Many small-to-medium-sized businesses and organizations craft incredible promotional campaigns. Yet, they still struggle to gain the same level of traffic to their websites and brick-and-mortar locations as their competitors. Why? More often than not, their websites don’t meet the high standards they set for their other promotional activities.
If you’re uncertain about your website’s effectiveness, you’ve come to the right place. Before you look to any other area of your business or organization to try to understand why you’ve failed to reach enough members of your target audience, consider the possibility that reach alone isn’t the problem.
What Impression Does Your Website Leave On Visitors?
Your website may receive plenty of visitors, but they quickly lose interest. Ask someone who has no affiliation with you or your business or organization to look at your website and give you honest feedback. Sometimes a site looks perfect in the eyes of its owner when it actually contains negative elements, such as outdated information or graphics, difficult-to-use navigation options, and confusing content. You might have too many contrasting fonts or colors that make it difficult to read. It might feature images that make you or your brand seem unflattering or even offensive.
How Clear and Well-Organized Is Your Site?
Sometimes people don’t stay on a site long because of vague and disorganized content. They also expect a familiar basic layout to make navigation easy. Your website’s home page should at least engage every visitor, summarize the purpose of your business or organization, and link to additional relevant, useful information. With navigation, it’s best to stick with what people expect, such as a navigation bar or menu along one side or the top of pages. Product and service pages should concisely explain topics. The site should also have a history and mission/goal page and a contact page that clearly explains how to reach you.
Does Your Website Work Correctly or Feature Errors?
Another turn-off for people is a website that has serious tech problems. If your site has broken links, pages that load too slowly, embedded videos that play poorly, or auto-play videos or background music with no mute or stop option, then it’s likely annoying and possibly even angering visitors. Additionally, it should feature smooth scrolling and offer working communication tools. Your website is pushing away potential customers if any of these areas fail to work correctly.
Do You Offer Memorable and Valuable Content?
It’s important to note that people only stay on a website and return to it in the future if they feel that the content provides them with something they need that’s unavailable elsewhere. For this reason, you should utilize evergreen and up-to-date engaging content that prompts them to stick around, or at least come back at a later date to learn more. For example, your site should at least have an events calendar, a blog with recent news and industry-related topic posts, and links on every page to additional content found on different pages on your site or on partner or affiliate websites.
One Final Thought…
If your website doesn’t rank well with online search engines, then it’s definitely not effective enough. You might need to improve the site’s search engine optimization elements or the meta-data used for search results.
The best way to correct these problems is by speaking with marketing specialists at a professional marketing agency like Dotedison Marketing. Each member of our team possesses the knowledge and skills needed to quickly pinpoint problems with your site and offer you solutions that improve traffic, ranking, and other critical areas so that you can better reach your target audience, maintain their interest and achieve your short-term and long-term goals.