Business Website Mistakes

Top 5 Sins Business Websites Make Without Knowing It

You’ve designed, developed, and rolled out a great website for your business. Lately, you’ve noticed you’re your business website hasn’t been bringing in much traffic, not to mention sales. You’ve fixed some obvious problems, but your traffic and sales haven’t improved much. What could be wrong?

Your business website may not have any big, obvious things wrong with it, but you could be doing something wrong that you may not know about or have thought of before. Here are the five least known business website boo-boos, and some suggestions to avoid and fix them.

Sin #1: Writing content that focuses on features instead of benefits. Your business website’s content has to both inform customers about your products and services and persuade them to buy from you. Unfortunately, many business websites’ content does a great job of informing customers about the features of their wares, but not so much when it comes to the benefits they’ll realize. For example, if you own a furniture store, mentioning that you have free delivery on your site is a feature. A benefit of free delivery is that customers save on delivery charges and don’t have to make arrangements to pick up furniture on their own, which saves them time, money, and hassle. In other words, visitors want to know “what’s in it for me” and how you benefit them more than your competition.

Sin #2: Not making your business website search engine friendly. The first places your customers often go to find business like yours online are search engines. They’re most likely to visit the sites that appear first in the search results, because they see those sites as most relevant and authoritative. If your site doesn’t appear there, consider search engine optimization, or SEO, to move your site up and make it more visible.

Sin #3: Failing to keep your business website fresh. Imagine two stores: Store X is clean, well-lit, and well-stocked with the latest merchandise. Store Y is dusty, dimly lit, and has only a few of last year’s items on display. Which store are you most likely to buy from? At a bare minimum, you should completely refresh your business website at least once a year. Even better, add fresh content weekly or daily. One way to do this is to have a blog where you post content about your latest activities, offers, and other goodies.

Sin #4: Not having a call to action. Along the same lines of focusing on benefits, your business website should create a sense of urgency in your customers, reinforce the need for your product or service, and direct them toward the task you want them to do. Some ways to do so are to add links to a product page that take customers to the checkout page or to download items or offer Internet-only deals or coupons.

Sin #5: Making it too hard for customers to buy from you. Even customers who want to buy from you won’t buy from you if it takes too many clicks or too much time to buy. The fewer steps from the initial visit to the sale, the better.