3 reasons why having a beautiful website is not enough to make sales.

1. Search engines like Google and Bing don’t show it on their results.

There’s a popular saying online that goes like this:

“If you want to hide a dead body, put it on the second page of Google”.

What if it’s on the fifth or the tenth page? Well… you get the idea. It doesn’t matter if you have the best product or service and an award-winning website design. If people can’t find you, it’s all worthless.

When people go to Google or Bing, they search for a specific query because they have an issue that they need to solve. They write queries like:

“Best Asian restaurant near Boston”, “Beautiful and cheap hotels in London”, “Landscape architects in Ontario” or “Where can I change my car battery in Austin”.

You must make sure to appear on the first results of those queries locally if they relate to you or your business. This is powerful because it’s the best way to get ‘free’ constant traffic to your website.

How can you do this?

Well, a few years ago it was sort of easy. You only had to put a lot of “keywords” on your site and that was enough. It got a little more complex later on because you had to create content and ask others to put links to your content from their sites. This is still important.

But today, besides publishing high-quality content, making your website secure and mobile-friendly, one of the most important aspects is creating a good “user experience” for your customers. No, “user experience” is not the same as “beautiful design”. Google and Bing determine “user experience” by measuring how many people visit your website, how long do they stay, if they come back or not. People lie, numbers don’t. So first measure how are people interacting with your website and adjust it until you have good numbers.

2. The website has very low traffic.

Again, it doesn’t matter if the website looks beautiful, if it doesn’t get traffic, it’s useless. Search Engine Optimization or SEO (what we talked about in the previous paragraphs) is a great way to bring visitors. But it takes from 3 to 6 months to optimize it. You must have patience and work consistently.

Another way is through social media paid advertising. This is a very powerful tool because you can target audiences based on age, interests, geography, gender, and even marital status.

Now, you can have both SEO and paid advertising set up, but how do you retain your traffic and get them to buy, and even more so… how do you get them to return?

3. The website is not optimized to convert or even capture leads.

Let’s assume that your website gets traffic from search engines and social media. A good user experience is vital here because the challenge now is to have a clear call to action and a way to get the visitor’s information when they leave.

You should know that the average attention span of internet users is around 8 seconds. This is 1 second less than a goldfish. If your website can’t get the users straight to the point in that time, then they will be gone. Your website should have the necessary tools to measure if this is happening or not, to see how your potential clients interact with your online business.

Human vs Goldfish retention, which one is greater nowadays?

Also, people will only convert if they understand the product or service that is on the website. It’s then vital to have GOOD pictures, GIFs, videos, or anything that describes the content clearly. Sometimes a complex design with encroach on the client’s product understanding. Simple and to the point is always better. This does not mean badly designed, but returning to the attention span point, you want your potential clients to remember your product, not distract themselves just admiring the website design and then leave. The idea is to avoid over-designing your website.

A great website is one where the users manage easily, despite how they do it. For example, some people will use a mouse or keyboard, others will use their phone, others just voice, and so on. This is because some of them might have some sort of disability or they are just accustomed to use it in a particular way. Remember usability and accessibility are not only for the disabled. You might not have poor sight, but might find trouble trying to look at a website without contrast controls in a bright sunny day. It’s also important to pay special attention at the user experience in mobiles, since the usage has skyrocketed.

(Read more about this here: https://www.guide2research.com/research/mobile-vs-desktop-usage#1).

Finally, a way to squeeze vital information from visitors to build an email list is a must-have. The idea is to later send promotions, news and any valuable information to those prospects, and make them future or returning customers. Remember that acquiring a new client is much more expensive that investing in people that already know you or have bought from you.

This is proof why it’s better to have an efficient rather than only a “beautiful” design. There are lots of ‘crapy’ looking websites that make a lot of money. You would be surprised. That doesn’t mean a good design does not have benefits. Of course it has, lots of them. It’s just, like I said, not enough.

If you need help creating a winning website, then let us help you!

You can start by auditing your website with us, so know how your current website is doing.

For more information please read:

To learn how to convert, retain clients & improve your SEO, without spending your marketing dollars please follow this link: https://www.flarespots.com/unique-method/.

To learn more and solve your website accessibility issues please visit: https://www.flarespots.com/convert-with-accessibility/.

Visit our resource page: https://www.flarespots.com/learn/.