Never before has it been so easy to get your business seen by so many people. That's the beauty of having a website. But websites come with their own unique set of challenges. In this article I'll be sharing the 5 biggest mistakes people make when creating their website.
1. They don't promote their site
It may seem obvious but some people forget to promote their site. The easiest way to get people to find you online is to share a link to your site on your business card, online profiles, brochures, signs, and any other place you'd normally promote your business.
2. They fail to do basic search engine optimization
To get found online you need to show up on search engines like Google. But Google doesn't automatically know everything about your business. They only know what they can extract from your website. That means you have to feed the beast. Doing basic search engine optimization won't guarantee you the top spot for a competitive keyword but it should at least show you on the first page when someone searches for you business name. Yet, people forget to do it.
Basic search engine optimization means creating a unique page title for each of your pages, providing a meta description and including some keywords and phrases people might use to find your products or services in the body of your website. Make sure to include plenty of text. Google won't be able to decipher the content of your website if it's all a big image file.
3. They don't make sure their site loads quickly.
Once you figure out a way to get people to come to your website you're going to have a hard time if you don't have fast loading pages. On average people will give a website about four seconds to load before clicking the dreaded back button. It's important to make sure your webpages are loading quickly. To do that be sure the images you use for your site are optimized for the web. If you're using the WebStarts website builder to create your site this is automatically done for you. Read this article to see more ways you can optimize your website for speed.
3. They don't provide a clear headline.
After a web page loads people are going to look for clues they're on the right website before investing the time to read through the page. By including a newspaper like headline across the top of your web page explaining what your site is about you're sure to engage more visitors. Try to include some of the keywords and phrases people would use to search for your procucts and services in the headline. Not only will this establish to the visitor what your site is about but it may give you a little boost in your search engine rankings.
4. They don't provide a clear call to action.
Now that a person got your site to load and they like what they see, they're going to want to know what to do next. Don't make this a mystery. Every website or homepage should have a call to action that sticks out on a page like a sore thumb. Your call to action can be a link or a button, maybe in image. Whatever it is, it needs to answer the question "What do I do next?".
5. They don't capture leads.
Once you've gotten a site visitor responding to your call to action it's imperative you make the most out of the lead by following up. You can only follow up if you have some way to contact the person who came to your site. Be sure and provide a form for your visitors to fill out and give them a compelling reason to provide you with their email address or phone number. This can be a discount, free trial, or anything else of high perceived value. Remember, the more contact information you ask for the higher they'll need to perceive the value, in order to turn over their contact information.