All businesses, whatever the shape or size, require a website to match. This will act as your 24/7 storefront, allowing clients, customers, and prospects to find your business no matter the time or day. Even if you don’t want to sell your products online, you still need your own website to interact with those people, share your content, market your business, and more.
It is relatively simple to build a website these days, but building a great one that fulfills its purpose is a little bit harder. With that in mind, here are ten mistakes that may ruin your business’s online presence.
1. Live Without A Website
The worst thing that you can do to your business website is not bothering to make one at all. Most people who have access to the internet will use it to search for products that they intend to buy. If you don’t have a site, this means that they won’t find your business, and would therefore not buy from you. At the very least, you need a simple page that explains what you sell, where you are located, and how to contact you. This gives you just a small chance against your competitors.
2. Build The Site Yourself
Today’s website builders mean that you can get a very basic site up and running, often for free. However, that doesn’t make them the best choice for your business. Unless you have the time and knowledge to create and maintain an effective site, you’re usually better off hiring a professional and paying the website design cost. These are the websites that look attractive to prospects, rank well on search engines, and help you to boost your sales and profits.
3. Design For Desktops Alone
Although the internet used to only be accessible through clunky desktops, these days, most people go online using their phones. If you overlook that fact and only design your website for PCs, then you risk alienating most of your target audience. This means that, instead of sticking with you, they’ll switch to a different site. Because of this, you must ensure that your website can be accessed by and viewed on a range of different devices, including smartphones and tablets.
4. Play Videos Right Away
Videos can make a website that much more interesting, but it must be the users choice to view them. If you have your clips play automatically, then it could frustrate and even embarrass the site visitors, especially when they’re out in public. For this reason, the videos on your site should only start if a play button has been clicked. You also shouldn’t have music playing in the background. This used to be commonplace on websites but is now viewed as quite outdated.
5. Clutter Up The Pages
When it comes to web pages, less is often more. As tempting as it is to fill all of your pages with as much information as possible, this can be distracting and confusing to visitors, making navigation difficult. Most users will get overwhelmed and switch to a site with less visual clutter. To improve site navigation, you should use headers, subheaders, and whitespace to break up the text. You should split pages into categories and add a search bar at the top of each page too.
6. Overlook Calls To Action
You may know what you want from your website visitors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they do too. Rather than hope that they can figure it out, you should put clear calls to action on each and every page. These might include buttons, such as “Buy Now” and “Subscribe Here”. Some sites also us pop-ups and pop-overs for certain requests. You can see what works best for your website by trialing each method and measuring its effectiveness.
7. Hide Your Contact Information
Nothing puts potential customers off quite like making them jump through hoops to contact you. While many of your site visitors will be there just to buy goods or learn a little bit more about you, others will want to ask a question or make a complaint. It’s vital that those individuals can do so as easily as possible. If you hide your contact information away, it makes this process difficult. For this reason, you should display it clearly at the top or bottom of every page on your website.
8. Assume SEO Is Dead
Contrary to the wrong, yet incredibly popular belief, SEO, or search engine optimization, is not dead. In fact, it’s just as alive and relevant today as it always has been. When a web user looks something up online, they tend to stick to the first few search results alone, and incredibly rarely leave the first page. If you’re not among those results, therefore, you’ll see little traffic on your page. SEO can help you to improve your search ranking, resulting in more business.
9. Ignore Trust-Building Elements
As amazing a tool as it may be, the internet can also be incredibly dangerous. Every day we hear new stories in the news of people being hacked or scammed online. Because of this, most of us are much more careful these days about the pages we visit and buy from. This means that you need to work a little harder to earn the trust of prospective customers. You can do so by adding trust-building elements, like trust badges, an HTTPS certificate, and customer feedback.
10. Forget About Social Media
If the content on your site is valuable to users and presented in an engaging way, then they’re going to want to share it with others. You should make this easier by adding social media sharing buttons to your web pages. It’s also important that you link to your website and share your content across your social media platforms too. This makes it much easier for your followers to find and access this content.
We all make mistakes, with entrepreneurs being no exception. If your website shows one of the blunders above, it’s important that you take the necessary steps to make it right.