How a bad website can hurt all your marketing efforts

Saffron Edge

Jun 18, 2018

5 min read

Your business website is like an old-school brochure of your business that is up and running 24*7. Do you want your brochures to be sub-par and drive customers away? The answer will most probably a no. So, why take the risk with your website? Not having a fully optimized website can have a detrimental impact on your business which can cripple your business to a point of no return. From just being a single website in 1991 to reaching the 2 billion mark in 2016, there are still a lot of active websites out there that are just painful to look at and are studded with keyword laden content that doesn’t make any sense to users. That needs to change! In this technologically advanced world where an online business can not survive without having an effective digital media strategy, having a website that allures users and perfectly aligns with your marketing efforts becomes all the more important. A good website and a good digital marketing strategy goes hand in hand. You can not just ignore one and focus on the other and expect results, you will have to work on both to make your efforts worthwhile. If you are facing trouble in making conversions, despite of having a stellar digital marketing strategy in place, chances are that there is something wrong with your website. It can be the content, the visuals (or complete lack of it), it’s speed or anything else that is creating friction with your audience and is driving them away. Apparently, there are a lot of website elements that can be hampering conversions on your website. Figuring out what’s wrong with your website is what you’ll have to do to get up to speed with making conversions, sales and some money for your business and we’re here to help you with just that. What follows is a set of website elements for you to focus and optimize that can be the main cause of low or no conversions on your website. Let’s go through them one by one and I will explain to you why optimizing your website for them is so important for convincing visitors -

Lack of proper visuals

Depending on just plain text to make conversions for your business works no more. The human mind is 5x more likely to remember an image than text. According to a study by John Medina. adding visuals increases the chances of a reader retaining a piece of information by 55%. And marketing is all about making it stick. Moreover, if users are not convinced with the overall looks, color scheme, layout style, fonts or any other design element of your website, most likely they’ll leave. So, make sure you put a lot of thought behind each design element of your website.

Irrelevant content

Having content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience is the most common reason websites fail to convert. Many website owners indulge in uploading spammy keyword-stuffed content on their websites that doesn’t go well with users. Also, uploading content that provides little to no value to readers is a sure red flag. Don’t upload content just for the sake of uploading content. Understand your audience and their needs first and then create content that caters to those exact needs for maximum conversions. After the recent developments in Google’s search engine algorithms, the main factors it uses to assess the content on your website depends on the basis of the value it provides to users and the sheer quality of it. Writing content for search engines is not a thing anymore, so it’s about time that website owners start focusing on writing content for their users rather than trying to game the system.

Site’s loading time

According to a study, more than 40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your website loads in the same amount of time, congrats to your competitors. Waiting for a site to load is a pure source of frustration. You’ll start losing website visitors even before they have a glimpse of your beautiful website. And there is little to no assurance that they will ever return back. So, it’s better to speed up your website in every way possible to provide a seamless experience to your users and boost conversions. Having too much code, extra plug-ins and heavy images on your website are some common reasons to have a slow loading website. Check them first if you are looking to increase the loading speed of your website.

Site’s responsiveness

Everything is going mobile, even Google. The use of mobile has skyrocketed in the past few years, so much that mobile users have surpassed desktop users for the first time in history. So, keeping that in mind, if your website doesn’t cater to mobile users, you are ignoring more than 50% of your website traffic. Optimizing your website for mobile has some serious search engine benefits as well. See how you can optimize your website for mobile users here.

Cluttered website

Not leaving some white space in your web pages in order to place more content on it does you more harm than good. It’s not easy to make sense out of the content or images when there’s not ample (or the required amount) spacing around it, making it look more like a clutter. Keep your audience’s readability in mind and try to give as much breathing space to the content on your website as possible so that they can serve its purpose easily, and that is to be read by your website visitors.

Navigational issues

When a user comes to your website, he expects to see content that he cares about first. The navigational steps the user has to take to consume relevant content on your website should not be more than 1-2 clicks and must be straightforward and intuitive. Don’t let your users spend a lot of their time in figuring out how to reach the most important pages on your website, keep the frustration levels at a bare minimum by making it easier for them to consume what they want on your website. A beautiful website won’t help you if it takes users 50 clicks to reach your service pages, they will be gone before reaching the 4th click.

SEO structure

Optimizing your website for SEO is as important as optimizing your website for your audience. Search engines are usually the most prominent players that send traffic to a website so optimizing your website for them shouldn’t be an option, it should be a priority. Incorporate some high search volume, low competition keywords in your content, optimize the meta descriptions and title tags, add schema markup and build some backlinks from your website to get some extra traffic from Google and gain some more conversions. But remember to optimize all the content and other elements of your website for your audience first, search engines come later.