Your company website is a great marketing tool that can serve many purposes. It is an outlet for information about the services or products you offer and demonstrates the value of your business. Whether visitors are coming for the first time, or returning to find out more, you want your website to be clean and effective in drawing in prospects.
We’ve listed some of the most common website mistakes we see, and how you can identify them in your own company’s site.
Not Enough (or Too Much) Information Above the Scroll
“Above the scroll” refers to the website real estate that site visitors see before scrolling down the page. It’s a myth that site visitors won’t scroll at all, but it’s still important to ensure your “above the scroll” content provides the beginning of a compelling user experience.
Information above the scroll is the first thing a visitor sees when they come to your website or landing page. Include clear language about who your company is, what you offer and how you will provide value.
Graphics are great, but be sure they serve a purpose and are formatted appropriately to fit on your website. Use buttons on your graphics or link your picture to an important page you’d like the user to visit next. You have the capability of guiding your visitor from the moment they enter the site by putting important links and buttons above the scroll and in the center of the visitor’s view.
Things to look for:
- Is there clear language about who your company is, what it offers and how it will provide value?
- Is there a header image or video? Is it too big or too small?
- Is site navigation easy to find?
- Are there clear site paths to take (i.e. Contact Us, Request Demo, Product Information, etc)?
Cluttered Site Navigation
Similar to having too much information above the scroll, site navigation should be visible and easy to navigate, but not take up too much of the current view.
A lot of companies will associate their navigation bar or banner with their brand. This can result in these large navigation bars or banners that will take up too much of the above the scroll real estate. For a great example of a minimal navigation bar and keeping true to their brand, look at the Apple website. Their navigation is so minimal you almost don’t even see it. What you do immediately see is their product, their summer deals, their reasons to switch to their product and all of the product categories they offer.
The primary goal of your website is to focus on what your business has to offer to a visitor. When available, group similar pages on your navigation bar and utilize drop down menus to categorize subpages. For example, if your business sells 25 types of cleaning products and six of those cleaning products are advertised toward ‘green households,’ have a header navigation display ‘green households’ with a drop-down for your six product pages.
Things to look for:
- Is it difficult to get back to the homepage or back to the primary navigation once you click on a tab?
- Do the navigation tabs direct to vital pages?
- Can you find the navigation menu in mobile view?
Ineffective Calls-to-Action
CTAs are effective on websites for a number of reasons – visitors coming to the site are already interested in something about the business and you have their attention without really having to work for it.
Poorly thought out CTAs come at a price: lost leads, higher bounce rates and poor search performance. Ineffective CTAs can ask too much of the visitor. Effective CTAs should be actions that a prospect would be willing and able to spend only a couple of minutes on. Start out with simple CTAs that will take 30 seconds. A quick form with name, email and company name would be a good exchange for something small like a white paper.
Ineffective CTAs don’t convey value to the visitor. A white paper or eBook can offer quality market data, best practices or “how-to” information that prospects will deem valuable content. You want the visitor to know the benefits they receive from your offer to help persuade them to value your services and in exchange provide you with their information.
Ineffective websites will have too many CTAs or, conversely, too few CTAs. One or two call-to-actions per page is effective because it grabs the viewer’s attention but doesn’t make them feel like you’re overselling.
Things to look for:
- Are the CTAs overly complex or nuanced?
- Is the page missing clear CTAs?
- Does the page have more than 1 (maybe 2) CTAs?
- Is there obvious value in the CTA?
Outdated Landing Pages
Landing pages are generally meant to be updated more frequently than the main webpages, and are often used to collect registration information for events, special promos, demo requests or gated content.
Since landing pages change frequently, it’s easy for old ones to slip through the cracks. Have a process established with your website management team to go through landing pages on a monthly basis. This is a great opportunity to create a landing page performance review, to track leads generated, understand the reach to the pages and other relevant website data.
Create new landing pages for special events and offers, and retire them whenever the offer has expired or event has passed. Outdated landing pages on your site look not only unprofessional, but almost demonstrate a lack of timeliness.
Landing pages should keep your business’s branding and have similar templates to the rest of your site. Stay consistent, and have a uniform look across all sections of your website.
Things to look for:
- Are event landing pages outdated?
- Is contact information correct?
- Are templates consistent?
- Do the pages have old logos or old branding elements on them?
- Check display/PPC ads: are the landing pages relevant and consistent with the ads?
Lack of Valuable Content
Valuable content will be of most interest to the visitor, even before they consider providing you their contact information in order to receive it.
You want to have a balance of gated vs. ungated content, and not all of your content should be gated. Only posting gated content can deter visitors from returning to your website. On the other hand, having only ungated content keeps you from being able to capture prospect’s information and grow your lead database. If your main goal is to create inbound leads that you can move forward with, offer enough gated content to get the important contact information you need to then use in your nurture program. Combine that with your ungated content to move prospects further down the sales funnel.
Have a variety of assets available. This includes blogs, guides, eBooks, content to browse, examples of work, case studies and more. Keep all of these assets updated! Your content pages should be landing pages within your website structure that are routinely updated with ongoing posts featuring the latest and greatest content pieces.
Gated content should include (but is not limited to) demos, eBooks, white papers, guides, templates and tools. These are valuable assets that visitors will receive in exchange for their name, email address and company name or phone number. It is important to have a variety of content to speak to each of your personas and in turn obtain potential prospects.
Things to look for:
- Is there plenty of valuable ungated content?
- Are forms for gated content too onerous?
- Is there a variety of content (infographics, blogs, guides, eBooks, etc.)?
- Is content recent and reflective of current industry trends and data?
Not Optimized for Mobile
Websites that are optimized for mobile viewing should adjust accordingly based on what device you are using (Android, iPhone, etc.). You shouldn’t have to spend too much time zooming in or out in order to read text on a mobile view and pictures on your site should adjust proportionately for the text and your screen size.
If a website isn’t optimized for mobile viewing, it is likely that your emails aren’t either. Mobile email opens make up over 50% of all email engagement. If available, test your emails and webpages on a range of devices.
Things to look for:
- Are you constantly expanding the view on your phone to read the text?
- Are images resized for mobile or are they cut off?
- Do navigation menus adjust to appropriate layouts as not to take up the entire screen?
Slow Page Loading
The average attention span is 8 seconds, which can leave some webpages in the dust if they aren’t loading quickly enough. Slow page loading can also be a result of large image file sizes, inefficient javascript/HTML coding or any number of other web development issues.
If slow page loading is consistent across the website, it may be a server issue. If warranted, check with your IT department regarding slow loading across your website.
Here is a handy tool to check page speed optimization by Google. This tool helps address issues that could be causing slow loading pages and provides recommendations on leveraging browser caching, image size optimization, file compression and more. Addressing some of these issues to increase page loading speed and make your site more efficient will result in a better user experience and more web traffic.
Inconsistent Branding Elements
Your website is a clear visualization of your brand. Visitors come to your site and learn about who you are as a company, what your mission is and why your services or products are worth purchasing. And while we like to look at all the pretty aspects of branding, your brand goes beyond the logo, color scheme and tagline.
Your brand also includes the type of language and catch phrases you use on your website. Your brand is how you connect with and begin selling to prospects that have never heard your sales pitch.
Inconsistent or unclear branding can hinder your credibility and result in missed opportunities which makes brand consistency important. Before publishing your website, or any new landing pages, be sure that your verbiage is aligned with your brand and templates are consistent and correct. This cohesion also applies to any gated content downloads you decide to use on the website. It is just as important that your brand continuity is visible in all of your content pieces because if a prospect downloads one piece, that asset sticks with them as proof of your brand.
Things to look for:
- Are the multiple fonts throughout the website and pages on brand?
- Are your colors in alignment with your brand palette? Aside from pictures, are colors consistent and matching?
- Is the messaging cohesive across all pages, do they switch from first person to second to third or change from past-tense to future?
- Are industry definitions consistent across pages and do they use the same terminology across applicable sections?
Fixing these common website mistakes will help your business make a profound first impression on a visitor, as well as keep regular returning visitors. And be sure to have your website analytics set up to help you keep track of your website performance!
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