Have you ever walked into a store and been so turned off by its appearance, employees, or confusing layout that you left without buying what you came for?
Your website is your online storefront, and the same reasoning applies. Today’s consumers are far more sophisticated than in the past. If they aren’t happy with one store or website, they know it will only take them a few moments on their phone to find another. If you want to succeed, you must exceed their expectations.
How Important is Your Website?
For most businesses, a website is a large component of their marketing efforts. For some, it’s the single biggest contributor to sales. Even if you only depend on your website to generate some of your leads, it’s a crucial part of your overall business strategy.
How to Know if Your Website is Helping or Hurting Your Business
Your website represents your business and is often the only point of contact between you and the consumer. Everything they know and feel about you and your company will be based on their website experience.
Asking yourself the following five questions can help you determine whether your website is helping or hurting your bottom line.
1. How long are visitors remaining on your website?
When you check Google Analytics (every business owner should do this), you may find your bounce rate is higher than 50%, possibly much higher. This is the percentage of visitors who glanced at your website and left without taking any action. You lost your opportunity to convert them in a very few brief seconds because your website appeared irrelevant to the user, didn’t function well, or created a bad first impression.
Average time on page is another excellent metric to follow. Knowing whether people stay 15 seconds or 2 minutes on a page is an excellent indicator of quality and relevance. A well-planned SEO (search engine optimization) strategy can improve bounce rate, average time on page and many other metrics, generating an increase in conversions.
2. How effective is your sales funnel?
You may follow your sales funnel closely and know exactly what percentage of visitors fall out at each step. However, if you only look at the number of conversions but don’t look deeper to examine all segments of the sales funnel, you’re disregarding a lot of valuable data. You’ll probably be shocked at how few people make it to the end of the funnel and convert. You must know where your sales funnel is leaking in order to fix it.
3. Are your leads surging, decreasing or flatlining?
If you don’t follow any other metric, you probably follow this one. If your leads are flat or decreasing, especially when considering the economic boom so many businesses are experiencing, you’re in trouble. Your website is definitely hurting your business.
4. Do competitors’ websites look and function better than your website?
It pays to keep tabs on your competitors’ websites. Be objective. Anything that impresses you also impresses consumers and is taking money out of your pocket. It’s especially important that your website functions at least as well on mobile as it does on desktop.
5. Is your website overdue for a makeover?
Your website must keep pace with the latest technology and trends. Your SEO, for example, should be updated to reflect the increasing importance of voice search. Mobile optimization and web design has become critical after Google’s March 2018 announcement of mobile-first indexing. Old, stale websites without fresh content will be ranked lower by the search engines, costing you leads and money.
If you think your website could be hurting your business, let’s talk about how we could supercharge it. Boost your revenues by updating your web design and SEO. Renovate your sales funnel and capture more conversions.
BXP Creative’s team of web designers, SEO experts and experienced marketers are ready to go to work. Check out how we work. Our system is designed to give you less stress and more control. Contact us today to find out how we can help you grow your business.
