Six Signs That Your Company’s Website is Failing – Plus the Solutions

The web marketer charged with looking after the company website has the unenviable task of making sense of the data. For most marketers that means logging into Google Analytics and looking at the streams of information: how many users visited the website on a given day, what the sources of traffic are, what are the most popular pages on the site.

But how many people really understand what it is that they’re looking at? What are the signs that a website isn’t performing adequately?

Knowing what the warning signs are is important, and can make the difference between detecting trouble early and acting on it to fix the issues, or waiting until it’s too late to make a difference anymore.

Here are the six most common problems that we see when looking at a company’s website, along with the remedies to begin fixing the issues:

      1. High bounce rate

This is still a term that needs explaining to someone not familiar with digital marketing. A high bounce rate means visitors are leaving the site without taking any action; they’re not reading a second page, they leave the website after landing on that first page. This is usually a sign that the website is not engaging or compelling enough to the reader; they haven’t found the content interesting enough to take action (read a second page, fill out a contact form, place an item into a shopping cart, etc.)

High bounce rates are 80-90+ % on a website. If you’re average bounce rate is hovering around 60%, that’s usually the edge of entering the trouble zone.

Solution: you should try a few experiments to see if it lowers your site bounce rate. Adding links to related content on the page can help reduce the bounce rate. So can improving your visual call-to-action, especially if you are offering a service or a product. A/B testing can be a great ongoing task to keep lowering your bounce rate. Remember, with every new page that gets read you increase the chances of your site visitor converting into a new lead or paid customer.

      2. Low conversion rate

Since I’ve just talked about the bounce rate, spending some time discussing your conversion rate makes sense.

If visitors are not converting into customers or taking any desired action on the website, this could indicate that your website is not effectively communicating its value proposition or is not user-friendly.

There could be a couple of different reasons for the low performance, one being the visual design of your web pages. This is a big of enough reason to devote a whole point to the problem, which I will do in point #4.

Solution: You need to have set up a goal on your analytics to see how well your conversions are doing. For example, a ecommerce website should have set up goals to see how many people are completing the last page in the site’s checking out process. That way, the number of finished transactions is known and can be compared to the total number of site visitors.

You can get even more detailed and find out if your organic visitors turn out to produce more sales, or if it’s your direct site visitors, or email visitors, and so on.

      3. Poor search engine ranking

Website owners want to be on the first page of organic results for search engines because it means more people will visit their website. Having good search engine results can translate into big bucks.

Solution: There are lots of reasons why your website may not be getting good results on Google or Bing. It could be due to the competition being smarter and having optimized their websites for best organic results. You may need to have more content on your site, or more backlinks, or even improve your website loading speed.

If you’re not knowledgeable about search engine optimization (the process of improving the organic rankings of a site), then a good place to start is with a site audit. Snaptech has done numerous site audits for clients, and given a report breaking down what needs to be worked on to get more traffic to the website. Having a professional digital marketer have a look at your website is like getting a medical doctor to examine your body: it’s a good strategy for staying healthy.

      4. Outdated design or functionality

Many website owners treat their websites like the way they treat their cars: if it’s working fine, why touch it? The truth is, your vehicle will run better and much longer if you keep it regularly maintained. The same approach should be given to your company’s website.

If your website looks old-fashioned, is difficult to navigate or does not work properly on different devices, it may be turning visitors away, decreasing engagement, and destroying your conversion rate.

Solution: have your web designer look at your front-end user experience every six months. Can you make small changes that increase effectiveness on your site? Can you swap out older or poor quality images of products or your services and replace them with something fresher?

Little improvements over time can add up to provide more value than leaving your site alone for years as you wait for a complete website redesign.

      5. Lack of traffic

If your website is not receiving enough traffic, it may be because you’re not effectively promoting it, or the content is not valuable or interesting enough to attract visitors.

Simply building a website isn’t enough to get you full results. There needs to be a plan to drive people to come to your website. There’s simply too much competition out there on the web today. You need to do more.

Solution: developing and launching a paid media campaign is one way to bring targeted traffic to your website. Paid ads start bringing results immediately. If you have a good paid ads manager then you should be making more than your ad spend; if not, you need to get an immediate second opinion from a different paid ads agency.

SEO is the second major way to bring traffic to a website. The downside to SEO is that it typically takes 3-6 to see results; the upside is that unlike a paid ads campaign, SEO continues to deliver traffic even if you halt your SEO work. The traffic will slowly decrease over time, but you will continue to see good returns on your SEO investment for months, if not years, ahead.

      6. Negative or no feedback or reviews

If the company website is receiving negative feedback or reviews from its customers, that’s a good indication that the website is not meeting their needs or expectations. Bad reviews lead to a decline in customer loyalty and trust. Those negative results will likely turn away potential new customers and drive them to see results from your competitors.

Having no reviews isn’t as damaging as having a slew of negative results about your business, but it’s still not great. Reviews are online credibility; tell me the truth, would you give your business to a company that had 100 positive reviews and a handful of negative ones, or a business that had no reviews?

Solution: you need a strategy to get positive reviews for your business, and to keep new reviews coming in. This is one of those quiet marketing strategies that business owners don’t really think much about, but can have a huge positive ROI for the business. Digital marketing agencies are specialists for coming up with strategies to get positive reviews posted online for a business. And I don’t mean paying for fake reviews; the best reviews are from satisfied former customers. These real reviews have an air of authenticity and confidence that paid reviews don’t have.

So there you have it: six warning signs to look out for, and six high level solutions for you to consider. As always, if Snaptech Marketing can lend you a hand on any of these strategies, we’re a phone call or email away.