No matter what niche your business operates in, it is important that you have a web presence. This presence works both as a secondary store front and as a brand building tool. Many online business owners find that their websites fail to get the response that they think it deserves, and because of this they give up in the first year, not realising that they were on the verge of success. Here are a few of the most common pitfalls people encounter when launching a new website.
Poor Mobile Design
Google is placing increasing emphasis on mobile friendliness when it comes to web design and this is particularly true for local search. If you are a Manchester web design company, for example, Google will rank your website higher for mobile users in the Manchester area if your site is mobile friendly. Slow loading or broken sites will be heavily penalised.
Poor Marketing
While it is possible to do well on the strength of your content alone, organic search traffic is usually not enough to sustain a business website. You will need to invest in some paid search or AdWords marketing, or use social media marketing to help your website reach critical mass. Marketing should be a log term effort.
Weak Content
Even if you have a great looking website made by a company such as Manchester website designers Bamboo Solutions, if the content on that website is thin or poorly targeted then your site will not achieve its goals. In most cases, your website exists to help your customers and this means that you need to provide content that serves their “know, do or go” moments. Resist the urge to talk about your business, and rather focus on answering the questions that your customers have and filling their needs. This is how you will generate goodwill and keep your visitors coming back time and time again.
Giving up Too Soon
It takes repeated testing and tweaking of your website design, calls to action and ad campaigns to achieve success. Many webmasters launch their sites, wait for the conversions to come in and then panic if the results they see are not as good as they expected. Rather than following a slow and systematic testing approach, they change too many things at once and then wonder why they are not seeing results. If you can only spend the time to learn one thing about online marketing, make that thing AB testing, and use sound testing practices to grow your website.
With patience and a good web design team behind you it is possible to achieve great results and turn your website intro an important part of your business. However you must accept that it takes time to lay the foundations of a good website. Be prepared to build up a collection of content over a period of several months, and to spend longer testing your ad campaigns.
