You may be surprised at the number of things that you are doing on your website that are putting your website visitors off. Simple mistakes, and seemingly inconsequential decisions, can affect the perception of your whole business, damage your reputation, and have visitors heading for the back button in no time.
Let's take a look at some of the things that really put people off, so that you can take off any that you need to address on your website.
New Website – No Plan
Any website has a purpose, a goal. Many websites have many things they're looking to achieve. You need to understand why your website is online and ensure that it is geared to achieve what it is supposed to achieve. Too many websites are thrown together without thought. How are you going to communicate your value proposition and ensure that people are willing to take action? How are you going to answer search queries and get people into a sales funnel?
How does your sales funnel work, and what are the different ways you can offer website visitors to convert? When you build a plan, you need to structure your website to provide solutions and lead people through specific steps in order to have them convert. You need to build trust signals and credibility through your website and have a clear plan of how you are going to take your website visitor from point A to point C – Conversion.
Using PDFs
This is one you may be guilty of. Lots of people have downloadable PDFs on their website to provide extra information on services, their industry, events, or anything else that they didn't really feel fit in their website. A lot of people won’t download PDFs in order to read them. Many people won't have PDF readers on the devices.
Take any PDFs and turn them into a blog, and have a suitable blog section or theme for the types of content you need to publish. It will improve your rankings if the content is valuable, and it will ensure that users don't have to break their flow in order to read the content.
Using The Wrong Domain Name
Your business name and your domain name are really important. Many people just choose something they like without thinking about whether it is appropriate for their business, or their industry.
Your business name and domain name need to be memorable, short and easy to type. When you choose your business name and domain name, go through research to understand your sector and work out something that would be appropriate. If your domain name isn't right, then you might like to go through a rebranding process.
Ignoring The ‘Mobile First’ Recommendation
More and more people are using their mobiles to search for products and services. Google has built a mobile friendly test into Webmaster tools. If your website is not passing this test, and you have elements of your page that are not suitable for mobile environments, then you will have your rankings affected, and the user experience for your website visitors will be under par. Make sure you test your mobile website version on different screens. There are tools that you can use to see how your website renders on tablets, smartphones and desktops of different sizes.
Not Analysing Your Website Metrics
If you aren’t tracking how your website is doing, how do you know when you need to change things? You need to track your visitors, bounce rates, page speed, number of pages visited, most popular pages, exit pages, entry pages and so on. Install Google Analytics if you haven't already. By looking at the stats, you will understand more about your visitors and how they interact with your website. You may identify certain pages that are getting a lot of traffic but aren’t converting, signalling that they need some attention.
Cluttered Your Content
One of the worst user experience issues is having lots of blocks of content without spaces, and having many elements on your page causing confusion. To increase site engagement and conversions, keep things simple, scannable and clear. Don't tell your website visitors everything at once, take them through a journey.
Broken Links On Your Page
Website links that go through to a 404-error page are really annoying. They will affect your credibility, and may also affect your search engine rankings. There are lots of tools to monitor broken links, and you can do so from Google Webmaster tools as well. Make sure that broken links are dealt with promptly.
Inconsistent Navigation
Many people choose to have different main menus for different sections of their website. This just leads to confusion. Make sure your navigation is clear and it's easy to get around. Anything that causes extra mental strain on your visitor will cause them to hit the back button.
Hiding Contact Information
Your goal is probably for people to contact you. Make your Contact Us page clear and visible on the main menu, and provide easy access to live chat functionality, social media and any other means for communication with website visitors. Drive engagement by making your communication channels salient.
Final Thoughts On Wrong Websites
These are just a few of the big problems that websites have. You also need to consider your call-to-actions, using video appropriately and getting your search engine optimization right. And very important, make sure to host with a reliable host company especially in your region such as https://www.domains4less.co.nz/web-hosting in New Zealand and Heart Internet in the UK.
Get your website in line with modern website users and don't think they won't notice when you have put in place website elements that you know don't really work. Website users are experienced these days and can quickly spot intuitively what is right, and what is wrong, and if it doesn't fall in line with their expectations, they will leave.
