7 Reasons Your Website (Might Be) Failing

How do your customers find you? Google says that 97% of internet users (which is about 80% of the adult population in the U.S.) search for a local business online before making a buying decision. In other words, everyone searches for you before they call, visit or show up on your website.

With that information in mind, it is critical to have a super-awesome website, market that website like a banshee, and track whether that marketing is successful. But, sadly, many companies don’t do all–or any–of these things effectively. Here are 7 reasons your website might be failing:

Reasons Your Website Might Be Failing

1. Your Website Doesn’t Exist – Research across a variety of industries shows that only around 50% of small businesses have websites. Holy crap. It is 2012 isn’t it?

The first solution is to hire someone to build a website for you. Make sure you get a number of price quotes before you make a decision. The other option is to use a cheap service that will host your website and allow you to add pictures and content at will.

2. You Have a Crappy Website – We’ve all seen sites that look like they haven’t been updated since the early years of the  Clinton administration. I should link to a couple here, but I won’t. I don’t want to be rude. My advice is this: look at your website and honestly evaluate if it needs a redesign.

3. You Don’t Put a Phone Number on Your Website – This one is absolutely flabbergasting. There are way too many websites that don’t have phone numbers prominently on them. Remember, a phone call is still the preferred way customers want to interact with you.

Your customers want to call you. They want to talk to a real person. And the most obvious and simple place for them to get your phone number is on your website.Make it easy for them by putting a phone number on the top of your website. Don’t hide the phone number and make them click on 17 links before they find a phone number. That’s silly.

4. You Fail to Track Web Traffic – If you have a website, you need to care about the number of people that visit your website. The best way to track this web traffic is with Google Analytics. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics in about 5 minutes. Google Analytics will show you a bunch of cool stuff that may (or may not) interest you. But, the main thing it will show you is this: how many people are visiting your site and how they found your site.

5. You Don’t Track Phone Calls – We recommend putting a local or toll free number from us (or another call tracking provider) on your website. The number is routed directly to your business.  Nothing changes. The only difference is that you can log in to LogMyCalls.com and track how many people are calling you after seeing your website. You can see who they are and where they’re calling from. You can even hear the phone calls themselves and determine if your employees are selling effectively on the phone. (That is pretty eye-opening. Believe me).

6. You Fail to Use Google+ – Recently Google announced they are killing Google Places. They are now ‘forcing’ every business in America jump on Google+. How are they doing this: well, when someone searches for a local business on Google, they are going to see your Google+ page (if you have one). If you don’t have one, they won’t see your page, see reviews, or see information about your business.

7. You Ignore Mobile – Google says that more people will conduct searches on mobile devices than on ‘regular’ computers by 2013. That means more people will see your website on their mobile phone than on their regular computer by 2013. Now, we’re not saying you need to go out and start creating a mobile website today (wait…yes we are).

Give Your Website Some Lovin’

Our research shows that companies aren’t giving their websites enough credit. Websites typically produce far more phone calls than people think. Fix some of the problems we’ve outlined above and, like the company in our case study earlier in the article, you could see 300% more calls to your business in just a few months. And that means one thing for you? More revenue.

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