are 5 of the most common mistakes people make with their website:
1. Expectations are too high
Often people think that all they have to do is create a website and the sales will start flowing in. It takes a lot of ongoing work to make a website successful. You need to get a lot of people to your website before you will start to get sales. It is estimated that if you can get 2 or 3 people out of every 100 people who visit your website to become customers then this is a good conversion rate.
Besides having a great design for your website you need lots of online marketing strategies. These strategies include Google Ads, Bing Ads, search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media marketing. Social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
No matter what strategy you decide on it will take time to get it right. If your expectations are too high, it can result in you becoming inpatient and making changes to your website or online marketing strategy that work against your long term success.
2. Hidden calls to action
A call to action is a prompt for your customers to do something. This may be to purchase a product, watch a video, give you a phone call, send you an email or subscribe to a newsletter. A common mistake is to only have calls to action at the bottom of the page. You should never assume that your customer will read everything on your page before they are ready to action.
It is very important to make sure that a call to action is always within view. This means that a customer is always able to take action (eg make a purchase) immediately, instead of hunting around to find out how. This means lots of calls to action are required on a page – particularly at the top of the page.
3. Too many steps before a purchase can be made
It is great to have a lot of information on your website. Specifically lots of relevant content is one of the best ways to improve your SEO. It also shows that you are very knowledgeable about what you are selling.
However, most people will only skim over a much of what is written on a website. At some point, they will make the decision to buy. When they do this the steps to make the purchase must be as streamlined as possible. Generally the more steps involved, the greater the chance the purchase will not happen.
4. Making it all about you
It takes a lot of hard work to run a business. You need to have passion for what you are selling. However, sometimes this passion can make you forget that others need convincing how good your product or service is. The benefits may be obvious to you but not to every one else.
In particular you need to convince your customers how they will benefit once they have made the purchase. This needs to be backed up by reviews and testimonials from existing customers.
5. You are trying to sell something that nobody wants
You have a stunning new website with lots of calls to action and a streamlined purchase process. In addition, you are doing online advertising, using social media as well as SEO. Despite this your sales are still very low. This may mean that people are not interested in what you are selling. Should this be the case then it doesn’t matter how good your website is or how much you spend on your marketing, you will still not get enough sales to succeed.
If this is the case you need to take a step back and look at the fundamentals of your business. What are you selling? Who are you selling to? And how viable is the business?
Dynamic Websites specialise in small business web design. We are based in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and provide services throughout Australia. We understand what it takes to get a small business online at an affordable price and with the minimum of fuss. Along with designing websites for small business, tradies and NDIS service providers we provide online marketing services. Our online marketing for small business extends to Google Ads, Google My Business, Microsoft Advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), content writing and, blog writing.
