Top 10 reasons why your website is failing

Websites don’t fail, people fail. If you think it’s all your website’s fault (or your web developer) then take a long hard look at the real reasons your website is failing to produce the results you desire.

1. You sit back and expect miracles to happen – You have a “build it and they will come” attitude. If you think that you can just have a website built and it will magically attract people to visit your website and show up on the first page of the search engine results for your keywords then you are very sadly mistaken. This is a very large miss conception of 90% of the website owners on the net today. Getting your website to the top of the search engines requires a LOT of work, link building strategies, content marketing, social proof, and search engine marketing strategies.
2. You have a lack of good content – You do not take the time to write authentic and unique content. Most people these days are too lazy to sit down and write an article in their own words. They copy text from multiple websites and meshing together to make it look like a unique article. But while that may look good to human readers the search engines can easily identify this and demote your content so that it never shows up in the search results. Make sure you are writing unique content in your own words and you will get the best results. Make sure you’re not writting about crap that nobody cares about or making it too difficult to read. General rule of thumb is that if a 5th grader can’t read it and understand it then it is not good copy.
3. You listen to the wrong people – Stop taking advice from people who were clearly not qualified to give you advice about Internet marketing. Just because someone you know reviews your website and has an opinion about it does not make them an all-knowing expert. Only take advice from individuals who are qualified to do so and that have a great amount of industry related experience. Most people accept their friends and even high school students’ comments seriously when it comes to web design and marketing advice. 99% of these people have absolutely no prior Internet marketing experience and they are clearly not qualified to even give such advice on such a critical part of your business.
4. You don’t monitor your website – If you can’t measure it you cannot manage it. If you are not regularly reviewing where your website traffic is coming from and your conversion rates, then how do you know if your website is doing well or not? at the very least you should be using tools like Google analytics or other website analytic tools so that you can track where your visitors are coming from. There are many free solutions available these days, Google analytics is the most popular, and if you are not using one of these tools on a regular basis then you are surely doomed to fail.
5. You do not engage in social media – You do not regularly post links to your website articles or blog posts on social media websites such as Facebook, twitter, YouTube, Google plus, or LinkedIn. If you think that you can get by without being active on any of the above-mentioned social media websites in this day and age then you have another thing coming. These days everyone is using some sort of social network as a daily communication tool and even the search engines are using social media networks to give authority to websites that have social proof. Social proof is determined how many times you were content has been shared across various social networks and how many back links the social media websites have that link to your website.
6. You do not optimize your webpages – If you are not using content optimization tools such as scribe content, to optimize your webpages to be the most effective with the search engines your website will not rank very high. Optimizing your content will increase on-site SEO and be in a format that search engines love.
7. You do not take web security seriously – If you are not regularly maintaining your website with proper updates and security patches then you are just asking for trouble. If your website gets hacked then the hackers can insert their own back links on your website which will give them link juice from your website to theirs. When this happens, the search engines identify this and will penalize your site or possibly remove it from all search indexes and it is extremely hard and expensive to get this corrected.
8. Your website does not support mobile devices – If your website does not support mobile phones and tablets then you could be frustrating up to 70% of your website visitors with a poor browsing experience. These days mobile devices are being used more and more for browsing the net for information and services. If you are not catering to this crowd then you are mostly likely throwing thousands of dollars out the door each month in potential business.
9. You never spend a dime – It takes money to make money. If you are not spending any money on marketing and some kind of paid traffic then you are missing the boat on potentially hundreds of daily visitors to your website. Make sure that if you do not know what you are doing that you hire an expert in this area because if you don’t you will just be throwing your money out the door for no reason.
10. You focus on the wrong things – If you are more worried about how pretty your website is rather than focusing on good content, then just shut your doors now and go home. People seriously do not care what your website looks like as much as they care about finding the content they need. If you would put more focus on usability and human interaction design, then you will find that your website will be more successful than if it was more visually appealing. Remember, people can’t see a pretty design if they can’t find your website in the first place.

In case YOU missed it, every point above starts with YOU! Don’t blame your web developer if your website isn’t giving you the results you are looking for. YOU are the owner of the website, so it is your responsibility to monitor and market it properly. If this is not an area that you know what you are doing then it should be your priority to find a company that you can hire to do these tasks on a regular basis for you.

 

ITDwebdesign.com can help! Contact us today for a free consultation and website evaluation.

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