The Most Common Website Problems That Affect Businesses

Your company’s website is it’s most important online sales asset, period. If you expect to create any sort of value for your company through your website, you need to make sure it’s armed for the task.

Bounce Rate is the indicator that shows you how many people are leaving your website after seeing a single page. When your bounce rate is high, it means visitors aren’t liking what they are seeing or aren’t finding what they’re looking for on your website, even though your company might actually provide what they need. If your visitors are bouncing, your website may have problems related to one or more of these categories:

• Design
• Content
• Optimization
• Lead Capturing

In this blog, we want to take an in-depth look into the most common website issues affecting businesses all around the globe:

Design

Clean, responsive, and visually-appealing design is indispensable for a corporate website. Your visitors need to like what they see first and foremost before you can start expecting them to provide you with their information. Design problems can range from unappealing or outdated visual design to issues with the website’s internal structure. Poor design can result in slow loading time, confusing navigation, and altogether failing to capture leads or even keep visitors interested in staying. Some of the most common website design problems out there are:

• Poor or Outdated Website Design: Most of us remember what websites looked like in the early days of the Internet; they went from dull and square to overwhelmingly cluttered with flashing gifs and annoying backgrounds. Unfortunately, it’s still common to find business websites that have not been updated since the mid-2000s as well as websites that have been built without any sort of design elements taken into account. A company’s corporate website is their online business card; as such, it needs a modern and visually-appealing look and feel, free of clutter and sensibly decorated with high-quality images and graphics.
• Do-It-Yourself Free Builders: Using a free website builder that lets you drag and drop items and use nice stock photos may seem like a quick way to solve your website needs on a budget, but, as with most free things, there is a hidden cost. These free services may be easy to use, but each design facet added will create a large amount of back-end code lines that will pile up and generate many performance issues. Websites created with free builders tend to load slower as they grow and content is added, and many small design errors will begin to accumulate that you won’t be able to correct without access to or knowledge about back-end coding.
• No Mobile-Responsive Design: More than half of all global online browsing takes place on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. It’s pretty simple: if your website isn’t responsive to mobile devices, you’re missing out on more than half of your potential market. This is an absolute must when it comes to website design.
• Poor or Complicated Navigation: You want your visitors to read the information they are looking for, so you need to make it easy to find. Intelligent website design will lead a visitor straight to what they are looking for and then makes it easy for them to contact you once they are interested in your product or service. If your menus aren’t easy to use or your contact points are hidden, you’ll end up with a lot of frustrated visitors. User experience makes all the difference.

Content

A visually-appealing website will keep your visitors interested for only a short period of time if your content isn’t up to standards. We like to say that “Content is King” because content is the answer to your public’s questions. Content is your online sales pitch; you don’t have a face-to-face interaction with your visitors, so whatever they read on your website has to convince them to take the next step. Content also needs to fulfill certain standards so that search engines can find it. As important as content is, it’s probably the area where many business websites are weakest.  Some common content issues are:

• Insufficient or Confusing Information: If you don’t have enough content on your website, it will be ignored by search engines. If you have too much information, then you’ll confuse or overwhelm your visitors. Your content needs to be balanced and concise, but it also needs to be informative, interesting, and easy-to-read. Writing quality content is not an easy task, which is why many people build careers around this. Make sure your website’s content is created by people who know what they are doing. Even if you have good writing skills and feel you can create your own content, website content for businesses needs to fulfill with certain standards and integrate with the overall design of the site. At the very least, consulting with a content expert can go a long way.
• Plagiarized Content: If any amount of content on your website is plagiarized, search engines may flag and reject it. Every business’s website should have original content created exclusively for them. It’s common to find sites with content that was intentionally or inadvertently plagiarized. There are many online tools (eg. Grammarly or SmallSeoTools) that can help you determine if you have plagiarized content, which needs to be urgently corrected for your website to get organic visits.
• Not Updating Content Periodically: In order to keep your website relevant, new content needs to be added in the form of articles, blogs, whitepapers, news, or video material. The more interesting and informative content you generate on your website, the higher it will rank on search engines, and the more likely it is you’ll get quality visitors. Your website’s main content can hold up for a more extended period of time, but it will eventually need to be revised and updated as well.
• Not Catering to the Audience: It’s easy to end up with poor content. Even if you hire professionals, your business may need a specific type of knowledge from a writer to communicate with your target audience effectively. For example, if you’re the CEO of a company that produces industrial chemicals, it’s likely that your potential customers are also knowledgable on the subject. Your content needs to prove to them that your business knows what it’s talking about. Whoever writes your content needs to understand the audience that will be reading it and needs to either have a sufficient level of technical knowledge on the subject or be an expert researcher. Defining buyer personas is an essential step in understanding your business’ audience and how to communicate with them effectively.

Optimization

So, your website’s look and feel are modern and intuitive, and you regularly add relevant content, but you’re still not getting enough organic visits. You may have missed out on a critical step: SEO.

SEO used to be seen as an afterthought, but nowadays optimization is considered a minimum requirement for search engines to give your website any sort of attention. SEO needs to be taken into consideration from the very first steps of content design. Keywords need to be researched, strategized, and implemented with a tactical approach. Overall, SEO is not an overly complicated process, but you need to know what you’re doing to get it right. Common SEO issues are:

• Not Using a Keyword Strategy: Keywords are how online users find websites on search engines. If your content is missing the keywords that your audience is looking for, then you have little to no hope of attracting them. Good keyword research and planning are the main ingredients of successful optimization. Finding out what your audience is talking about and hitting the right keywords are the first steps in climbing search engine rankings. The more in-tune your content is with a well-planned keyword strategy, the higher your website will rank.
• Headers, Meta titles, and Meta descriptions: These elements are what show up on search engines when your website is displayed. If this information is missing or incorrect, then potential visitors will not be inclined to click on the displayed link. Meta-descriptions can be especially tricky; they need to be over 120 and under 156 characters and need to grab the audience’s attention enough to make them click. They also need to incorporate the right keywords seamlessly to rank higher.
• No Metrics or Conversion Tracking: Without KPI’s and conversion metrics in place, you’ll have a hard time finding out where your website is falling short. Metrics will let you track the effectiveness of your optimization tactics and keywords, and will help you adjust your efforts accordingly to improve results.
• Using Only Broad Keywords: Broad keywords will help you somewhat, but long-tail specific keyword phrases are the most effective at capturing good organic leads. Long-tail keyword phrases need to supported by relevant content as well; there’s no point in using a specific phrase like “The Most Common Website Problems That Affect Business” if you don’t actually provide that information. Specific keywords are more effective towards getting those organic clicks, but the content is where you make your sales pitch.

Lead Capturing

Lead capturing is the science of funneling a lead through your website content towards them giving you their information to start the sales process. There both front-end and back-end characteristics of lead capturing optimization. A well-designed information flow, strong Calls to Action (CTAs), and comprehensive contact forms are all part of the front-end aspect of lead-capturing. Behind the curtains, the lead funnel needs to be able to notify your sales team and get them to act quickly. Some of the most common website problems relating to the lead capturing process are:

• Missing or Hidden Contact Forms: It’s surprising how many business websites out there make it difficult for users to contact them. If your website’s purpose is to bring in leads and create sales opportunities, you need to make sure that getting in touch with you is a simple process. Contact forms need to be easy to find and easy to fill out; they need to request enough information without making it a tiresome task for the user. Drop-down menus and multiple-choice options are preferable to blank spaces for writing; they also make it easier to classify your leads internally.
• Slow Notification Process: Once a lead fills out a contact form, your sales team needs to know about it as quickly as possible. A user will lose interest if they aren’t contacted within the first 24 hours, at the very least. Optimally, a company’s website is integrated with their CRM so that lead notifications go straight towards the sales queue. If CRM integration is not possible, then the lead notification has to be programmed to reach an email inbox that is regularly monitored.

If you are experiencing any of the most common website issues that affect businesses, you may need some expert advice. Contact our team to find out how your website can improve and become a powerful sales asset for your company.