Your website might fail.

All of the time and effort you put into creating your website might not lead to a successful business.

It happens all the time and like it or not; nobody is guaranteed success.

Some people invest £10,000 in a new website, and some people pay less than £100.

It doesn’t matter. It could still fail.

Over the years, we’ve noticed that there six key reasons your website isn’t working.

These things will stop you from getting traction and cause your website to become ineffective.

I want you to avoid failure as much as possible, which is why I wrote this article.

My hope is that you fix these issues before it’s too late.

1. Nobody wants or needs your product

Let’s get this one out of the way first.

Your website will NOT make up for a bad product. Not even a big fancy site with all the bells and whistles.

If your product or service is bad or simply not relevant. Your website (and business) is likely to fail.

I know it sounds harsh, and it is, but it’s vital that you have a product you can actually sell. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What can you do about it?

Be honest and ask yourself, do people want or need the product or service that you sell? Or was it just an idea that came to you, which you ran with.

If it’s the latter, I’d strongly recommend that you do some research to see if there’s a market for it.

I read a fantastic book on this very topic. It’s called Will It Fly by Pat Flynn. It will allow you to test out your idea to see if there’s a need or desire for it.

If it turns out there is a market for your product/services then great, however, if it turns out your product isn’t as relevant as you’d hoped, then see how you can develop the product and make it more commercial.

This isn’t a time for feeling sorry for yourself; you have to adapt or risk failure.

2. Your website is ugly

If your website looks like it was designed by a drunk 4-year-old, it’s probably NOT going make you rich.

Your visitors care about design and you should too. It makes sense. If you have a nice clean website, people will generally stick around for longer and potentially do business with you.

On the other hand, a bad looking website will turn people away and impact the number of customers you get.

This is why it’s so important to have an attractive website.

Here are a few things I see from time-to-time that might make your visitors feel icky;

Bad choice of colours – Luminous green is always a bad choice
Hard to read font choice – Fancy does not mean better
Stretched or distorted images – Image quality is so important

What can you do about it?

Your website doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It just has to be clean and simple.

Generally speaking, if you have paid a web designer I would hope that the site looks pretty good. Your chances will certainly be better than if you do it yourself. If you’re in any doubt whatsoever, get some honest feedback by sharing your website in our free Facebook group and title it “honest feedback needed”.

The biggest problem when business owners build their own website is they make it far too complicated. Too many features and too much clutter.

The best advice I can give you is to find a low-cost template and use that as the framework for your website.

You can install WordPress templates for around £50 and as long as you don’t change too much, it’s going to look pretty good.

Bad design will definitely impact on the success of your website so please take some pride in it.

3. You’re making your visitor think too much

A common problem I see when reviewing websites is a lack of clear, concise messaging. Everything is far too complicated and it’s just confusing for your visitor.

Imagine if you were walking down a street and none of the shops had signs up. Instead, they all had vague statements like:

“Helping you to prosper”
“Making you feel in control”
“Communications through solutions”

It would be pretty confusing trying to work out what anyone does. So why the hell do we do this we our websites?

Everywhere I look online, business owners are trying to be clever by using these random phrases. I’ve never really understood why because it just confuses people. They don’t help anyone and in most cases they’ll turn people away.

This also goes for the rest of your website text too, there seems to be too much industry jargon and not enough simple language.

What can you do about it?

Keep it simple. Whenever you write anything for your website ask yourself…

1. Would this be easy for ANYONE to understand?
2. Do I make it clear exactly what we do?

If the answer is no to any of these then you will want to revisit it.

Around two years ago, I read a book by Ann Handley call Everybody Writes and it helped me understand that writing is a lot easier than we think. I would suggest anyone struggling with getting started to check out that book too.

It’s also worth checking out this post, where I talk about how to get across what it is you do in one sentence, with some examples too.

4. You’re ignoring SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is far from dead. As long as people are still using sites like Google to browse online, SEO will be important.

I know it might seem complicated but SEO is part and parcel of running an online business. If you have not spent the time understanding even the basics of SEO then you’re probably missing out on a lot of traffic.

The truth is, there are lots of people out there searching the internet for your products and services and by burying your head in the sand, you’re simply missing out.

What can you do about it?

SEO doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s like anything else, learning a little bit and taking action will allow you to improve over time.

We’ve written lots of blog posts about SEO that can help you get started for free. We avoid jargon as much as possible and include lots of examples and images to make things easier to understand.

Here are a few to help you on your way.

SEO for Blog Posts
SEO Jargon
Why you’re not ranking in Google

You could also take an online SEO course, look on sites like Udemy or Lynda, you could even pay for a website critique and we’ll tell you exactly what to do with your website to improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

There are so many ways you can learn about SEO if you just focus on it.

Even if you hire a company to help with SEO, I would still recommend that you learn the basics first so you can inspect the work that the company have been doing.

5. Your blogging efforts are poor

If you are not adding new, quality content to your website on a regular basis, you’re going to get left behind.

Blogging can help in so many ways:

• It helps educate your visitors
• It builds trust
• It generates more traffic
• It allows you to get more customers

These days your visitors expect information fast, they want to visit your websites and get answers to questions before they buy. They don’t want to wait to speak to you on the phone or via email, they want a self-service website where they can inspect you on their terms.

What can you do about it?

At the very least you can write 2 blog posts or new pages per month and focus on helping your audience.

• Think about the questions that your customers ask you on a daily basis. Write an article to answer those questions.
• Write articles that educate your audience and empower them to achieve more. For me it might be “The Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Blog Posts”
• Write articles about your internal process. What is it like to work with you. For example, we wrote an article on “how we build your website from start to finish”

Write down a list of all the blog posts you can think of and come up with a content calendar so you can plan, write and promote your content over the coming months.

6. Your visitors don’t trust you

If you want more customers, your website needs to feel trustworthy.

With all the dodgy websites out there, it’s no surprise people are cautious about buying from websites they’ve never heard of.

This is why you need to build up a level of trust.

What can you do about it

There are many ways to show your visitors that your website is trustworthy, here are just a few:

• Show images and videos of you and your team
• Show genuine case studies and testimonials
• Educate your readers so they become more informed

More than anything, it’s about being authentic and showing who you are and what you stand for. Take this article for example. I wrote this because I wanted my readers to be aware of the potential dangers of an ineffective website. I want my customers to understand that I am an honest person and that they are not guaranteed success. It takes hard work.

Summary

Please understand that your shiny new website is not a golden ticket to success. It takes hard work and constant improvement. Your website is simply a vehicle that can help you get there BUT you are the driver.

I get that this article might come across as one big rant, but as I said at the beginning, I want you to be successful. I don’t want you staring at your analytics and your bank account in 6 months time and wondering why nothing is happening.

Over to you

Be honest, do you think you’ve suffered from any of these in the past? I certainly have. Please tell me your story in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

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