You go back to your website, change a bit of text, tweak the colours, add a call to action.

Still nothing.

At this point it’s easy to give up. After all, you’re not a website expert, you’ve already spent hours on it and you need to get back to your day job.

Sound familiar?? 

Realistically there are 2 reasons your website isn’t performing: 

1. The people who land on it aren’t ready to take action.
2. Your website isn’t appealing.

Let’s look at the first reason:

People aren’t ready to take action

How often do you go online to buy something, you find the product from a trusted retailer then quickly Google it to see if you can get it cheaper/faster/from an independent seller elsewhere? In a nutshell, even with the big retailers like Amazon, people don’t necessarily buy the first product they find on the website. This is because they’re not quite ready to take action and buy the product.

The same principle applies to your website, whether you’re offering a service or a product.

If we’re going to shun the big retailers for independent sellers or engage with a service from a small business, the chances are we’re going to want to get to know the person first. People like to buy from people but it’s important we know who those people are first.

On average it takes a minimum of 7 touch points before someone engages with an independent service. These touch points can come from a variety of sources – website, social media, newsletter, LinkedIn live, messaging, etc. It can take up to 27 touch points to get someone in the position where they go onto your website and click that all important ‘buy’ button.

27 touch points?????????

Yep! For some people it will be even more. So there’s a couple of things to think about here:

How can you get people from the first touch point to the next?

A well designed, easy to navigate site with an option to sign up to a newsletter/follow on social media, subscribe to notifications is your best option here. If people like what they see when they land on your website they’ll stay and read more of your site, if they then receive a prompt to keep in touch, they’re more likely to sign up to your newsletter/subscribe to your social media.

Then keeping in touch is relatively easy. You should be posting to Social Media frequently and emailing your crowd regularly

Your website isn’t appealing 

When we’re the people who have written our websites then go on to build it or work with a website designer to build it, we’re often going to be too close to the website to be objective. In short, we can’t separate the process from the finished result. So when we look at the website we can’t see what’s not working and why people aren’t signing up.

In an ideal world you’ll have a friend/associate/trusted customer whom you can ask to go through your website and make a note of anything they think doesn’t appeal/needs improving. Bonus points if they share what they think the improvements should be. If you have this as an option, do this, you’ll probably be surprised to hear what people think of the website when asked to be honest, rather than the default people pleasing ‘looks great!’ we often hear.

What’s important is the person looking at the website should have some experience/common interests/traits of the customers you are hoping to appeal to. For example, if you’re looking to appeal to 40 something independent businesswomen there’s no point asking your friend’s 20 something son who works in an employed role in IT, to look at it.

If you don’t have someone who can do this consider asking a website designer to go through it. Most website designers will have a website strategy and solutions, review or power hour service where they can go through the website for you and suggest changes to improve it, they can also talk you through the process of changing it.

Websites are always evolving and need time, attention and updating to continue to perform. Sometimes what worked a few months ago, can stop working as website design moves on. Keep track of your website analytics as these will tell you what’s working for you and what’s not. Schedule time into your diary to review your website every couple of months.

Just like with plants, a website which is tended to regularly will thrive and when a website thrives it brings in leads and generates sales leaving you to get on with your actual job, it’s win-win.

I have a wee free resource that you might just wanna get your hands on that will help you to look at exactly what you need on your website.  

It’s an ebook called No-One Wants A Webshite!