Does this sound familiar? If so, don’t panic, it happens to more businesses than you might think. As a business owner, it can understandably cause you a lot of stress, but the good news is there’s often a fixable reason behind a quiet inbox.
What technical things could impact web enquiries?
Let’s start with the techy stuff. Your website could be designed to perfection, but if it’s built poorly, or on a bad platform, it won’t matter how it looks. It simply won’t perform for you. These could be technical issues like:
- Security certificates: Do you have a valid SSL certificate? If not, your site will appear as unsecure to prospective visitors. The potential danger of entering a site without security will see your site entrances plummet.
- Page load: We’ve all experienced the frustration when we visit a page and everything…loads…so…slowly. Having media files that are too big, or having a site bloated by unnecessary plugins not only provide a bad user experience (increasing site exits) but it also massively impacts your visibility on search engines and within AI search results.
- A site that’s not mobile-first: Opting to design and build your website with desktop first in mind is so 2010. Mobile searches are King so you need to ensure that your mobile experience offers everything your users need. Also, Google uses your mobile version of your site for indexing, so if it’s not hitting the mark, you’re missing out in all areas.
- Plugins: There can be the danger, especially if you’ve built your site yourself, to add unnecessary plugins. Whilst plugins are needed for some functionality, it’s important to get an experienced developer to check if they can impact other areas of your site – such as emails not firing from your website to your inbox!
- No-follow robots: In a world driven by AI search, it’s imperative that your site can be crawled and indexed by search engines. Having code that’s clean and up to scratch, in addition to ensuring your content isn’t blocked by robots will help your site be more visible – meaning potential customers can enquire.
How visible is your website?
As we touched on above, if people can’t find your website, it won’t convert for you. Website visibility is all about ensuring your show up where your audience searches. This includes search engines, social media channels and now, with the ever-growing boom, AI powered search tools.
If your SEO is outdated, your content is flat and with no clear objective or your social media has been left in the dust, these are all factors that will impact your visibility. Investing time into a content strategy for your website and social channels. Ensure that you’re updating your website content regularly (in a structured way and in context to what your business offers) and keep your social media channels active to keep current and prospective customers in the loop.
Make sure you also review your strategy – are you using the right social channels? Is your content linked to common FAQs that your audience asks? Research is key to ensuring that all communications are inline with your objectives and audience needs.
What’s your message?
Are you getting traffic to the site but engagement is low? If your brand messaging isn’t clear, engaging or aligned with what your audience needs, they’ll leave without a trace. Some common things we see with websites that perform poorly include calls-to-action that are buried at the bottom of pages, technical language that can only be understood by a small percentage of visitors or simply confusing layouts that provide a poor user experience.
These can all stop a user mid-scroll. A good website starts with planning. We develop wireframes to ensure the customer journey is clear and combine this with messaging that’s on brand yet speaks directly to a user’s pain point, whilst ensuring those all important calls-to-action are clear. Ensuring you have content that also shows off your credibility (testimonials, case studies, etc.) will provide new visitors with more reason to enquire.
Are you measuring your website’s performance?
Are you focusing on the wrong data for your website? If your inbox is quiet, how is the rest of your website performing? Without tracking what’s working, and what’s not, on your website, you can be left guessing. Utilising analytics tools will show you where users are dropping off, where your highest bounce and exit rates are and link these pages to your main areas of delivery.
For example, if a page with a high bounce rate predominately has traffic through social media, maybe the messaging from the social post to the landing page is confused? Maybe your important pages aren’t getting as many visitors because they’re hidden on your navigation or are neglected within your content strategy? They say data is King and they’re not wrong. Analytics is crucial to understanding where your site currently stands, and where areas of improvement are needed.
Websites the Kensa way
Helping brands with websites that perform is exactly what we do at Kensa. We help our clients transform their quiet storefronts into powerful, lead generating platforms. And we can help you from the ground up.
As a full service marketing agency, we can support you whether you’re a start-up looking to dip your toe into the business world, or you’re an established brand looking to shake things up.
We follow a tried and tested method that ensures that all website projects don’t just look good, they perform too. Ready to level up your online game? Get in touch with us today.
