9 Mistakes Smart Business Owners Make With Their Websites. Are You Making Them?

 

1. Be part of your overall marketing and business strategy.
2. Deliver value to your ideal customers.

Sadly many websites do not do this.

Here are 9 things many websites currently do which can either boost or kill sales for their owners. Please take some time to compare your site to these and make any changes necessary. If you do your returns from the site will go up even if your traffic levels do not change.

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Your site has no clear offer or calls to action.

There is nothing more important than having a strong offer on your website. The offer needs to be almost too good to be true in order to get someone to take action. The offer also needs to have little or no risk for the potential customer. This is where a lead generation tool like a valuable FREE Report is effective for most businesses.

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No sign-up form to capture potential customer details for later follow up. Very few people are ready, willing and able to buy when they first come across your website.

You need people to know, like and trust your business and this takes time to achieve. So you must capture their details (at least email) on their first visit. Then you have to properly follow up and gain them as a client when they are ready to buy.

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You rely more on social media than your website. Here’s some bad news. Social media accounts are never truly yours. They can be shut down anytime if the provider decides to do that. Often there is little you can do about it.

By all means, use social media for traffic but make sure you have a strategy to get people off social media and into your own database for future marketing. If you develop a great database you will find that if you want to sell your business you will get a much higher price. That’s what Google really purchased when they bought YouTube.

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Your site offers too many choices. What happens when you face too many choices? If you’re anything like me you normally walk away and don’t buy or go elsewhere for what you need.

Instead be really clear about what action you want someone to take on your site and remove anything that distracts from them taking that action.

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You are not clear about who your ideal customer is.

Every business has an ideal customer. You know the one who pays well and generates few, if any, headaches. We all want more of these right? Then your site needs to reflect this. By deciding who we target with the site we might feel as though we are reducing future sales. However, the reality is for many businesses fewer, better quality, customers is the right way to go.

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You don’t immediately show people they’re in the right place. If you get this wrong you can kiss the customer goodbye!

So you’ve attracted your ideal customer to your site, congratulations. Now you need to make sure they know, within under 4 seconds, they are in the right place. This is where creating the site for your ideal customer comes into its own. The single best thing you can do to show them they are in the right place is to tell them with a clear headline that states what you can do for them. If you get this right then you can start building a relationship with a potential future client. You do this by getting them to know, like and trust you over time.

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Your site uses jargon.

Write plainly to be understood and it’s more likely than not your audience will appreciate that, no matter how well educated they are. Get someone who doesn’t know your business to read your site and see if they clearly understand what you offer.

Don’t ignore WIIFM (what’s in it for me). It may sound harsh but the truth is no-one cares about what you do! They care about what you can do for them.

They have a problem/pain that they want to fix. You can be the solution if you explain what you offer in terms they care about. For example, if you’re a Chiropractor you don’t say we manipulate the body to improve your health. Instead, you say something like ‘You will be moving with dramatically less pain after just 1 visit’ (or whatever the relevant promise is).

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Your site requires too many clicks/steps to action.

If someone wants to call you, make it easy to find your number on each page. If you want an email address then just ask for that, rather than full name/address details. You can get these later by offering an extra incentive to provide them.

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All your traffic comes from just 1 traffic source. Business owners pull their hair out when Google does an update and their rankings sink. Or Facebook closes your page because a competitor complained about it.

The point is you need multiple traffic sources. Then you need to bring this traffic to your site and into your own marketing database. Then if something changes you might be a little peeved but your business is not decimated.

So there are 9 things that can either boost or kill the results from your website. Hopefully, you’re not guilty of the sales-killing ones or if you are then you’re now fixing them! I thank you for taking some time out of your day to read this post. My goal was to deliver value that is simple and immediately actionable for your business.