Are you making this mistake? Certainly there are more than three issues that can impact your ability to acquire new clients online. However, avoiding and/or repairing the mistakes listed below can make a big difference in a short period of time.
Unprofessional/Unfriendly Website.
When your site looks bad, you look bad and you may attract clients who are less savvy, have less money and are generally painful to work with. But this includes more than just fancy designs and professional photos. You should have a unified brand, logo and color scheme that unifies your Social Media Presence and Compliments your site design.
Below you will find an excellent example (a=before, B=After):
A beautiful and professional design always helps to build more trust and increase lead conversion. However, there are two other little-known usability items that can make or break your website. Fail to fix these and your calls, appointments and inquiries will drop.
A – Mobile Compatibility : More than 30% of all web traffic is mobile. If you have an internet capable smartphone, pull up your website and ask yourself.. “would I like or use this site? “
If you have Google Analytics installed on your website you can easily check. Go to “Audience -> Mobile -> Overview” . Take a look at your Bounce Rates, Pages per Session and Average Duration. You want to see low bounce rates (below 70%), higher pages per session (1.5 or more) and long sessions (1:00 or more is perfect). From our own analysis and monitoring of client sites we have discovered a direct correlation between pages / time on site and lead generation. The longer they stay, the better your chance to “make the sale”.
Below is an example of good (Site A) and not so good (Site B):
B – Speed, Speed Speed : It is so important now that Google has made this part of your SEO ranking. If your site is slow (mobile or not), then you will suffer. In fact, many e-commerce companies agree and have data that correlates sales with site speed.
How You Can Check Your Site For Issues…
Luckily Google was nice enough to provide everyone with a free tool to check speed and mobile compatibility all in one. Go to google pagespeed insights and see for yourself. If your score is lower than 70 then you probably need to think about investing some time and money into an update.
How You Can Fix It Fast…
Here are a list of recommendations for you to improve your website performance and mobile compatibility:
- First run your free pagespeed test and print out the issues / recommendations.
- Ask your hosting company if they offer the “Google Pagespeed Module” as part of your hosting package. If they do, you can instantly increase your site speed. Be sure to run the speed test before and after.
- Consider a caching network like Max CDN or Cloudflare. Many caching networks not only speed up your site but they can also protect against spammers and hackers.
- If using wordpress or another CMS, look at caching plugins. Our current favorite for wordpress is Zen Cache, it is simple and effective.
- Build a mobile version of your site, just search google for a mobile site builder. You can host the mobile version externally and install as a subdomain (“m.domain.com”) or install javascript (usually provided by the builder) to detect mobile devices then redirect mobile visitors automatically. If you are using WordPress it is rather simple to find a mobile site builder plugin by searching the wordpress plugin library.
- Go responsive with your next design. Responsive web designs will automatically resize and reorient your website based upon the visitors screen size. Warning – this wont always address issues related to speed so be sure to test your site if you do update to a responsive version.
Or Contact Me…
If you are too busy to do this yourself. Although my team and I generally focus on lead generation and sales funnels, I am happy to review your site and make recommendations. You can schedule a call on my “about me” page. My assistant gets all requests and prioritizes them accordingly. There is also an option to schedule online using my calendar link, just follow the steps after the scheduling request.
P.S. – Did you want to know the #1 mistake? Maybe you noticed I titled this article as “the #2 mistake…”. I did that because the #1 mistake is analytics and tracking which tends to be too techy and boring. However, it is the only way to find out if the money your spending for advertising is working or… if that recent website update actually helped your business.
