3 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Converting
Your website is like your PhD, your store front, your diploma hanging on the wall of your office. Potential clients are landing on your website everyday, trying to determine if you are the best solution for their problems.
While it may seem like a simple thing to make, your website needs to have a strategy in place to help position you as the high-quality industry leader that you are.
Maybe you’ve thrown a website together just to get something up, or maybe you hired your best friends cousin for $200 to build you a website. Regardless — if it wasn’t built with a key strategy in mind, it’s likely why you aren’t converting any of those website visitors in to paying clients.
1. There’s no clear website journey
Your website is the welcome mat for all of your best-fit clients.
It should lead them exactly in the direction they want to go, and the direction you want them to take.
So you first need to identify what you want the function of your website to be as a whole, and what the ideal journey is you want someone to take as soon as they land on your site.
This might look like:
Overall Function: to get leads to fill out the inquiry form
Ideal Journey: Home page → services → inquiry form
or another example:
Overall Function: to build up your email list
Ideal Journey: Home page → blog or lead magnet → email list
If your website has been slapped together however, you’ll notice your exit rate is high. Your site visitors aren’t getting the answers to their questions, or they can’t find the information they’re looking for, because there’s no clear direction for them to go.
You should aim for 3-5 clicks max to take your site visitor from the Home page to your inquiry form.
2. The value is getting lost in the design
As a website designer, our clients often come to us with a website that either:
is hard to read or understand, or
is focusing too much on themselves and not enough on their ideal clients
There are basic design principals that need to be followed (most of the time) for your website to be accessible. Accessible, meaning easy to read or comprehend.
The biggest culprit that makes a website inaccessible is not having enough breathing room around content — make those sections bigger ya’ll!
You don’t want to overwhelm the written copy or images you have in the sections of your website; that’s where they’re going to gather the further information to determine if you’re the best-fit for them.
So often I’ll come across a website that feels like the business owner is aching for an ego boost. Filled with information about how great they are, their raving reviews, their credentials and what makes them so good.
While this sounds like how your website should be, it’s really hurting you in the long run.
If your website is the welcome mat for your best-fit clients, it needs to invite them in. They should feel heard, understood, and also inspired while visiting your website. Nobody wants to hang out with someone who only talks about themselves.
It needs to elaborate on the unique methods you’ll take them through, your specific POV within your industry and the experience and outcomes that others have had from your services. It should showcase you as the option they’ve been searching for, because they feel seen and like your understand exactly what they’re going through and what they need.
And if you have no idea who your best-fit client is, the struggles they experience and how your services are the solution — you need to do some brand strategy.
3. There’s no visual stimulation
AKA — it’s boring, it’s outdated, it’s plain, there’s no personality to it.
You have less than 10 seconds to capture someones attention through your website. And given the digital age we’re in, site visitors can tell if a website is outdated or unkept.
This starts to cross over into having an in depth brand identity, because your colour palette, illustrations, backgrounds and supporting elements will work together to cause visual interest in the site visitor. It also helps to position you as a high-quality brand, because people can tell you’ve taken the time and invested in your business.
If your website feels like a flat PDF, and has little to no movement, it’s also working against you. This isn’t to say you need videos & pop ups & epic transitions in every single place of your website (please, don’t do this). But you need some form of movement or reason to guide the visitor down the page.
The hierarchy of your written copy also matters a lot in both visual stimulation and accessibility, but that’s where your copywriter comes in.
A website is more than a menu of your services, it’s one of the key determining factors whether someone will book with you or not.
If you’re eager to get your website up, like yesterday, you’ll want to check out our 2 Week Website package. But if you’re ready to really build your client roster, and get serious about growing your business then you’ll want a 4 Week Website.
Time to convert all those leads!
— Cheryl
