6 Reasons Why Your Website is Losing Customers

Is Your Website Losing Customers

As a small business owner, you’re most likely aware that having an internet presence is a must have in today’s society. Your customers are all over the internet via social media outlets, blog posts, messaging apps, etc. and they’ll most likely visit your website at least once before ever utilizing your service. Without the proper web design, your website is losing customers to your competition.

Websites serve two primary purposes for your business; a web-based location to inform the world about your business and secondly, educating your customers not only why they need your product or service but also why they should purchase from you. If executed correctly, local businesses have the opportunity for lead generation and turn leads into sales.

How Your Website is Losing Customers

There are two primary factors to measure your websites performance, Bounce Rate and Lead Generation. If your website is missing either one or both, you’re definitely losing a tremendous amount of web traffic and potential customers to your competition.

What is Bounce Rate?

When a person visits your website and leaves the page they entered your website on without clicking through to additional pages, your websites bounce rate will increase. If your website has a higher than usual bounce rate, this will not only affect potential opportunities for lead generation but Google will decrease your websites ranking in the search results.

If you’d like to find out how Google uses Local SEO to rank small businesses, click here.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of identifying potential customers for a product or service and capturing their information. When a user visits your website, your goal should be to convert that visitor to a lead. If your conversion rates are low or nonexistent, your website is not serving one of its main purposes.

Why Your Website is Losing Customers

1. Web Design – Bounce Rate

Think of your websites web design as the store front for your business. Now imagine your customer or client walking into your store that is decorated like its 1995, the aisles are narrow and products are cluttered all over the shelves. In most cases, your client will leave without making a purchase.

That is exactly how customers react to web design. Your website should be appealing to the eye and should not be mentally taxing to view the content. You have a maximum of 20 seconds to entice your customer to stay on your website to find out more. Your value proposition should be clear, concise, and easily found. If your website is cluttered with content in tight spaces, most customers will leave because it is too taxing on them to find the information they’re looking for.

A clear example of this is Google vs. Yahoo.

2. Page Speed – Bounce Rate

If a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, more than 40% of visitors will leave the website without viewing any of the content.

Google recommends and consumers expect that websites load in 2 seconds or less. If your website does not load in the recommended time, you run the risk of losing traffic to your website and/or reduce customer satisfaction tremendously.

To test your websites page speed, check out Google PageSpeed which will show you how fast your website loads and also recommend tips to reduce your page load times.

3. Poor Navigation – Bounce Rate

How often have you had to ask a sales clerk where a product was at your local supermarket? If a customer has to ask you how to find something on your website, you’ll most likely lose that customer. Naturally, consumers want the path of least resistance. If it takes any amount of extended effort to find something on a website, most visitors will leave.

Your website should have a clear and concise navigation menu that is easily found. Also, link descriptions should be relevant to the page they’re pointing to.

A great way to test if your website has a streamline navigation setup, ask a friend or family member to visit your website to find a particular product or service. If they are not able to find it easily, you may want to reconsider how your websites navigation is setup.

4. Mobile Responsiveness – Bounce Rate

Smart Insights, a market research company, reported that 80% of all internet users in 2017 come from a mobile device. This statistic is continuously increasing as technology advances creating easier access to the internet via mobile devices.

With that said, it is extremely important for your website to be optimized and responsive to mobile device. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, you’ll be missing out on your share of 2.2 billion searches a day.

5. High Quality Content – Lead Generation

When consumers search for something, they have a problem and are searching for a solution. If your content does not clearly provide an explanation or a solution for your customers’ problem, they will refer to a competitor that does.

High quality content comes in many forms. It could be a YouTube tutorial, a How-To blog post, list of resources for a solution, etc. Your content should have several internal links that reference related content on your website as well as external links. The more links you have, the more opportunities you create to get your consumer to stay on your website and convert into a lead.

Content Marketing is the backbone of lead generation. Without a content strategy and plan, your business will miss out on an incredible amount of opportunities to generate leads that could have potentially turned into sales.

6. Calls to Action – Lead Generation

Once you have great high quality content, your website needs a way to capture information from your customers. This is where calls to action come in.

A call to action induces your websites visitor to perform a specific action. In most scenarios, it will be a form that collects some type of information from your customer.

Every webpage should have a call to action that is directly linked to a value proposition. Customers will not give you their information unless there is good reason to. Once you’ve engaged your customer with an offer they can’t refuse (free consultation, download this free manual, etc.), you will need to have a method to collect their information.

Remember, a call-to-action should be:

• easily accessible
• quick to fill out
• have some offer customers can’t refuse

Check out this article by Hubspot to find out more details on call-to-action design techniques.

If you’d like a free consultation on how you can use your website to increase sales, we’re here to help.