Most articles with names like these aim to inform readers with limited knowledge of inbound marketing about the need to restructure their websites with the methodology in mind.
They’re helpful for those who are unfamiliar with inbound marketing, but for those who have already made the move and built their site with conversions in mind, they are a bit redundant. The latter is who this essay is for.
This post will concentrate more on the tiny details that will help the websites and pages that were already established to convert, rather than telling you that you need CTAs on all of your web pages and that you must install landing pages. Without further ado, here are seven reasons why your website may not be functioning to its maximum potential despite being conversion optimized.
1. SEO Reasons
Even the best-optimized website with the most relevant content in the world won’t matter if no one can find it using search engines. A site that is correctly optimized makes it simple for Google and other search engines to scan and index its pages, but if a mistake happens in a few crucial places, this might cause problems.
How to Diagnose:
Use Google Webmaster Tools to check for crawl problems that prevent users from finding specific areas of your website. You may get a list of everything that is incorrect as well as instructions on how to remedy it using the helpful dashboard.
How to Correct:
This depends on the Google-identified errors. While there are many various issues you could need to address, the most popular resolution for any significant 404 errors is to establish 301 redirects.
2. Promotional Reasons
You’re Targeting the Wrong Audience with Your Current Promotional Strategy
Think about the visitors to your site before you make any radical changes to it or your content strategy. Are they the proper folks or are they irrelevant, unqualified site visitors that leave your site fast after learning what you do and sell?
Are you marketing your company and website to the right audiences and in the right places? If you’re not, you can be wasting time and money on bringing in pointless traffic while your real target audience goes on living their lives unaware of your existence.
How to Diagnose:
Check your website analytics to determine if certain visitor sources are producing less conversions than others, and use your website traffic tracking program (such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc.) to evaluate the bounce rates associated with your site.
You might want to think about a fresh promotion approach through a certain source if you observe high bounce rates and low conversion rates linked to that source.
How to Fix:
The answer to this issue mostly depends on the places and methods through which you now advertise your website and its contents. Depending on what you are doing right now, here are some of your options:
- Regarding paid advertisements:
If you are currently paying for traffic in some way (Google PPC, social advertising, display ads, etc.) and are not seeing results from these campaigns, you might want to either completely cut off any that aren’t showing ROI (Are you paying more than you are receiving back in potential leads/business?) or think about using other strategies that might yield greater outcomes. A paid advertising tool like LinkedIn that allows you to target with demographic and employment information may be more effective for your business than a PPC campaign that can only target through keyword selection if, for example, you are a company that caters to a very specific segment of the market.
- For organic promotions:
You might want to think about doing an audit of your existing social media strategy if you are having trouble effectively promoting and generating interaction for the material on your website through organic social sharing (if you have one at all). Find out where your clients, prospects, and you go for information (social media- which channels, industry-specific forums, etc.). When you know what information your personas are seeking for and will find valuable, you can generate and publish that material on the appropriate channels in the appropriate ways so that the appropriate people can find it, interact with it, and hopefully end up on your optimized site.
3. Design Reasons
Anyone without a responsive website has been almost scared by Google’s “Mobilegeddon,” and for a good cause. For those of you who are unaware, Google announced a new algorithm update in April of this year with the intention of elevating the rating of mobile-friendly websites and pages in mobile searches while lowering the ranks of unresponsive sites. It has been repeatedly shown that mobile-friendly sites have lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates than those that aren’t, even without this latest update.
How to Diagnose:
Utilize Google Analytics to determine the demographic of visitors to your website and the proportion of bouncing visitors. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to get a definitive response if these numbers appear out of the ordinary high, especially when contrasted to your desktop traffic.
4.Unclear website navigation
Your navigation should offer a condensed number of pages with labels that are clear and appropriate for your users. Your visitors may be diverted from important conversion points if your navigation is cluttered with every good and service you provide or if you’ve added awkward side navigation that only adds to the confusion.
How to Diagnose:
Use the Google Page Analytics plug-in to see how visitors are interacting with the various navigational elements on your website. You might want to think about combining if certain portions of the navigation are receiving a disproportionately low number of clicks compared to other areas.
How to Fix:
List each page that is linked to the top row of navigation on your website, together with the click rate it received from the Page Analytics tool. Highlight any pages with low click-through rates and try to group them with other, more generic navigation items. You might even think about removing the link from the menu and having it live on a particular page.
5.Poor Landing Page Design
Your landing pages, one of the more obvious places to examine, can be challenging to thoroughly optimize in order to improve the performance of your website. Everyone is aware of the standard best practices for designing landing pages.
Conversions aren’t always assured, even when a landing page is optimized according to best practices, and even small changes can have a big impact.
How to Diagnose:
Check the conversion rates of all of your pages using your landing page tool. You alone will know what a good conversion rate is for your landing page based on your industry and the goods/services your company offers.
How to Fix:
I’ve gone ahead and put out a few minor modifications that you might look to adopt that can help to better optimize your already well-set-up landing pages in an effort to save precious space in my article and prevent wasting your precious time and patience.
In light of this, search through your list for any pages that display percentages that are below average. You might want to consider your overall landing page design if you think your average conversion rate could be higher.
- Concentrate on relevant material:
It’s fine to spend two to three sentences outlining the offer before throwing four bullet points on what the reader will gain from it, but you might want to think about other perspectives. Consider breaking up your information so that visitors can read a brief excerpt and decide immediately whether or not they want to download it. You can also try providing testimonials and social proof regarding the deal or service it is associated with.
- Invest time in developing and disseminating the appropriate imagery: Are you displaying the subject of your landing page utilizing stock photographs or large photos? Should you utilize offer-specific.png pictures instead, which use up less space and immediately inform the reader what the offer is? Maybe you might think about removing the image entirely and substituting it with a video that explains everything in a more palatable way.
- Try a different configuration than the typical 2/3 -1/3: The concept of a “landing page” is no longer just for digital marketers. Internet users are becoming more and more aware of the concept and are able to recognize the generic pattern of 2/3 of information on the left and 1/3 of form on the right. Many businesses have realized this and altered their forms to be less content-heavy, more visually appealing, and focused entirely on the simple form. Perhaps you ought to try it as well.
6. Content Reasons
The adage “content is king” is true. They ought to actually say that quality content reigns supreme. You might be missing the boat with your content creation if you are spending more time considering blog subjects than who you are writing for.
Your blog’s content is only as excellent as your readers think it is, so if they don’t feel connected to you and your words, your brand may suffer along with your traffic, conversion rates, and lead generation.
How to Diagnose:
Check the typical blog views and CTA clicks associated with each one using your blog dashboard. While studying analytics, gather qualitative data by keeping an eye on shares and comments and soliciting reader input both inside the text of your articles and through various feedback platforms like Hively, Feedbackify, or Qualaroo. You might want to take a step back and reevaluate your current content approach if your metrics are poor and you frequently get unfavorable or no feedback from readers.
How to Fix:
If you discover that your content production plan requires more time, begin with your buyer personas. If you already have them set up and functioning, fill out a buyer persona spreadsheet with the data you now possess and compare it to the results of recent interviews with prospects and customers to determine if there are any inconsistencies. Once a complete persona is established, generate focused content using the objectives, difficulties, and pain points learned from the interviews before planning your content with an editorial calendar.
7. Offers and Page Content Do Not Strategically Connect
A lead-generating website’s success depends on its capacity to turn visitors into leads. In order to do that, best practices recommend placing CTAs on the majority, if not all, of the site’s pages in order to always offer users a point of conversion.
Unfortunately, some website pages may have CTAs that advertise content unrelated to the subject matter covered on the page where they are located, resulting in low click-through and even lower conversion rates.
How to Diagnose:
Use your site’s page analytics to identify CTA-containing pages that are not receiving any clicks. After that, look further into the content to determine whether the promotion’s offer is either unrelated to the information on the page or lacks the context needed to link it to the CTA. If so, you might want to think about creating a fresh CTA and/or offer.
How to Fix:
For any CTA-containing pages that require updated CTA wording but not a new offer, change the wording to better fit the persona and content on the page. The remaining pages should then be sorted according to the principal subject they cover. Apply the same principle to your whole content library. Place the CTA for that offer on the page if the topics of any of your pages and offers overlap.
You should either use this list to help you define your offer creation strategy going forward for any pages whose topics aren’t covered in your current library OR look to see if there are any other pieces of content you might be able to promote on that page, such as particular blog posts or bottom of the funnel conversion pages.
Conclusion
While a properly optimized website will always beat a static one, many people who have used inbound marketing for a sufficient amount of time will tell you that there is always room for improvement.
If you fall into this category, I hope this list gave you a few new suggestions so you can go back to the drawing board and begin further changes. If not, I’d be interested in learning what you think should be looked for in order to improve a poorly performing website.
