10 WEBSITE MISTAKES THAT WILL SEND YOUR VISITORS RUNNING
How long can you keep your website visitors on your site?
According to many webmastersnot long enough. The general consensus among many online business owners is that visitors come, but they do not stay.
Its one thing for a visitor to leave your site after clicking on an ad or an affiliate link. Those are desired actions. But, when they click backwards and bounce off your site, you know you have some work to do.
What could be the problem? You wont know until you test, but to start you off, here are some of the top website mistakes I see webmasters make that send their visitors running the other way.
1. Lengthy Content
The more content the better, right? Well, not always. It will depend on your market.
If you are an Ecommerce store owner, too much content will crowd out your products and fail to provide a valuable user experience. If you sell services, lengthy paragraphs of unfocused content will bore readers and send them running.
There is a method to attracting people with your content and keeping them reading until they see your call to action. We call it readability.
If you want to learn more about this concept, read my previous blog post, A Lesson in Website Content Writing that Gets Results. In this post, I discuss how to tighten up your copy to draw readers to where you want their eyes to go.
Long paragraphs tend to bore readers. Your content shouldnt read like a novel. Separate paragraphs with bolded headlines, bullet points, and other separators.
If users arent captivated in the first few seconds, they will bounce off your site.
2. Too Many Ads
Does your website look like a nod to the Las Vegas strip?
When users land on a website and their eyes gravitate toward a multitude of ads, they will click away faster than their hands can take them.
Ten years ago, excessive advertising was not uncommon. Flashy banners were all the rage and brands made a lot of money using them. Today, internet users are savvy and after so much abuse, they know what an advertisement looks like. The more in their face it is, the greater chance they will click the other way.
Ads are a great strategy to making money online and I teach this in Niche Profit Classroom. But, in excess they not only fail to engage website visitors, but they also turn them off and cause them to leave your site. Internet users are already skeptical when they land on your site. Blinding ads just corroborate their suspicions.
3. Clutter
Take a good look at your site. What do you see? Is your eye pulled in more than one or two directions?
If so, your website may be too cluttered. Avoid jumbling together excess images or adding too many elements. As a webmaster, you may think the user will have more opportunity to click if you add more elements, but this is not always the case. If a visitor sees too much media (ads, images, text boxes, etc.) all at once, he will not stay.
Dont confuse your visitors. Keep the design clean and simple, with every element separated.
4. Poor Targeting
Who are your visitors? What do they want?
When you create a website, your preliminary work should involve who you are attracting. If you fail to establish an emotional connection with your content and your design elements, you will experience a high bounce rate.
Consider this example:
You are selling wedding dresses or you are an affiliate for a wedding dress manufacturer. Before you put up a site, you will need to consider the colors and design elements your audience demographic would like. You wouldnt use harsh, masculine colors because they do not appeal to the bridal, female demographic. You would use soft, warm, inviting colors, with a feminine vibe that translates to all parts of the site, including the content.
5. Hard Sales
Be careful about how hard you push your products/services. A call to action is a great strategy, but excessive calls to action, or copy that jams a product down a visitors throat will never convert to a sale.
Use informational, persuasive and valuable content around your calls to action. Offer enough value so your visitors will WANT to buy from you because they feel you have given them something of value.
6. Lack of Easy Navigation
Make it easy for your visitors to click through to the other pages of your site. Dont hide your navigation behind excessive images or ads or make the navigation unreadable.
7. Copying your Competitors
Have you ever spied on your competitors to acquire some ideas for your site?
This is not a faulty strategy, but it leads to problems if it isnt handled correctly.
Use your competitive research to spark creative ideas for your marketing campaign, but do not copy any element. You can run similar marketing strategies to your competition, but do not mimic their design or content. Not only is this unethical;, but it also will not make your visitors happy if they happen to see both sites in the same internet search.
8. Outdated Information
If your content isnt evergreen, update it as needed.
I have seen many websites publish seasonal content and fail to remove or change it once the season is over. For example, you may visit a site in the month of January and see an expired holiday discount from December. This displays to the user the brand is not professional and does not maintain the website. Would you want to buy products/services from this website?
9. Over-optimized
Not only does over-optimization affect your sites Google rankings, but it also diminishes your sites user experience.
Throwing in excessive keywords will make your content sound unnatural. Visitors will read it and not make sense of it.
Strive to provide valuable content for your target audience. This will keep them on your site and clicking where you want them to.
10. No Value
When creating your website, focus on your visitors first! Think VALUE.
Are you throwing together content just to satisfy a page limit? Or are you genuinely wondering if your website visitor will read and enjoy what you published.
Focus on the user first, and everything else will fall into place.
What website mistakes have you made? Are you guilty of any of these?
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