8 Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Attracting Clients and Customers
Whether you hired a professional or DIY’d your website, there are mistakes to be made when it comes to choosing and organizing content and working towards user-friendly design elements. Your website should be generating income, attracting clients and customers and leaving your users with an easy-breezy experience when they visit your site. If you’re not bringing in your desired amount of customers and clients on the regular, your website is most likely to blame.
Here are 8 things that might be killing your website:
You have no clear site goals or calls to action.
This is the BIG ONE. Not having site goals will kill your website quick. Pick one to three site goals. Example: you are an eyelash studio that wants to schedule new clients through your site. This would be your main site goal: to schedule clients. Secondary goals would be to have clients engage with you on social media and to join your newsletter.
A clear call to action to support these site goals would be:
Have a “schedule now” button front and center on every page and easy to find. You will also want this in your header and footer.
Have an invitation to join the mailing list and social media links in the footer of each page.
Your use of design does not adhere to your site goals.
You want to have great design elements, but you NEVER want them to be the main focus of your site, as this distracts from your site goals. Simple, clean and effective design choices are great components of a successful site. Here are a few design tips to support your site goals:
Choose colors that compliment your brand. When choosing colors for your site, you want them to be on-brand (ie: they adhere to your brand guidelines or share a similar message of your brand). Here are a couple of great resources for choosing colors:
It’s best to not use more than 3 colors if you are not familiar with color theory or digital design. Less is more and far more user friendly and coherent. My go-to when I design sites is to pick a main color, a second color in the same color family and a third complimentary color.
You want to use your main pop of color sparingly on important headers, links, and those call to action buttons that lead your visitors to where you want them.
You do not have a distinct list of services, price listing, or you aren’t offering packages.
The number one place that clients and customers will be visiting on your site is a “Services” page. You should have this page easy to find and on your main navigation. Your users want to know what you offer, how much you charge and if you offer packages. If you do not have these listed, your visitors will often go to a competitor’s site to find what they need. Guilty! I do this all the time! If I am searching a website for a service I am interested in and I do not see pricing listed or package options, I find someone else. Make sure your website clearly lists these things or you’ll lose business, simple as that!
Things are hard to find on your site.
This ties into #3 above. If your visitors can’t find what they need, they can become frustrated quickly and close that browser window. The end. What you want to do is narrow down your main pages. To keep best practices, you’ll want to list the following, or similar in the main navigation of your website: home page, services page, about page, and contact page. These are the musts. How I like to outline my home pages is have a small section that gives a teaser or highlight of each main page with a call to action button or link in each section to those main pages.
If your page is more complex, make sure subcategories are listed where appropriate. Example: you have many services- so an easy way to list this is to have these different services in a drop down menu under “services” that links to a separate page or jumps to a particular section of a single scroll services page.
Don’t forget to have your call to action buttons in easy to find places throughout your site to make it effortless for your clients to contact you, book with you, etc.
You have no SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. When you build your website and create your content, it’s important to have focused, well written pages that are relevant and have purpose. Your content topics, or keywords, represent the search terms that connect you with your audience.
Build your content with these best practices in mind. It’s important to anticipate what your target audience might search for when looking for your products and services. Make your content clear, concise and to the point. Lists make content more digestible for example. Infographics are another form of engaging content. Search to see what other types of content are performing well in the search engines and produce something similar, or better. The content that answers readers’ questions and helps them find what they’re looking for will rise to the top as it is the most relevant, and thus, the most valuable.
Your site is not mobile responsive.
It’s just not cute when you’re browsing a website on your phone and you run across words so small you can’t read them or some of the page is cut off, or my least favorite- the menu or links are so tiny that you have to zoom in to click! This is mega unprofessional. If you are using Squarespace, your site will most likely be optimized for mobile, but it may not be ideal. In this case, you may need a web designer to help you with some code to tweak the mobile responsiveness. Contact me here if you are needing Squarespace help!
You are using low quality images.
Low quality images will make your website look… well, LOW QUALITY! I cannot stress this enough to my clients — invest in some professional photography for your business or brand or at a minimum, choose high quality stock photos for your website. There are many copyright free sites to use out there. Here are some good ones:
sitebuilderreport.com/stock-up
These sites offer professional photos you can download for a fee:
Too many words!
Less is so much more! Research has shown time and again that people no longer read- they scan. Guilty! In the age of smart devices and short attention spans, having too much copy is just a no-go. This is also a very beneficial marketing strategy for you because it really helps you be concise about your brand, what you offer, your main points, etc. Edit down, edit down, edit down! Keep that copy short and to the point!
A few tips:
Use bullet points and icons to show main points.
If long text is necessary, consider using a “read more” button to show hidden text.
Save longer explanations and things you want to say for a blog, not the main pages of your site.
I hope this has been helpful to you! These are definitely 8 of the most common reasons why you may not be reaching your goals through your site. If you are designing your own site without design experience, I commend you! As a designer, I know it is not easy. If you would like to hire a designer, or have an experienced designer take a look at what could be improved on your site, I’m your girl! We can get on a quick call to chat about your needs.
Angela
