10 Reasons Your Website Isn't Delivering Customers

Almost every business in the world has a website these days. Yet a lot of those organizations face the problem of getting few visitors or not getting enough sales from their websites. We often hear that from new customers. Some common comments are: “why aren’t we getting any visitors”, “I get a lot of visitors but no one contacts me”, or “we are on Facebook actively but none of our followers goes to our website”. Maybe you too are wondering why your website is not bringing in customers.

The truth is that your organization needs more than just a website. Often organizations forget to build a strategy around it. For many, it’s just an online business card: nothing more than a digital way for their customers to find their contact details.. If you want more visitors to your website and turn those into customers, then your website has to have relevant content, tailored to the search intent of your buyer persona. That’s where a lot of organizations struggle. That’s a pity: your website is the foundation of anything you do online, and can be a powerful tool for bringing in those customers.

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There’s no strategy

Without a well thought out strategy, there is no point in having a website. You will not draw in the right visitors, or generated the number of leads you would like without that strategy. It’s like driving to the other side of Europe without using a GPS. You start driving, but it will take ages and a good deal of luck to reach your goal. So take some time to determine your strategy. Think carefully about the purpose of your website, who your buyer personas are, what social media you want to use, your landing pages etc. Once you have your inbound marketing strategy clear, you can build a website that attracts the right visitors and hopefully converts those visitors into actionable leads. By the way, we seriously recommend you to consider Growth Driven Design.

Your website is built the wrong way

Even the most well thought out strategies are often not realized because of poor performance. That’s also the case with websites. Unfortunately, in the world of online marketing, there are also a lot of companies that don’t deliver the quality you’re looking for. For example, you want to build a house and you make a plan with an architect. And then ask a bunch of untrained amateurs to actually build your house. The result is a house with crooked walls, doors in the wrong place and a kitchen that is too small. Not only will it just cost you a lot of money, but you also won’t get any results with the website you get. Before you hire a team to build your site, check what they already have in their portfolio and if those clients are satisfied. Get some kind of proof from their expertise. If you feel like you can’t trust them building your website, then look elsewhere.

A bad homepage

You’ve probably experienced it: you clicked on a linke and you ended up on a horrible homepage. Then you clicked away as fast as you could and visited a competitor’s website. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s what most people would do. Everyone wants a good experience. The home page of your website is incredibly important because it immediately gives an impression of your organization. If your homepage hasn’t had any updates in the past 5 years, visitors will definitely drop out. They probably think you went out of business 5 years ago. I cannot emphasize enough how important a homepage is. it is the first impression people get and you only have 1 shot for this first impression. Spend enough attention on building a clear homepage that will make people interested to read and click through the rest of your website.

Not mobile-friendly

Everybody has a smartphone. For several years, websites have been viewed more on mobile devices than on computers as a general rule. Just look around in public places or on public transportation. So it’s important to have a website that people can comfortably view on mobile devices. Google penalizes websites in their search results that are not mobile-friendly. Since 2018, Google has been focusing on mobile-first. Mobile-friendly websites are more likely to show up in search results than non-mobile-friendly websites. Want to know if your website is mobile friendly? Then check this Google tool.

The wrong keywords

Imagine that you finally have a professional website with amazing landing pages AND a mobile-friendly design. Most organizations are happy with that and will already start looking forward to all the traffic they will get. Well, think again. If the designer didn’t provide any keywords, or used the wrong ones, you still won’t attract the right visitors. Keywords are really important: your potential customers use keywords to look for solutions to their problem.

If you don’t use those same keywords, they won’t visit your website. So be sure to the as much time as needed on SEO and take care of keywords. Not only in your titles but also in alt tags, metadata and so on.

Your website is too slow

A website that is too slow hurts your SEO. Google penalizes this. It is an element of the algorithms that search engines use to give your website a score. Research shows that more than 50% of your visitors leave your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds for your page to load. 3 seconds is a really short time! Test here how fast your website is.

If you notice that your website is too slow, sit down with your web developer and see what you can do. Is the server hosting your website the problem? Are your images just too big? Are you using an extreme amount of javascript? With a few tweaks, you can make your website significantly faster, and you will see the results immediately in your analytics.

Not enough content

Another element that search engines base the algorithm on is whether or not you post new content on your website regularly. An easy way to take care of that is to write a blog. You don’t always have to call it ‘Blog’ by the way. Or you can add photos, change titles and keywords or add new pages and videos. As long as you post new content regularly, you are doing your SEO a big favor.

If you decide to add a blog to your website, prepare well. Start looking for topics you can write about that are also relevant to your target audience. Start with a content calendar and make sure you have a good mix of content types. Do not overdo it, post at a frequency that you can handle and that you can maintain over time.

Focus on content promotion

Publishing content on your website and then waiting for visitors is a common mistake. Having content on your website is one thing, and a very important one. But you can’t just sit back and wait for search engines to rank your page, and not everyone is going to get to your website through just from organic search. So make sure you have a plan to promote the content on your website.

You can do that through social media. When you decided on your strategy, you also mapped out your target audience and what channels are best to post on.

A content calendar allows you to schedule content on each platform so you can keep track. Use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your social media with content. Of course, you can also advertise on social media.

Don’t forget the possibilities of email marketing. In terms of ROI, email marketing is still the most effective way to reach people online. It takes some time to build up a list of contacts, ut once you’re there, with the right approach, you can achieve great results.

No call-to-actions

Suppose you DO get a lot of visitors to your website. Now you want to get them to do something. For example, subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, register for a course, download a document and so on. To trigger that you use a call-to-action, in the form of a button on your page or on your Facebook page. Putting the right call-to-action in the right place is harder than you might think. But it’s o so important to get a good ROI from your website.

No focus on analytics

Your website has so many possibilities. But if you’re not looking at your analytics, you don’t know if you’re doing the right things. How else will you know if a Facebook post is getting any traction? And what content is doing well? Analytics is a part of the job that many people don’t like and often just skip. But we can recommend that you take a thorough look at your analytics regularly. The insights you get from this exercise will make your marketing efforts more efficient and get more out of your website.

There you have it. Just having a website is not enough. With some effort, you can turn your website into a lead generation machine. Of course, there could be more reasons why your website is not generating customers. Start with your digital strategy. You’ll see your online marketing efforts will get results soon. Don’t forget to involve your team, and ask for advice and opinions. They have a different perspective and see things you don’t see. Do you have questions about this? Talk to our expert about it.