Is Your Website Costing You Sales?

It’s hard enough to get traffic and develop a workable sales funnel. Don’t make it harder by shooting yourself in the foot with a dysfunctional and completely inefficient website. Small business websites are especially prone to these kinds of mistakes, as they might not have the technical expertise of larger businesses available to make sure they are thoroughly functional. Toward that end, here are some tips that will help you make your site attractive and functional to your visitors, and ultimately lead to more sales and conversions.

7 Tips for a Better Converting Site

1. Make sure your site is fresh - Google loves fresh content, and frankly so do your potential customers. Having stale content populating your pages for a few years back is a sure ride to poor search rankings and disinterested visitors.
2. Poor Site Navigation - Not being able to get around your site will cause anyone not related to you to head for the exit. Ensure you have working, current and visible navigation on your site. Also be sure to have a link to your home page on each and every page of your site.
3. Boring pages - Make sure you use white space liberally. Split up long chunks of text into digestible pieces, and make good use of sub-headlines. (also a search benefit) Don’t litter your site with ads, as this is another sure way to send visitors packing.
4. Have a mobile version of your site - Since we’re in a day and age when over 50 percent of all of all search traffic comes from a mobile device, wouldn’t it be smart to have a mobile version? Just sayin…
5. Flash - There are two major issues with Flash. First Google has a hard time reading it, so it can effect indexing of your pages, and it makes your pages load very slowly, which effects search ranking.
6. Fix any broken links - This frustrates visitors, and is a black mark with Google. Especially be sure to take down any links to old products or programs which are no longer available.
7. Employ strong calls to action - One of the most egregious conversion killer is not requesting the action. Make sure you employ strong and frequent calls to action in your pages.

This is but a short list, but definitely enough to get you on the right track. Don’t make it harder than it is: optimize your site today!