
The main purpose of a website is to give your business a presence online with which to promote itself and make sales. But if your website isn’t up to snuff, it could actually make your business look bad or actually reduce the number of sales you make.
What are the website mistakes that can hurt your company’s online presence? Here they are, and here’s how you can fix them.
1. Your Website is Slow
You can have a brilliant website with strong visuals, enticing CTAs, and great SEO, but if your website is slow than all of that will be for naught. A slow website speed will hurt you in two ways. First, most users don’t like slow websites and they’ll probably leave if yours takes more than a couple seconds to load. This also hurts your SEO. Search engines track how long users stay on your website, so if it sees that users are leaving your website after only a few seconds, you’ll probably drop in the search rankings.
The best way to maintain a fast website is to host it on a professional server. A great server provider will not only ensure that your website is running fast, it’ll also make sure that your server is encrypted so user information is safe when they visit your site— critical if your website conducts online sales.
2. You Have Weak Links
If you’re trying to boost your website’s search engine optimization, then you need to make sure your website has strong link building. You want your website to have both internal links and links to other websites (Google, in particular, favors this because you’re guiding users to more information), but you also want other websites to link to yours. The more links to your website that are out there, the higher your domain authority will be and the higher search engine rankings you’ll earn.
If you’re unsure of how your link building is going, run a link profile analysis to see whether or not you have strong backlinks.
3. Your Website Needs a Better Aesthetic
A great website should be pleasing on the eyes. The homepage says it all, and it’ll likely influence whether or not users decide to stay and explore your site, or choose another site. Try and avoid having extensive text on the homepage and make sure it’s highly visual.
But although you want your homepage to look good, you don’t want it to be overstuffed with visual information. Too much homepage clutter will confuse users and make it harder for them to navigate the site.
If your website is in desperate need of a makeover, download stock photos online and use them to add some more flair to your site. You should ultimately hire a photographer to take professional photos for your site, but stock photos will get you by in the meantime.
4. Your Website Could Have Better Customer Engagement
If you have customers that love your service or product, you want them to spread the word about it. You also want them to buy your product again. The best way to spread word-of-mouth and drive repeat sales is to have a high level of customer engagement on your website.
A good way to foster customer engagement on your website is to allow users to post reviews on it. This is definitely a risky strategy because you’ll also be letting people post bad reviews. But if you feel confident about your product and you think that you could rack up a bunch of positive user reviews, it might be worth looking into. You can also drive user engagement by offering giveaways and contests or by maintaining a blog.
5. Your Website Needs More Content
The more regularly you post content to your site, the better. New content will boost your SEO because search engines favor new content.
There are two types of “new content.” First, there’s a page refresh, which is when you update an existing page on your site with new copy. Second, there’s blog content. Blogs are great for your website because they allow you to post new keywords and links, and they can also help attract a regular audience of users to your site. It’s possible that one of your blogs could go viral and attract a massive amount of web traffic.
Any of these 5 changes to your website will help you boost your brand awareness, increase traffic, and boost your sales, so don’t wait and get started on sprucing up your website today.