Your website is at the heart of your digital marketing efforts, so it should have an exceptional design to create a good foundation for your blog, social media pages, and your overall online presence. Unfortunately, it is easy to fall victim to some common website mistakes, which can hurt your business by negatively impacting your SEO, driving potential customers away, or failing to accurately convey what products and services you offer.
This short video from the web design experts at Mopro will explain some of the most frequent website mistakes that have the potential to sabotage any business. By watching the clip and reading on, you can be sure that your site is working hard for your business—not against it.
It’s not giving customers the information they want.
If you cannot easily locate the name, physical address, and phone number for your business when you look at any page of your website, you should rethink your design. It may sound obvious to include this information, but many businesses neglect to make it a prominent feature on their sites, prompting potential customers to move on to competitors. You’ll also want to make it easy to see a list of services your company offers, view carts on e-commerce sites, and find a more detailed “About Us” page where customers can get to know your business.
It isn’t designed for mobile use.
A substantial fraction of your web traffic should come from mobile users. If it doesn’t, you probably have not given much thought to creating a mobile-friendly website. Optimizing your site for mobile includes steps like reducing redirects, optimizing images for faster loading, avoiding Flash, and creating finger friendly navigation with easy scrolling and clicking. Links should be easy to click without having to zoom in on the page, and pop-ups should be avoided at all costs. In addition, emphasizing your geographical location with steps like including your city and state in title tags, meta descriptions, and site content, will benefit mobile traffic, because so many mobile device users will use GPS location tracking to search for businesses that are located nearby.
Your site design is too busy.
Whether someone is loading your site on a mobile or desktop device, you will want to be sure that there isn’t too much going on. Using an excess of bright colors, animated features, videos, and other distracting features can make it hard for anyone to focus on the actual content of your site, leaving users straining to find the information they want. Think simple and tasteful when it comes to design, and don’t overload users with too much text. If your written content isn’t direct and easy to read, it is not likely to get looked at.
You’ll also want to think about the goal of each page you include on your site. Some pages may simply implore readers to continue learning more, while others should prompt a purchase or form submission. Clearly map out the goals of each page on your site, and create clear calls to action for each one. Providing a clear prompt for what you want from your customers is likely to give you more of the results you want.
It doesn’t offer a seamless user experience.
You will spend a lot of time thinking about your site design as well as the content you will include. With this perspective, it can be hard for you to think about how your website will translate to the average audience. Having friends or family members click through your site to evaluate the user experience can tell you where people might be getting lost or disinterested in your website.
If you want to get people looking at your website, you will probably make a name for your business on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Your profiles on these sites should feature a link to your website, and your website should include widgets to allow people to get to your social channels easily. Forging the connection between your social presence and your website can ensure that you maintain a more cohesive brand identity and stay visible in a competitive landscape.
You aren’t thinking about SEO.
Each of the issues above will impact your SEO, and there is plenty more to think about when it comes to search engine optimization. If this is something you haven’t considered as you’ve built your website, there’s a good chance you are getting buried in search engine results. When you look for ways to improve your website, consider the following questions to determine where your site might be falling short in SEO:
- Are your site pages well-organized?
- Does your website represent your brand?
- Does your site include a blog?
- Do your service pages feature descriptive titles and keywords?
- Are users clicking past your homepage?
- Have you written specific landing pages for your social and search ads?
If you’re not sure what you need to do to get your website in good shape, don’t panic. Pennington Creative is here to help with exceptional content and design services for small businesses and marketing agencies. To explore the work we do and the clients we do it for, check out our website today.
