Have you ever had a website developed and been dissatisfied with its outcome? Or perhaps you have had a website that used to be highly successful but is no longer generating any revenue?

You may have fallen into a trap if your website isn’t being used as one of your business’s major sales drivers.

Over the last ten years, we have worked on hundreds of websites and talked with countless business owners, and we have discovered that most business owners who need help with their website fall into one of these two traps:

1. The Trap of Knowledge

Many new business owners, in our experience, underestimate the importance of proper website design and marketing. They frequently misjudge the impact of a properly designed website, mistaking low cost for value and opting for the cheapest website designer accessible.

Many new business owners are unaware that not every website is created equal. Consider this: both a Ferrari and a Toyota are automobiles, but which one will perform better? A website is the same way.

2. The Trap of Stagnation

What worked for your website a few years ago may or may not function today. Because many firms are only now realizing the need of competing successfully online, the battle for internet visibility has become fierce. Those who invest extensively in continuously enhancing their website and digital marketing activities reap the benefits, while those who remain stagnant die.

So, whether you have had a website constructed that doesn’t do anything for your business or you have noticed a substantial reduction in your website’s performance, there’s still hope. Below, we will highlight some of the most important aspects on which you should concentrate and, if required, enhance.

CONVERSION

Everything we do online should be geared at improving conversion rates. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) refers to the process of converting website visitors into buyers, or converting a website into a sales machine. To do so, you will need four things, and if you do them right, you will see a significant increase in sales;

• A digital marketing approach.
• A high-quality website with lots of visitors.
• The capacity to evaluate and enhance data.

Here are the four ways to do it in greater detail:

1. Digital Marketing Plan

Let’s be honest, did you have a digital plan when you first launched your firm and had a website built? If you answered no, that’s fine; many businesses don’t begin with a digital plan in place. But, for the sake of your business, it’s critical that you do your homework first.

You would have had a business plan when you first started the company that offered you some direction and a blueprint for how you expected to expand your company in the short to medium term. A digital marketing plan is quite similar, and it also gives you insight into how the competition is doing online and what you need to do to meet your objectives.

The Advantages of a Digital Marketing Plan

Insight

A solid digital marketing plan will look at what your competitors are doing online to evaluate what they are doing properly and badly. It will also show you what your consumers are looking for on the internet, as well as the volume of such searches in your area.

Opportunities

It’s a lot easier to spot changes when you know what your consumers and competitors are doing online.

Consider the following scenario: you own a plumbing company in Chicago. The first thing that comes to mind is to optimize your website for the term “plumber Chicago.” However, this is not necessarily the ideal course of action for two reasons. The first is that the competition for these keywords is fierce, and you won’t be able to have your website listed unless you have a substantial budget to devote to SEO. The second reason is that your clients may not always type this into Google.

“Plumber Chicago” is perhaps the most searched for term on the internet, but a lot of that traffic is low quality, which means that people searching “plumber Chicago” could be looking for anything similar to it, such as plumbing jobs. The keyword purpose is low because it isn’t specific enough.

On the other hand, if we find a term like “local emergency plumber in Chicago”, we know that these people are actively looking for a plumber in that part of town and will be extremely likely to contact you if they come across your website; this indicates that the keyword intent is high. These are referred to be long-tail keywords, and they are extremely beneficial to your business.

Keyword intent is an indication of a searcher’s intents and how likely they are to take action, which will eventually lead to a conversion.

Because the competition is typically doing it poorly and focuses on large volume keywords rather than phrases with lower volume but strong buyer intent, it’s often a lot easier to rank effectively on Google for long-tail keywords. So, by figuring out what the value keywords are and how your competitors are performing for those keywords, you can immediately spot market gaps and possibilities to attract high-quality traffic.

Direction

A digital marketing plan will establish a clear route for capitalizing on those opportunities once they have been identified. This is typically in the form of a step-by-step guide to ranking for high-value keywords and/or creating advertising campaigns.

It’s never too late to develop a marketing plan, whether you are just getting started online or have had a website for years.

2. A Website of High Quality

You will need to engage a high-quality website designer if you want a high-quality website that has a noticeable beneficial impact on your business, and they don’t come cheap. A professional website designer will not work for a low fee because they are not required to.

In our years of experience, finding the proper designer for the task can be tough, and quality can vary. Following poor encounters, several of our clients have had to work with many designers.

Some Warning Signs of a Poorly Designed Website:

• High Bounce Rate. If you look at your Google Analytics statistics, you will see if you have a high bounce rate, which suggests that the majority of visitors to your website are abandoning it right away. (If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up, do so now.)
• High Cost Per Conversion. If you are spending a lot of money on advertising, such as Google Ads, but you are not generating any leads or sales, it could be a clue that your website isn’t working properly.

The Attributes of a High-Quality Website

A professional website designer will be completely focused on your business and will want to learn everything there is to know about your target market. Because they are creating it for your target market, they will frequently refuse to develop the website exactly the way you want it. A high-quality website is one that is appealing to both potential clients and search engines. Here are some of the technical characteristics of a high-quality website:

Responsive Website Design: Your website should appear amazing on any device, including mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop computers. Responsive design refers to how your website adjusts to the size of the screen it’s being seen on, ensuring that everything from text to graphics is proportioned correctly. Visitors will not want to stay on your website if they have to zoom in to see information, and this will negatively impact your Google rating. Click here to utilize the Responsinator Tool to see how your website looks on different devices.

Contact is Simple to Make: CTAs should be obvious on your website (calls to action). Visitors to your website should be able to contact you quickly and easily; contact forms should be available, and if they’re on a mobile device, Click To Call buttons should be shown solely on mobile.

It’s Simple To Use: Your website should be well-structured and easy to navigate so that visitors may quickly discover the information they require.

Loading Time Is Short: If a visitor’s browser takes too long to load your page, they will leave and Google will penalize you in the rankings. Anything longer than two seconds is deemed slow, and Google recommends aiming for less than half a second. To use the Pingdom Tools speed test tool to check the speed of your website page, click here.

Fast Loading. If a visitor’s browser takes too long to load your page, they will leave and Google will penalize you in the rankings. Anything longer than two seconds is deemed slow, and Google recommends aiming for less than half a second. To use the Pingdom Tools speed test tool to check the speed of your website page, click here.

Unique Content: Your written content should be original and of the greatest quality. Nothing should be repeated across sites, and you should never copy and paste from another website.

On-site Search Engine Optimization: It’s not all about what you see on the surface. It’s critical that your website’s code follows Google’s guidelines, such as the correct text-to-code ratio, tag attribution, and meta tags.

Important: Check to see if your website has an SSL Certificate installed.

Consider Re-Designing Your Website.

If you believe your website is failing your business, you should consider getting it redesigned. When a website becomes outdated or is poorly built, the best course of action is to scrap it and rebuild it from the ground up.

3. High-Quality Traffic

There are many ways to get high-quality traffic to your website, including Google Ads, SEO, and Social Media, but we like to think of traffic as either Paid Traffic or Free (or Organic) Traffic to keep things simple.

Paid Traffic

Because advertising is a quick way to gain clients, we usually advocate it as a short-term option for firms that have just launched their website or are not well-listed on Google. There are various ways to advertise online, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, and so on, but the platform you choose is largely determined by the type of business you have and the demographic you are targeting.

Let’s imagine you own an eCommerce store that sells shoes all over the world. Ads on Pinterest, rather than Google Ads, would be far more cost-efficient and effective in terms of engagement. Alternatively, if you run a service-based firm (such as a lawyer), you should run Google Ads locally.

Organic or Free Traffic

Okay, so it’s not entirely correct to suggest that there is a way to receive 100 percent free traffic because it will take an initial commitment of time or money (which in my experience is often the same thing). However, you will discover that it pays off in the long run, long after you have put in the time and money and recouped your investment. So it’s effectively free traffic in that sense. Finding strategies to generate free traffic is critical to your business’s long-term success.

There are various avenues you can utilize to get Free Traffic, just like there are for Paid Traffic, with Google and Social Media being the most popular.

Social Media

Social media may be a powerful tool for increasing brand exposure and engagement, which can lead to sales, but it takes a lot of time and effort to create a large following. I normally advise clients to start by creating high-quality content that is relevant to their target market and then running advertising to get things started.  Once you have accumulated a few thousand followers, you should be able to turn off your ads and produce free traffic by continuing to develop shareable/engaging content, whether in the form of attractive offers or relevant news/media.

Important: When utilizing social media, you must exercise caution. Remember that you are entering a social area where people don’t want to be marketed to, so how you deliver your message is critical. People will see right through you if you come across as a “pushy salesman” and express their unhappiness. If you have any unfavourable interactions or conflicts, make sure to settle them as soon as possible and professionally. If you are not sure how to use Social Media, consider hiring a Social Media Manager with a proven track record of successfully maintaining business profiles.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks well on Google for relevant keywords. To be regarded as “well-listed,” your website must be on Page 1 at the very least, and preferably in the top three results for a specific search query.

A solid SEO plan will include the following elements:

• Keyword Optimized Content. Once you have determined which keywords you want your website to rank for, you will need to generate high-quality content that tells Google that your page is relevant to those terms. This can be done in a variety of ways, including blog articles and regular pages like your services pages. Relevance and quality are the most important factors here. The more relevant your page is to the search phrase, the more likely it is to appear in the results; and the higher the quality of your page in relation to your competitors, the more likely you are to outrank them.
• On-site Optimization. Your website should be well-coded to comply with Google best practices, which means utilizing the correct mark-up, tags, and metadata throughout.
• Keyword Research. You will want to know not only the high volume search terms/keywords but also the high intent keywords, as discussed in the Digital Strategy section. You will need to use the Google Keyword Tool from the Google Ads Console to acquire this information.
• Competitor Analysis. To learn why your top competitors are ranking highly on Google, you should undertake an SEO audit of them. Examine their backlinks to discover if there are any websites from which you might obtain links. Examine their website’s content and blog to evaluate what they are doing properly. When you examine your competitors’ websites attentively, you will notice issues in their SEO, as well as technical errors and subpar content. These are chances for you to improve and surpass them in the rankings.
• Backlinks. Backlinks used to be a big ranking factor for any page, but Google has started emphasizing high-quality content in recent years. After all, Google is where people go to look for knowledge and answers, so if you can supply some well-written content, you will have a good chance of attracting organic visitors. This is fantastic news, as obtaining high-quality backlinks is difficult. However, you should continue to pursue a link-building plan but focus on the quality of the backlinks rather than the quantity.

4. Examine and Significantly Improve

We are in the dark without the capacity to understand where our clients are coming from and how they interact with our website. It’s not enough to install Google Analytics and merely know how many visitors we are getting; we also need to know where the worthwhile visitors, or conversions, are coming from.

Consider this scenario: your website had 20 hits/visitors yesterday, and three people called your firm. How do you know which three of those twenty resulted in a conversion? Let’s say you did find out, and you learned that only one channel or phrase was responsible for bringing in three paying consumers, while the other 17 were completely ineffective. You did want to concentrate on growing traffic through that channel or term, which would result in a big increase in sales. Tracking technology is used to do this.

Tracking Conversions

Website monitoring technology is most effective when used in conjunction with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. Google Analytics used to provide more granular information so we could see which organic keywords were converting, but since 2011, Google has encrypted this data for privacy reasons, making it more difficult for us to see how our organic traffic is converting. However, when utilized in conjunction with sponsored advertising, we can observe which advertisements are the most effective. This increases the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns while lowering our ad cost.

Social Media Conversion Tracking

A tracking code, such as the Facebook Pixel, is now available for all Social Media advertising accounts, such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Facebook. You can set up conversion tracking from within your advertising account once you insert this tracking code into your website code. Various instructions on how to track specific actions such as button clicks, add to cart, and so on will be supplied depending on the platform you choose.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking

Setting up Goals in your Google Analytics account, then linking your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account and importing the Goals back into Google Ads is the best way to track conversions in Google Ads. When it comes to conversions, this integrates your tracking between Google Analytics and Google Ads, offering you a single source of truth.

Conclusion

To summarize, if your website isn’t generating leads, you should concentrate on digital marketing plan, a high-quality website, high-quality visitors, and the ability to evaluate data and make improvements. We have a plan in place to attain our objectives because we have a marketing plan. We are prepared to collect consumer contact information using a high-quality website. We have a lot better chance of receiving leads and making sales if we drive high quality traffic that is relevant to our business, and if we can discover exactly where that high quality traffic is coming from, we can become laser focused on what is actually working best for our business.

Hopefully, we have provided you some useful advice on what areas to concentrate on in order to improve your online performance. You may need to undertake some additional research depending on your expertise of these subjects, as we have only touched on them briefly.