Is Your Website Hurting Your Business? Ep. 146

You're working hard on your SEO, learning about keywords, adding title tags, and meta descriptions, and that's great. Your SEO efforts help increase your website's visibility online and boost your traffic. 

But what happens when that traffic gets to your website? Is your site working to help your business, or is it actually hurting you? 

Listen to this week's episode and find out what hurts a business so you can make sure you're not making any of these website mistakes. 

Transcript

0:32

Hi there, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad that you are here with me today. So today's episode is a little bit different. We're not just talking about SEO today. Today we're talking about our websites and conversion, because this is part of the entire process, part of the equation, SEO, search engine optimization is going to boost our visibility. And bring traffic to our website. Now we need to make sure that our websites are set up to do their job and that they are able to help convert that traffic that comes to visit, or those people who find out about us and come visit the website. And I had. This. I kept seeing this come up again and again and again in a couple of entrepreneurial groups that I'm in, and it was like, you know what? I wanna write a blog post on this. I wanna do a podcast episode because I believe very strongly that there is a correlation between our traffic and our conversions, and if we start increasing traffic and we do not see an increase in conversions. It's because there's something wrong with our website. We are not set up for conversions, and that means our website is hurting our business. And I see so often people asking, Hey, I have my opt-in, I've got my webinar page. Nobody has signed up. Would someone take a look at it and you look at it and it's very definitely hurting them and they don't know it. So let's talk about what could potentially be hurting your website just to make sure that yours is set up in a way that that traffic that you're generating from your SEO work is going to pay off. So what we see, what I see more than anything is it sites that struggle. Have a problem. There's five problems. I see. Number one is it is not immediately clear what your business does, who you help, how you help them. Maybe you haven't quite figured out who your ideal customer is, like we talked about last week. Maybe you're still kind of struggling with that. Maybe it's just not clear. Maybe you're not using the right language, you're not using the words that they're looking at. Maybe it's kind of cluttered. It's hard to tell. There's a lot of information. There's a lot of graphics. It's hard to know where to look, how to focus your eyes. The other thing that can just be is that it's hidden, like your message, your text is hidden on mobile, and most people are gonna initially start searching on their phones. So what I want you to do to determine is this a problem, I want you to go to your website, on your computer, and on your phone. I want you to look at your homepage. No scrolling, no movement whatsoever. Is there a sentence that tells me exactly what you do and who you help? Is there information about that? Like if you go to mine, it's going to tell you. It used to say, I make SEO. Easy to understand. Now, I believe it says, I help you be visible online because I've had to change my messaging slightly because of all the shifts with Google. But you want something like that. One sentence, who are you? What do you help with? And stay focused on them, on the visitor, not yourself. This is not about you. This is about them. How do you help them? Because what I want you to remember. Every person visiting your website is asking the same question. What's in it for me? Why would I trade you my information? Why should I trust you? Why should I buy from you? Because they have a question. They have an issue. They need something, and they need to be convinced that you can help them. And when they're first coming to see you the first time. They're gonna be skeptical. They're not going to just believe that you can help them, and it's very likely they're not going to come back to your site again without additional prompting. So it's really important that when they come on their phone or on their desktop, they can see who you are and what you do and how you help them immediately. So that's your five second test. Can someone tell and. If you aren't sure, ask your mom, your cousin, somebody who knows you, who doesn't understand what you do for a living. We all have them. Ask them to look at your website and see if they can understand without scrolling in five seconds or less what you do. If not, you need to make an adjustment. You need to change your opening hero section on your homepage because most people are not gonna scroll. So it's really important. The next thing we need to look at is. Are you getting traffic? But your email list is not growing. So if you are getting traffic, your SEO is working. You are more visible in AI search. People are finding you, they're coming to you, but they're not signing up for whatever it is you offer as your freebie. That's a problem. Because we want them to convert. The only way they're gonna become customers is if they become leads. Somebody who's just coming to your website to visit or to check it out the first time, they're not yet a lead because you don't have their contact information. You cannot nurture them, you cannot engage with them. You can't really do anything. So what you need to make sure is, is your. Opt-in. Your freebie, your valuable free offer, whatever you wanna call it. Everybody calls it something else. Is that easy to see? Is it clear what it is? Is it easy to get and to request? You want to have as minimal a required number of sections to fill out to get your freebie. Truly the only thing you need is their email address. So on my freebies, you'll notice if you go to my website, I ask for your first name. It is not a requirement. I do that because I like to be able to personalize my emails. I like to be able to know who I'm talking to, especially when you send me questions. You reply to emails. I go look and pull it up and see if I have your first name so that I can reply back with that because it just is nicer. Then I require the email address because I cannot send you the freebie that you're looking for without having your email address. So that is the only thing that is actually required. What you wanna look at is, does my opt-in, like is it prominent? Can I see it without scrolling on my homepage and on my phone? Really important that you can see the opt-in without any scroll on your phone because you want them, when they come to your website for the first time, they need to see that so that hopefully they'll sign up for it because the reality is if they don't sign up for it, then they may very well forget who you are. They may not come back. You may miss out on that person. So make sure that it's really easy. Not only what do I do. But where is my opt-in? And then from there, I want you to look at some of the opt-in performance. I had this conversation with a student recently because she wasn't sure if she had created the right opt-in. She had a new opt-in sequence. And people were signing up for the freebie and they were like signing, it was a free class. They were signing up for it, but they were not scheduling the consult call. And so she was really confused as to why they weren't. She'd had 200 people come through and request the freebie, but nobody had requested a consult call. So we talked about that just to see, and we looked at it and it's like, okay, 200 people saw the freebie page. 80 of them signed up for the freebie. So she had approximately a. 35% signup, which is okay, it's not amazing, but it's not bad. We wanna see 30 or better generally on your freebie like lending page. But then when we went from those 80 people, not one person had signed up for a consult call, which told me something was broken at that stage of the funnel. The actual lead capture was fine. It was something in the follow up. So then I looked at it with her and I realized it was, I believe the way that her follow-up sequence was formatted because her call to action was buried. It was very hard to find, which moves us into item number three that I see, and that is that there's a problem with your call to action button or call to action phrases. In her case, she had a video sequence to kinda warm people up, bring them into her world, and rather than sending people one video each day with a big call to action button to book a consult under that video, she had one landing page with five videos on it. And it wasn't till you got all the way to the bottom of the page that there was one call to action button. So I had her, you know, if this were mine. This is how I would do it. This is what I would do differently. So she's in the process of changing that, so hopefully that's going to increase her conversions. The other problem I see is sometimes it's almost impossible to figure out what you're supposed to do. There's pictures behind, like there's pictures with text on top of it, or there's text that's like white text on a blue background. That's almost impossible to read. What I want you to look at with your hot. Call to action buttons in particular is, are they high contrast? Is there a big contrast between the button color and the font? We're talking blue with white, dark blue background, white font, um, white background, black font. We want big, bold, easy to see, high contrast. The other thing we wanna see is it, is it a color that is unique? I don't want you using the same page that's in or the same color that's in all your highlights on your page as your call to action button. Your call to action button should be. One color and one color only, and it should be the only thing used in that color on that page so that it stands out. You also wanna look at the text and the size even of your call to action buttons. When I worked at the first agency I was with many years ago, we actually did a whole testing series. In emails for one of our clients, and it was a large, they're at your house. They're delivering packages to you every day. They were one of the major delivery companies, okay? And we tested in their emails, did turquoise or yellow or orange work better as a call to action? Which one got people to click more? Once we established that it was orange, by the way. Once we established that orange worked better, then we tested placement of the call to action button. Did it matter if it was at the top, if it was in the center, or if it was at the bottom? And I'll be honest, I can't remember exactly what was the winner for that,'cause it's been about 15 years since I did that. But what you want to look at is, is it clear? Is it easy to read? Is it high contrast? Do you know what it looks like? Like what you're supposed to do? Is it. Cutesy or is it straightforward? Get the free guide. Take the free class, learn here. Like tell them what they're doing. Give them that little MicroCon conversion, because that's going to help. The fourth one we've kind of talked about already, and that's that your site looks good, but it's hard to use on mobile. So we've talked about how it looks on mobile. Now we need to talk about the actual functionality, the actual usability on mobile. So sometimes we see sites that are beautiful. But are not super mobile friendly. What I want you to do is go to your site and look at each of your core pages. On mobile. You should most likely have what we call a responsive design website. At this point in time, they've been around for a long time. All that means is that your website template is designed to look nice at any size. So whether it's on a phone, it's on a tablet, it's on a computer. It's designed to adjust, so you wanna make sure your screen size, your content looks good. I had a situation recently with one of the pages where it looked great on the computer, but when I went to double check it on my phone, the text and the image were actually overlaying on top of each other, and you couldn't read the text on one of the pages. We ended up having to remove the image on mobile only so that. It still was easy to read. You do not wanna have anything jumbled up on mobile. You wanna make sure that it's a really easy user experience on mobile. The last thing is just, is your site hard to read or understand? Are you using text that makes sense? That's easy to understand? Are you using words that your average fifth grader, fifth grader, so approximately 10 years old, understands because they say, when we are creating our content, we need to write to a. Fifth grade comprehension level to make sure that we are really working with the general population. We don't want to have content that is above our reader's heads that makes them feel intimidated or like they're not smart enough to work with us. We absolutely don't want that. We want them to be feel seen and heard and understood and see how we can help them. The other thing is just make sure that you don't have issues with the text overlay and things like that on your mobile site. Just make sure it's easy to read. Look at your opt-ins. Don't have a big picture with lots of like, I saw one recently, it was a picture with a mountain and then it had small text in white and it was like a webinar opt-in and I'm like, oh my gosh. First off, this has nothing to do with the webinar. Second off, that text is impossible to read on top of that picture, like put a box behind it. Make it easier to see. Make your text stand out. Use a bigger font so it's easier to read. There's so much you can do, but you really wanna make sure. If you're getting traffic to your site, let's make sure that your site is geared to help you convert that traffic. We need to make sure that your freebie is front and center. Your call to action button is easy to read. It's high contrast. It stands out. People are going to be more likely to make that conversion. We wanna make sure you have the information that they're looking for and that it's really easy to read and see and work with On desktop, mobile tablet's, not as important, but I'm not saying, don't worry about tablet, just in general. We don't see as much traffic from tablet, but we wanna make sure that it is a good user experience no matter what type of device they are on. We also wanna make sure that. Your website is optimized so we can get the traffic in, but we've gotta do more. We've gotta get, once they come to the site, we need to make sure we're doing what's necessary to build that email list, generate those leads, and make those sales. Otherwise, we are wasting our effort with our SEO and I don't want you to do that. We gotta do both parts of it. Alright, that's it for today. I will see you back here next week. Go take a look at your website, make sure that you are not inadvertently or accidentally hurting yourself. I wanna make sure that your website is working for you.