When sending people to your website, it’s important to keep in mind that the website should be appealing and put the customer at ease. This should be a no brainer, but you may have a lot of things on your site that you don’t even realize they annoy your customers. Whether it is because you thought something would look really cool and make your site stand out or want to make sure your customer watch the video bio you took so long to put together, it’s important to remember that customers are looking for certain things when visiting a website. If you are an offender of any of the things mentioned below, tweaking just a few things can help lower the abandonment rate on your site and help increase the amount of leads you get.
1. Pop-Up Ads
If you have ever visited a website and been bombarded with pop-up ads, you know how irritating closing all of those little windows can be. While an email sign up or survey invite may help you generate a few leads, for the most part it is going to make people run from your site.
If you are asking for information before the client even has a chance to have the site completely load, you are probably losing several potential customers. Removing the pop-up ads and creating clear call to action buttons will help decrease your bounce rate, and increase the amount of leads you get.
2. Automatically Playing Media Content When the Page Opens
Yes, we get it; you spent a lot of time and money creating the talking head video on your homepage and it looks awesome. If you have video or music auto play as soon as the site loads, however, you may get a customer in trouble if they are trying to quietly view your site during their work day.
Setting music or video to begin when landing on your website may cause someone to click away from the site if they were not expecting any noise to come from their speakers. It is also a nuisance for clients who may be visiting your site frequently, as they have probably now heard this promotion several times. Providing access to this media content is very helpful, but letting the visitor choose whether or not they want to interact with the video will make for happier customers.
3. Distracting Animations
The flashing button you put in your header may draw attention to your lead capture page, but it can distract clients during the critical three seconds they have to focus on your page after landing on it and cause them to hit the back button to leave. While flashing animations and auto-play videos may look cool and have a great design, removing them from the site can really let your customer focus on what your site has to offer that is relevant to them.
4. Generic Stock Photography
Having photos on your site can help engage clients and make your page more appealing. Having pictures of attractive models sitting around a conference table looking at a computer can defeat the positive points of having images.
Providing generic photos can be insulting to your clients’ intelligence (they know your employees don’t really look like that) and also take away from a great opportunity to advertise yourself as a local company. Providing a photo of all of your staff, your office, or even a local landmark can really drive home the point that you are down the street and really know the area and the people around you. If you brand your company nationwide, adding images that showcase your products or the services you offer can help you as well.
5. Having a Contact Us form instead of Contact Information
If your Contact Us section only leads to a lead capture tool, you may be missing out on potential customers. If a person wants an answer to a single question, and doesn’t want to have to worry about receiving your newsletter every month, they will not fill out the form that you provide.
Providing a Contact Us form for regular customers is great, but you should also include additional ways for people to get in contact with you without guessing what else they will get besides an answer to their question. Listing a phone number, email address, or social media site they can reach you through will help you answer questions for potential customers that may help lead them to finally make a purchase.
6. Incoherent About Us page
Was your About Us content written for your consumers to understand, or is it filled with industry buzzwords that may confuse them? Reading your profile information after writing it and weeding out ambiguous or confusing language can really help lay out what you provide for your customers and let them know it is relevant to them. Sometimes it may also help to have a friend or family member not in the industry proofread your copy. If they can understand it, chances are your customers will as well.
7. SEO-Driven Copy
If you went through Web 101 when people first started focusing on being picked up on by the search engines, you learned that providing a couple paragraphs of keywords at the bottom of the page would help get you found.
Google has become a little wiser over the years, and it’s time you grew along with them. Not only will writing solely for the search engines make potential customers leave because it is visually unappealing or they can’t understand it, Google is now punishing sites with content written just for bots that crawl through the site. Write for humans first, and then go back in and add a few key terms for the search engines.
8. Not Including Share Buttons for Social Media Sites
If you have really interesting content on your site that gets customers excited, but they don’t have an easy way to share this information with friends, you are missing out on a big opportunity. Including share buttons for all social media sites on each page is an easy way to promote your content and help get it seen by a bigger audience while driving traffic to your site.
9. You Don’t Have a Blog
Blogging is a way to expand the About Us section of your website and really showcase your expertise. It will allow you to show your personality through your writing style, as well as allow readers to see your growth over time. This allows you to let people researching you or your company to find out a little more information and have a place to return back to with information that is constantly being updated. For most web hosting companies, it is really simply to either link to or frame in a blog that you update regularly on a blog website. This will also provide a reciprocal link back to your website from a relevant source.
10. Titles and Content Don’t Match
If a customer clicks on a link from an email or the search engines about one topic, and is taken to a page about something completely different, you are going to have an unhappy customer on your hands and leave a bad taste in your mouth. Having catchy titles for pages is important to get that reader on to your website, but matching the content to that title is even more important to convert that visitor to a customer. This will help you appear reliable, and not make them feel like they were tricked into clicking on that link.
11. Your Call to Action Doesn’t Match the Offer
Promising a client 50% off any product on a call to action button, then including a disclaimer that the client has to spend $500 first is the quickest way to ruin your reputation and make that campaign fail. Pulling the bait and switch will make customers lose faith in you, so make sure your call to action isn’t a far stretch from what you are really offering.
12. Your Internal Linking Isn’t User Friendly
Internal linking can be your best friend to make your website easy to use and easy for the search bots to navigate when crawling through your site. The key to making the most out of your internal links is making sure that they link to relevant pages. Linking to pages that don’t match up with the wording will confuse clients, and make the search engines think you don’t have content relevant to what you are speaking about.
Sometimes we may have to settle linking a phrase that isn’t the most keyword friendly to have it make sense for the client, but it will be better for you in the long run. It is also important to open all links in a new tab or browser to allow the customer to keep reading their current page.
13. Slide shows That Take Forever to Load
Slide shows offer a great way to showcase several products or services while saving on the precious real estate of your pages. If you have a slide show that requires the page to reload for each slide, however, you may be doing more harm than good. If a client has to wait to long to see the next slide, they will lose interest and leave the page. If possible, create a slide show that allows the client to easily navigate between slides without having to visit a new page to allow them to see all you have to offer with ease.
14. Using Flash
Flash can make your site look amazing, but it’s not the friendliest format for your customers or the search engines. It takes a while to load, requires the customer to have the latest version updated, and is not legible to the search engines. It also may prevent some clients from seeing the information that is relevant to them if they don’t want to wait for the presentation to end, or make them irritated if they do have to wait to see simple information.
15.I Don’t Know What To Do
If a customer comes to your website and doesn’t know what to do or get to what they are interested in finding, they won’t have the patience to click around to find it. Putting the main elements of your product under easy to find buttons will help lay out what you want your customers to find. 220 Marketing websites are designed to showcase the things we know our clients need to make accessible to their clients with buttons at the top and all other distracting links hidden. This allows customers to come into the site, click on the type of product they need, and fill out a form within seconds.
If you are responsible for having any of these annoyances on your website, 220 Marketing is always here to help. As one of our clients, you can always come ask us for feedback on features that are currently on your site, or bounce ideas off of us before you implement them. This is one of the many service we provide for our clients at no extra charge!
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