We often see websites that could be doing so much better.  When I say that, we of course don’t have access to the back end or any financials of all these sites but we can see lots of opportunities to improve the interface to the customer.
Your number one goal on your business website should be to collect people’s email addresses from your website.  If you’re not doing this get onto it right now!  I say this because it’s so much easier to reach out to those people who have expressed interest in your product or service with follow up communication – they’re warm leads.
Other than collecting emails (and there’s a whole series of blog posts in that topic!).
Here are 5 simple checks to see if your website is losing leads,
1. Website content doesn’t address pain points
If your website content doesn’t communicate to the visitor in their terms and answer the problem they landed on your site to solve, you’re losing leads.  Take a step back.  Someone somewhere in the world typed something into a search engine, or clicked on a link and landed on your website.  It wasn’t an accident.  They were looking for something.  They wanted to solve a problem, or get an answer to a burning question they had.
Action: check your google analytics to see where your traffic is coming from, and the keywords used in getting to your site.
2. Poor navigation
Are you making it difficult for your potential customers to get to what they need to find? Have you buried the content deep in the menu system? When they navigate the menu, does it make logical sense?
A well architected site will prevent your visitors from click back and going to another site.  We know that over time, you add pages to your site and posts, and more pages and before you know it you’ve created a monster!  Each and every page you add, needs to have a goal or a purpose.  If your business direction changes, tidy up old content that is no longer relevant, or re-purpose it into more fresh content.
Action: Review your site navigation and maybe ask a friend or family member to find something on your site. Observe them and see how easy or difficult they found it.
3. Missing call to action
I mentioned every page needs to have a purpose.  On each page there should be a clear call to action for the visitor to take.  It might be to sign up to your email database (in exchange for something of value of course), or it might be to book an appointment or make and enquiry.
Don’t waste the opportunity to present something for them to do.
Action: Review each page and check there is a clear call to action asking the visitor to do something.
4. Slow loading pages
One of the worst causes to losing leads from your site is losing them before they’ve even had a chance to read anything! If you’re on cheap and cheerful web hosting plans then don’t expect super fast loading times for your site.
You can optimise your site for load times by reducing sizes of image files (www.tinypng.com), or reducing the quality slightly of images.  Be careful adding plugins (if you’re using WordPress) when you’re unsure the impact of what they do.  Often these plugins will loads files and resources from remote servers, which end up slowing down your site whilst they transfer what they need.
Consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as CloudFlare.com which will cache items from your site around the world in it’s servers allowing visitors to load your site faster.
Action: Check your website using the Pingdom Tools site to see how well it performs
5. Mobile un-friendly
The age of mobile is truly here and if your website isn’t loading nicely on mobile devices, the likelihood is that your visitor is going elsewhere to one that is. Â Google have changed their algorithm to rank sites higher that respond well on mobile technology.
If you’re using WordPress you may be able to install the WP Touch plugin to make it responsive.
Action: Check your website with the Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool to see if it is mobile friendly.
