Is your website working?

By that I mean, are people contacting you after they visit it?

While your website might look pretty, that’s not its job. Its purpose is to turn visitors into leads that you can then convert into sales.

If your website isn’t doing a good job of generating prospects and leads from the traffic you’re sending to it, you’re wasting the money you’re spending on your (digital) marketing.

If you run a Google Ad campaign and get a ton of traffic to your site but only a few inquiries (or worse, none) then your website isn’t working.

This doesn’t mean you need to go out and get a new website! The beauty of websites is they can (usually) be easily edited and changed.

But before you can make any changes, you need to understand why your website isn’t convincing your visitors to call, email, fill out a form, or however else potential customers can contact you.

Understand why

The first step is to open up Google Analytics and have a look at what is going on.

If you don’t have Google Analytics, you need to get. Right now. Stop reading, create an account, set up a profile and add the tracking code to your site (or get your web developer to do it).

Google Analytics provides an extraordinary amount of data on your website visitors.

Where they come from, both geographically and how they ended up on your website, how long they spent on your website, what pages they visited, how long they spent on those pages, what pages they visited next or whether they left your site, and whether they were a new or returning visitor to name a few key metrics, to name a few.

We’ll take a look at some of these, what they tell you, and what changes you might need to make to your website.

Is your traffic human?

This is the first thing to check before you start diving too far into your Google Analytics data.

Not all traffic recorded visiting your website is human. A percentage of your visits are from various bots, some of which are good (like the Googlebot) and others which aren’t (like those operated by spammers).

However, regardless of their intentions, bots are not going to call you and purchase your products or services!

They needed to be filtered out so, as much as possible, your Google Analytics data only contains legitimate human traffic.

Once you’ve done this, you can trust the data is giving an accurate picture of how your website is performing.

Is it obvious how to contact you?

Take a look at how many new visitors you’re getting and how long they are spending on your site.

If they’re spending a lot of time on your site and they’re a new visitor but aren’t contacting you, it may be because they don’t know how.

It seems pretty simple, but it is amazing how many websites we see that don’t make it clear how people should contact them.

If you make it too difficult (or impossible!), no matter how interested they are in your products or services, they will eventually leave without contacting you.

That’s a huge missed opportunity for you to make a sale. Not to mention a waste of the marketing dollars you had to spend to get them to visit your site.

We recommend having your company’s contact details, such as phone number and email address, prominently on all pages.

Also, make sure you have clear call to actions at appropriate places on your website. If you’re promoting a course you’re running, for example, have a form and sign up at the end of the copy.

You want to make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch, sign up, buy now, register etc. You don’t want them to have to hunt for your contact details.

It’s also important to have a contact page that contains all your relevant contact details so if people have a general inquiry or, for whatever reason they haven’t been able to find the appropriate way to contact you on the page they’re on, they can go there and contact you.

In Google Analytics, you can set up Events and Goals to track when people fill out the contact form on your website or click on your phone number or email address.

This helps you accurately assess how well your site is working.

Do you lead visitors through your website?

When people land on your website, do they know where to go to find the information they need?

Look at the pages on your website that have the most traffic. How long are people spending on them? Where do they go to next?

If they don’t spend very long on the page and then leave your site, it’s possibly because they’re not sure where to find the information they’re looking for.

When you’re designing a website, the user experience is critically important.

Most people arriving on your site are looking for specific information in order to make the decision to contact you.

Like with your contact details, if you make things confusing or too hard to find then your visitors will give up and move on.

For example, if people land on your home page first, you want them to quickly understand what you do and how your products or services can help them. Next, they should be able to easily find more information about your products and services, drill down to a particular one, and then contact you about it.

In Google Analytics, Behaviour Flow and Exit Pages reports show how people move through your site and which pages they leave your website from.

This allows you to identify the pages people potentially get stuck at and edit them to make it clearer where they should go next.

Where are you sending your visitors?

A lot of marketing channels (i.e. Google Ads, Social Media, Email) allow you to choose which page their traffic should initially land on.

We’ve covered this in detail in a previous post, but if you can dictate the page people start from, make sure it is a dedicated landing page and not your home page.

While you can (and should) create an effective home page as the majority of your traffic (Direct and Organic Search Traffic in particular) will start from there, a landing page will always be more effective.

Up to five times more effective in fact.

Conclusion

If it looks like you’re getting a lot of visitors to your website but they’re not getting in contact, then have a look at your Google Analytics data and see what areas of your website might be letting you down.

Making it obvious how to contact you, leading your visitors through your content, and starting them off in the right place, all help your website turn traffic into leads, which you can then convert into sales.

We’re more than happy to take a look at your website and give you some pointers on how it can work more effectively for you – get in touch.

Here’s an example of how we helped one of our clients get his website selling.