7 Reasons Your Site Doesn’t Convert

It’s frustrating. As a proud small business owner, you put a lot of time into your site and perfecting its content. You’ve segmented your customers and have created targeted landing pages to attract them but, for some reason, they’re not converting. What are you to do? It’s time to tweak and troubleshoot your landing pages for ultimate success!

Below are seven reasons your landing pages may not be converting for you and how you can help turn it around.

1. Too Many Distractions

One mistake folks often make crafting landing pages is to throw everything they have related to a topic on one page. The hope is that if you list everything, something will catch a user’s eye. However, that’s not actually what happens. What happens is you muddy up their conversion path by either overwhelming them into taking no action at all or encouraging them to take an action that doesn’t put them on the correct conversion path.

Instead, limit the number of distractions and products you place on a page. Be confident that if customers find one thing they’re interested in, they’ll look around for the rest of what you have to offer. You don’t have to throw it at them all at once.

2. Important Content Is Hidden

One of the basic tenents of journalism says that if you want something to get read, you have to put it “above the fold” (that is, in the top half of the paper’s front page). The same thing goes for content marketing. Make sure the most important bits of your content, the ones that are meant to drive customers to do something, are in a place where users will actually see them without having to page down. There’s no point in having exceptional content if you’re just going to hide it in the basement. Put it front and center to help it do its job.

3. You Need Stronger Calls to Action . . .

. . .or maybe you just need a call to action, period! The call to action you place on your landing page is often what either compels (or doesn’t compel) someone to do something. If your pages aren’t converting, then it might be a sign that you need to tighten up your calls to action. To get better at persuasive copywriting, do some reading over at sources like Men With Pens, Copyblogger or Problogger. Any of these blogs can help you learn to how to speak to your customers in a way that encourages them to take action.

4. You Need Stronger Direction

You know the conversion path you’re trying to set for customers.  Can they identify it? Are you making it seamless or are you allowing them to veer off course because things aren’t clearly laid out? If you’re not sure of how well you’re pointing people in the right direction, take a look at your analytics.  If you find that lots of people are abandoning the process at the same spot, it may show you that something odd is going on in a certain part of the conversion process.  Maybe you can tighten up your writing, maybe you need to remove a distraction link or maybe it’s something else.  Either way, you want the flow of your page to be clear to those reading it.

5. You’re Sending Them Away

Another reason people may not be converting is because you’re accidentally sending them off the desired conversion path. Do you have a link back to your home page in the same place you’re encouraging someone to “check out”? Do you mention your other product pages from the landing page of another? Do you link to a funny YouTube video for comic relief? If you do, you’re giving people an excuse not to buy from you. Don’t put extraneous links on pages that are meant to funnel people into a shopping cart and get them to make a purchase. People will do anything not to buy. If you give them an option to get out, they’ll take it.

6. You Scare Them With Too Much Text

I don’t know about you, but when I land on a page that has 6,000 words and barely any white space, I hit my back button. It doesn’t matter how interested I was in the product or how engaging the copy might be; it’s too intimidating to tackle. If you want people to convert, make sure your pages are lightweight, scannable and easy to process. If you’re overloading them, you may end up scaring them away.

7. They Don’t Trust You

A final reason customers may not feel comfortable purchasing from your site is that they don’t trust you. That could be the result of a number of things. For example:

• You don’t have an About Us page. Or, you have one but it doesn’t feel “real.”
• You don’t list any contact information like a real street address, phone number, social networking profiles, etc.
• Your site doesn’t look professional.
• Your content is filled with typos, grammatical errors or is too informal.
• Your content isn’t engaging or doesn’t show that you’re committed to your customers.
• You can’t be found on social media.

If any of this sounds familiar, then I’d encourage you to go into your site and amplify these trust factors, as they’re often the deciding factor for customers looking to purchase from an SMB.

The point of your landing pages is to attract customers and get them on a specific conversion path. If this isn’t happen, you need to start testing/tweaking to find out exactly what’s setting users off course and how you can rectify it. What landing page problems have you experienced? How have you combated them?

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