What to Do With a Low Performing Website

When it comes down to building websites, you can either take it seriously or watch as your investment in your business wilts away. Considering that websites are the primary source of high quality leads for many businesses, it’s important for entrepreneurs to make the right decisions when it comes to creating websites that are optimized for finding new clients.

That said, you may find yourself directing a bulk of your marketing expenditures to establishing your business’ website. But it’s important to realize that a successful website doesn’t end with its launch.

If anything, your website’s success can be gauged by how you’re able to continuously optimize and update it in order to meet your business targets. You should check your website’s analytics to get a better view of how it performs right after implementation. This should lead you towards implementing the right corrective strategies.

When there’s a clear drop in visitors and conversions, you know you will have to take immediate action, so here’s a few things to help you remedy a low performing website.

Check your KPIs

Your KPIs, or key performance indicators, show you how your website is performing in terms of generating interest, acquiring leads, and converting new customers for your business. These come in the form of metrics such as the visitor count, conversion rate, bounce rate, and exit rate, among others.

Being able to set your benchmarks from the start should provide you with a clear view of the goals you should be aiming for. During the initial months, you will have to monitor your metrics and determine which KPIs your business should be focusing on. This should help you set up your goals and, throughout the lifespan of your website, provide you with the numbers for calibrating its specific components.

Basing your success on your KPIs helps you to double down on certain elements that could be improved, discarded, or added to boost your need to meet your initial business goals.

Do a content audit

If there’s one thing you really need to focus on when it comes to improving your website, it’s the content. The information you provide helps educate your audience about the products or services you’re selling, introduce your brand, encourage visitors to take action, help users navigate your webpages, and, of course, help your brand engage the right customers.

In fact, many businesses in both the B2C and B2B sectors see content as integral to the success of their online efforts. People are bound to stay in your website if you provide them with a lot of quality content that’s relevant and entertaining at the same time.

No doubt, if you’re seeing a consistently high bounce rate, you may have to consider improving your web content or overhauling your website altogether. Either way, you will need to know the types of content that will get your audiences hooked on whatever it is you’re selling.

One simple strategy you can utilize for this is a doing content audit. Simply visit the websites of your competitors and assess the type of content that they produce. The aim here is not to replicate what other businesses are doing but to make improvements that they weren’t able to apply. So, when doing a content audit, check for elements like the type of writing style being used for your competitors’ webpages or the color scheme for improving accessibility. Other than that, you might also want to know if they’re able to include videos or engaging graphics in their content.

Making improvements to your website would mean several hours of brainstorming for original ideas. At least through a content audit, you can cut the time it takes for your web development and design team to implement potent changes to your website.

Change your keyword strategy

Content is not the only factor for success. When it comes to maintaining a highly productive website that produces a consistent volume of organic visitors, you will need to check your keyword strategy and see if there’s anything you need to improve along those lines.

Keywords are what make your website visible to the people who are actively looking for the products and services you are selling. A drop in new visitors would mean that your website is not fully optimized for Google’s search engine or it simply didn’t catch up with the most recent changes to search engine algorithms.

Both cases would require you to change your keyword strategy. This would mean coming up with a new list of keywords that can produce the most number of clicks. Research is important, so make sure to work with your web development team to identify the right strategies for improving your online visibility.

Opting for long-tail keywords, improving the readability of your website content, and enhancing the overall design of your website are highly recommended, although you can also focus on more technical improvements such as increasing the loading speed of your webpages, making your website’s interface more navigable and intuitive, and building links through guest-posting. With these strategies in mind, you can improve your website’s searchability and get more organic visits.

Outsource your marketing to industry-specific partners

Improving the performance of your website is something that takes a lot of time and expertise to pull off. If you’re lacking both, you can always outsource your website-building activities to the right service providers.

It helps if you’re able to find an outsourcing partner who is well-versed in the type of industry. For instance, treatment and rehab centers aiming to increase admissions can benefit from agencies like Lead to Recovery, which specializes in SEO, PPC, and other online marketing campaigns that cater to the specific needs of this market.

At any rate, you will have to know if the agency you will be working with has the right people and the right tools to help you gain an advantage within your niche. You should only work with one that has a lot of experience working within your field and using content management systems like WordPress.

Maintaining a successful website is mind-boggling even to seasoned entrepreneurs. With the right strategies in mind, you can continuously improve your website and allow it to generate as much business as expected.

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