Is Your Website Useless? 7 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself
When is the last time you generated a lead from your website? Would you even know if you did, or whether the lead came from another channel?
In this article we’re going to be look at whether or not your website is useful, or useless. If you’re impatient, submit your website to our Website Grader tool and we’ll send you a detailed performance report of your site after you’ve finished reading this article.
1. Why Do You Have A Website?
Many small businesses I speak to have a website but aren’t sure why they have one. They were either talked into it by a colleague or worn down by the mass of articles and people telling them that they need one.
If you have a website but aren’t sure why, chances are it isn’t going to be very effective! As with any marketing endeavour, you need to start with the objective.
2. Do You Measure Success?
Are you measuring the performance of your website? Do you have Google Analytics setup? If not, then you won’t have any data to determine if your website is effective or not.
Think of Google Analytics as an accounting system for your website, it gives you detailed metrics on how many visitors you get, where they come from and what they do once they’re on your site.
Using Google Analytics you can measure the following:
- How many website visitors you receive
- How many of these visitors are unique
- Which devices they are viewing your site on
- How long they spend on your website
- Which actions they take (form submissions for example)
- Where they leave the website
What makes things worse, is that many small businesses are convinced they have Google Analytics setup when they actually don’t! If you’re not sure, we wrote an article on this which shows you how to check – Is Google Analytics Setup On My Website?
If it turns out you don’t have Google Analytics setup, not to worry, we got you. We also wrote a simple guide on How To Setup Google Analytics On Your WordPress Website. Not on WordPress? You should be! Talk to us about converting to WordPress.
3. Is It Responsive?
It baffles me that there are still businesses without a responsive website. It’s 2017, everyone and their grandma has a smart phone and is browsing the internet. If your website isn’t responsive, you are losing out on two fronts:
- You’ll show up lower down in search engine results compared to competing websites that are responsive (mobile friendly). This means you’ll receive less visitors from search engines and less potential customers.
- You’ll lose large portions of mobile site visitors who are unwilling to try and navigate your website on their phones or tablets. These are potential leads for your business.
There is a simple tool you can use from Google to check whether or not your website is mobile friendly (besides the obvious test of getting out your mobile phone and having a look). Here’s the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool.
4. Does It Have A High Bounce Rate?
You’ll need Google Analytics setup to determine this one. Bounce rate is defined by Google as: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions). It is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Google analytics calculates and reports the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website.”
Your website bounce rate can be found in the Home section of Google Analytics and is defined as a percentage figure.
If you have a high bounce rate this generally suggests there is an issue with one of two things:
- The content and usability of your website is poor
- The traffic you are sending to the website is not the right traffic website and is bouncing as a result.
Bounce rate varies depending industry, typically anything consistently higher than 60-70% suggests there is a problem that needs addressing. If you’re seeing a bounce rate of 80-90% I suggest you look at refreshing your website pronto!
5. Does It Reinforce Your Brand?
Is your website unique and it does reinforce your brand? If you have brand colours, fonts and terminology, does your website reinforce this and distinguish you from competitors?
If I asked what colour springs to mind when I say Netflix, you’d immediately think Red. What about Spotify? Green. Apple? White and grey, clean colours.
Look at the Netflix homepage below. It’s striking, in their signature red colour and strongly reinforces their brand.
Having a strong brand can help you in the following ways:
- Brand consistency ensures customers that you are thorough and professional.
- It helps distinguish you from competitors. Customers will ‘recognise’ you through your brand.
- If your website is branded correctly, it’s a more pleasant browsing experience for your customers and they are likely to spend more time browsing your site and evaluating you as a provider, as opposed to say a shoddily put together site that was hard to navigate.
6. Does It Send You To Sleep Waiting For It To Load?
If your website is slow, sluggish and takes a long time to load, it’s going to be costing you business. This could be a contributing factor to high bounce rate, you have less than 10 seconds from when someone lands on your site to grab their attention and provide them with enough info for them to navigate further into your website.
If it takes 10 seconds for your website to load for a first time visitor, large chunks of traffic may choose to just close your site and try a competitor instead. Remember, there’s always someone else hungry for the business!
7. Does It Generate Leads?
The litmus test for every business website is, does it generate leads, or does it make sales (if ecommerce). For B2B websites where the objective is to generate leads, correctly configuring Google Analytics will allow you to determine which leads are coming via the website (you could also look at call tracking).
If you are using an ecommerce platform like Shopify or Woocommerce, you’ll be able to track orders and sales via your ecommerce dashboard, and connect the dots on where these sales come from using Google Analytics.
If your website isn’t generating leads, it may time to start asking why and what can be done to change this.