I’ve gone over what makes one website good, and another bad before. Today let’s get into why you need to have a good website. Why you need to be online. If you have a bad website, or no website at all, if you’re not promoting your website and getting it noticed, you could be missing out on thousands or millions of dollars in lost sales – sales that will go to your competitors instead.
1 – It’s Too Old And Stale
If your website is too old and looks outdated, this reflects badly on your company – It makes you look too old and outdated, or that you just don’t care enough. People don’t want to do business with too old and outdated or don’t care enough. They’ll move along and find one of your competitors to do business with instead, and your website will actually cost you more sales then having no website at all would. Having no website is not a viable option though, as your potential customers are mostly online looking for businesses like yours, and if they can’t find you, or are unimpressed by your website, they’ll find your competitors and they’ll get all that business.
2 – The Contents Are Outdated And No Longer Accurate Or Poorly Written
Poorly written copy will drive people away. Inaccurate content will cause problems when people don’t get what they expected. In most jurisdictions, this is also illegal and can leave your business vulnerable to getting fined or sued for false and misleading advertising, or lead to you being forced to offer that old, cheaper price on your website since that’s what you advertised.
Your website is a tool for communicating with your market 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It doesn’t need to get paid to be on duty, it keeps communicating and informing round the clock. If it’s message is badly written, old or inaccurate, it will NOT bring in customers, and will hurt your reputation and can even make offline sales and marketing activities more difficult as you can now have a negative reputation to fight against. This could be the death of your business if you allow that to happen.
3 – Your Website Is Under Performing
You’re just not seeing the results you thought you would. There are many different reasons this can be happening. A few of the most common are:
- Not getting the right traffic. If your website is attracting people not in the market for what you’re offering, you can’t expect them to respond. They’ll get there, be disappointed it’s not what they were looking for and move on. In this case, you need to re-evaluate your message and change it to match the market you’re looking for, your target market, as well as re-evaluate your traffic sources to make sure your message is both the right message, and also reaching the right people. To find out if this is the case, you’ll need to track the stats of your website and get a feel for the demographics visiting it, and compare those to your target market, if they don’t match up, there’s a good chance your getting the wrong people to your site.
- The copy is not inspiring/convincing enough. If people are bored by the contents of your website, or are not convinced you’re the right company to do business with, they’ll move on and choose one of your competitors instead. If you are getting the right traffic, then it’s probably that the contents aren’t doing their job. You’ll need to evaluate where the problem is, what pages are people dropping off your website from. In this case, you’ll need to re-write your contents to be reader friendly on a computer screen, exciting enough to keep the reader’s attention, answer their common questions and tell them what to do next. If it fails in any of these areas, it won’t convince them to do business with you. You’ll need a re-write, and it’s best to bring in a professional copywriter to fix this. Graphics are also critical, and can make or break even well-written copy, so also look at how you can add graphics to enhance your message, break up long text, and draw attention to areas you want people to specifically notice, such as a call to action or an important point.
- Not getting enough traffic. If people can’t find your website, they can’t respond to it.This is the simplest problem to solve. Finding suitable places to advertise on and creating a compelling ad will solve this problem. That does cost money, so be prepared to invest in it. Also, be aware that a lack of traffic can be hiding other problems mentioned in this article, so be observant of whether or not this new traffic gets you the results it should. This does require a steady investment as the traffic will dry up if you stop investing in it, but it will get traffic to your site fast if done right.SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will also bring more traffic to your site as you will see shortly.
4 – It’s Getting Terrible Search Engine Results
You need to do SEO on your site to help the search engines know when to give your site a high ranking, and when not to. This is a long term solution to getting traffic to your website, as this will gradually move your site up the search rankings, eventually into positions where people doing searches are likely to find you and visit your website.
This is not a magic bullet solution where all you have to do is SEO your website once and you’re magically in the promised land of #1 ranking on Google. It takes time to build up to that spot, and continued effort to stay there. Once you make it to the top page though, it’s well worth the wait as you get very interested and relevant traffic. These are people going out of there way to find a business like yours after all, so many of them are looking to buy soon if not now.
5 – Your Potential Customers Are Most Likely Looking For Businesses Like Yours Online
No matter what your business is, what your market is, whether your wholesale, manufacturing or retail, provide services or products, sell B2B or B2C, or any combination of these, you can count on your customers mainly looking online for a business like yours. If you’re online and visible enough, they will find you. If you’re not, they will find your competitors. If you look terrible online, they will not want to buy from you, they will look for your competitors and buy from them instead. Get online, have a strong presence, and be visible. If you do this, people will find you and buy from you.
6 – It’s Not Mobile Friendly
Google and many other search engines now penalize websites for not being mobile friendly. If your site is not mobile friendly, you will find your ability to be found through search engines limited. If a large chunk of your visits come from mobile devices and you’re not mobile friendly, you will likely lose many of those visitors as they have a bad experience on your site. Update your website to be mobile friendly if you want good search engine results and don’t want to drive away your mobile visitors.
7 – The Technology (code) Is Obsolete And Vulnerable To Hackers
This is a huge problem. Hackers love to find websites like this and will have a field day with your site once they find it. They can take it down, impersonate you and commit crimes in your business’ name, and infect your business’ and client’s computers with malicious software. Some of this software can be devastating and shut your business down if it gets into your computers and locks them up or corrupts them.
You could lose thousands or even millions from data loss, lost production, repair bills and lost customers. You, your staff and your clients could even lose their identities to identity theft. I met someone once who told me about how he got detained at the Canada-US border because identity thieves had used his identity to do drug trafficking. This man and his wife could very well have been arrested and convicted of crimes they never even committed!
8 – It’s A Common First Impression For Your Potential Customers
Because so many people search online for their products and services, your website is likely the first impression people will have of your company. If you’re website looks awful, outdated, or is inaccurate, this is what people will remember you for. You will have made a bad first impression, and you only have one chance to get this right! How likely is your website to be someone’s first impression of your company? Google alone had more then 100 billion searches per month, that’s more then 11 times the world population every month searching on Google alone! That doesn’t even take into account for Bing, Yahoo, and other large search engines who contribute tens of billions more searches every month. If you’re website is not there and not on point to make a good first impression, you’ve just lost all those searches as potential customers.
9 – It Saves Your Time
Your website can answer many of the most common questions and issues customers may have. In many cases it can even sell your products/services on full automation! Each of those can save hours of labour for your business every day. This is time you now have back to spend on other things, hours you don’t have to work yourself or pay your staff to work on, hours spent doing other, more profitable things.
10 – Your Competitors Have Better Websites
If your competitors are outperforming you in any of the other 9 areas covered here, or in any other areas important to your market, they will get the lion’s share of the traffic, responses and profits. They will outrank you in search engines, outperform you in getting a response, generating goodwill and profiting from the internet. In short, they will look and perform better then you do. If you want to fix or prevent this, you will need to look at what your competitors are doing, evaluate if they’re doing something better then you are, and how you can get ahead of them. If your website is terrible, it’s time for a new one.
If you’re company suffers from any of these issues, we need to talk now. We need to get started on fixing things for you right away. Contact us and let’s get the conversation started right away, before you miss out on any more sales needlessly.
