The three most common reasons websites fail

One of the biggest problems in the digital world today is the tide of useless websites flooding the market. It is a source of immense frustration for many business owners. Many extremely successful businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on websites and then find they simply don’t deliver the right leads.

Deb Croucher, founder and CEO of Brilliant Digital, has 20 years’ experience building websites. She and her team have a phenomenal track record of results across countless industries, and in her opinion, there are three things you MUST get right if you want your website to deliver the right leads.

How to identify if your website suffers from poor content:

• There’s no clear messaging around what you do, for who and why. How is your customer going to know they are in the right place?
• There’s a lack of passion, excitement and enthusiasm about your company, products and services. Why would a customer get excited, if you’re not?
• Poor quality images – or none at all. The same stock photos that everyone uses. This immediately tells your customer that you are not interested. If you’re not putting any effort into your own business, how can they trust you to take care of their needs?

Content needs to inspire

All these things are part of content and will immediately turn a visitor off you and your company. The visitor will click ‘back’ and go and find another website – your competitor’s – and see if they can find what they are looking for there instead. Your content needs to inspire.

Your content is your digital salesperson

We make purchasing decisions with our emotions, even online. You need to connect with your online customers to the same degree that you would in a face to face encounter. Since an online encounter will miss all the non-verbal cues that make up 80% of our face to face communication, you need to convey them in your digital content. Your content is your digital sales person.

Common design and user experience (UX) errors

• Hiding the navigation bar so people can’t find what they’re looking for.
• Using really clever language in your headings that strangers to your business will not understand.
• No text links to take your visitor on a journey through your site.
• Lazy layout – clunky blocks of text with a picture on top. That is not a story. That is a mess.
• No story – you must weave a multimedia story into your website.
• No journey – a good website is layered so visitors can journey through the site, learning more and more about your company as they go.

Basically, in this digital world, you are who Google says you are.

If you haven’t gone to the effort of making sure your business is search engine friendly so your business is found as the result of all those Google searches related to your business activity, then you are not going to get the eyes you need on your website. In short, you will not get the lead volume you want.

When you search Google (because everybody does), do you check the businesses on page 346?

No. No one does.

You need to make friends with Google if you want your website to be seen. To sustain your business and to have your digital business grow organically, it is crucial to get the Google ranking of your website sorted.

So, there you have it:

• engaging content,
• strong design and user experience, and
• a good relationship with Google.

The three essentials for any successful lead-generating website.

If you’d like our help in making that happen, contact us.