Is your website lifeless, producing little or no value to your business?
On average websites are updated every two or three years because they stopped, or never did bring tangible benefits to the company. Most websites have to undergo complete redesigns in order to keep up with competitors and to keep their leads and traffic flowing.
The real problem is, re-designs can be expensive and time consuming. Updating every two or three years will only get you so far. Maybe you're in charge of your company's website re-design, or possibly you are just trying to find the answers to your website problems.
Here are five reasons you are looking for solutions to your website problems, and how to solve them for good.
5 Reasons Your Website Sucks
1. Confused Identity
Your website sucks because you’ve never figured out who you are, and if you did, you’ve forgotten. Instead of focused, hard-hitting content, your site has become a hodgepodge of cat videos and cute GIFs with a few helpful resources sprinkled in here and there. It’s time you find your identity, clean out meaningless content, and get back to your websites original purpose. Ask yourself why did we build this site? Who am I trying to reach (target audience)?
Stop trying to appeal to everyone on the internet. Find your niche and identify your target audience. Once you do that, then write to them. Give them quality content. If your business is selling women’s footwear, don’t try to appeal to men’s sense of fashion. Focus your blog on ladies’ shoes. Tell them how to find the perfect shoe - and the right fit. Make your site appealing to women, and fill it with content that answers their questions and meets their needs.
2. You Cut Corners
Your website sucks because you sacrificed both time and money to get it launched. Now that it’s up and running, you don’t have time to keep it fresh and current, and there is no one to hand the project off to.
On the other hand, growth driven design is a smarter way to think about your website. It flows seamlessly with the Lean Startup methodology. An important part of Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop. When you have issues that arise, getting feedback is crucial on locating and fixing problems, bugs, and glitches.
If there are videos on your page but the player crashes and is slow within certain web browsers, you need to know which browsers and find a solution to this issue. New updates to browsers and software might cripple articles and pages. Getting ahead of the game is crucial for a great buyers' experience.
Being informed about possible issues before they happen will allow you to either prevent or respond efficiently and accordingly. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and be forced to do a complete re-design of your site that will cost massive amounts of time and money. Learn more about the benefits of Growth Driven Design. It’s a great way to fix the little time, little money problem.
3. It’s Not Responsive
Your website sucks because you let the future sneak up on you. You built your site for desktop computers, but now everyone is searching and gathering information on smart phones, tablets, and a variety of mobile devices. Continuing to run an unresponsive website, one that does not automatically adjust to be easily read on mobile devices, is throwing money to the wind and frustrating your potential customers.
48% of users say that if they arrive on a business site that isn't working well on mobile, they take it as an indication of the business simply not caring. 52% of users said they would be less likely to engage with a company if the mobile experience on their site was bad (Source: MarginMedia).
Having a website that adjusts to the technology is key to obtaining and wowing visitors on your site.
Start thinking “Mobile First.”
Strip away all the fluff and get down to the bare bones.
- Clean.
- Easy to navigate.
- Up and Down scrolling only.
- Large buttons that thumbs can easily press.
You can still be creative and have cool graphics on your site that may not be visible on mobile devices, but make sure your customer can find what he/she is looking for on his/her phone - and then wow them with your creativity and cutting edge technology when they visit your site on their laptop or desktop.
74% of users said they would be more likely to return to a site in the future which has been mobile optimized(Source: MarginMedia).So please build responsively.
4. It's Not Inbound Oriented
Your website sucks because you don’t have dedicated landing pages for inbound marketing or PPC. Inbound Marketing is promoting yourself, company, or product. Blog posts, videos, eBooks, podcast, whitepapers, and other forms of content marketing allow you to do just that.
This serves as a way to attract leads along the different stages of the purchasing funnel, and allows customers to become familiar with your company. It also helps establish your company’s authority in your field of expertise.
Without proper landing pages designed to usher in leads, money is simply being thrown down the drain.
Landing pages create a relationship with a potential client and turns that into a lead. A potential client is given a close look at a company and is usually given an offer of some sort in exchange for information allowing a company to market to them. From this a company can find out where the buyer is in his/her journey and what the lead’s needs are.
Landing pages can either be a part of a call-to-action advertisement or a Pay Per Click(PPC) ad. The call to action and PPC ads allow for the potential customer to be led right to a specified landing page that has information directly related to the ad they clicked on. Simply sending a potential customer to the homepage of your website after they have clicked on a specified ad will only leave them feeling misled, and can cause them to get bogged down in all that the company site offers.
Don’t throw all you have at a lead just to send them to your website’s home page! Send them to a specified landing page that gives them what you promised.
5. A Disregard for SEO
Your website sucks because the last blog post was from February 2011! Not updating your website is sending a clear message to clients. If you fail to keep your website up to date, you will fail to take care of their problems as well. Failing to keep your blog updated also leads to a drop in search engine traffic.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows your website to climb higher on the search engine website list. Many factors and variables go into the SEO: keywords, page titles, urls, publish date, etc.
The SEO benefits of regularly updating your blog are to great to be ignored!
Updating helps drive traffic to your website. Constantly having new content on your website breathes life into the SEO. Giving a fresh take on an issue or problem can help your website climb a little higher in the rankings. This also builds your website’s page numbers and gives potential clients more pertinent information.
Traffic being driven to your site helps convert to leads. The more people that come to your site, the more likely you are to obtain a lead.
Updating and building content helps establish authority in your field and helps drive long term results. Here’s some ways to give your SEO a boost today.
Get the 'Suck' Out of Your Website
Audit your website. Keep these 5 Reasons in mind when you do it.
Ask yourself:
- Is the site is performing like it should?
- How is the traffic on your site?
- Are you attracting a steady stream of leads and customers?
If not, it's probably time for a new website design.
