Aug 31, 2009

Five Website Mistakes That May Be Hurting Your Sales

Could your website actually be hurting your sales?

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that it is working to convert visitors into customers. In fact, certain website factors could be causing you to lose site visitors and revenue. Take a look at the following five website mistakes to make sure that you are not committing these common, but detrimental blunders.


5. Not Being Found by Customers
What good is a website if customers cannot find it? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help your site be easily located for relevant search engine queries, resulting in more website traffic and revenue.


4. Difficult Navigation
If your site navigation is disorganized, you risk frustrating your visitors and missing out on the opportunity to convert them into customers. Make it easy for visitors to find the products and services that they are seeking by organizing your site navigation in a straightforward and logical manner.


3. Long Path to Purchase
Don’t complicate the purchase process with unnecessary fields or registrations on your ecommerce website. The more pages that your customers have to navigate through in order to make a purchase, the more likely you are to experience a high rate of shopping cart abandonment.


2. Slow Load Time
It is crucial that your site loads quickly in order to avoid a high bounce rate. Test your site using a free web tool to ensure that it is loading before your customers decide to look elsewhere. There are a few opinions as to how quickly your site should load, but I recommend no more than four or five seconds in order to avoid losing sales. If you do find that your site is loading too slowly, you can help to decrease that time by optimizing your HTML code and CSS, eliminating unnecessary or redundant items, and compressing images.


1. Ineffective Elements
How can you be sure if your content, images, headings, and other site elements are effective? Eliminate the guesswork and conduct multivariate tests to figure out exactly what works for your customers. Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple website elements simultaneously in order to determine which combination results in the highest conversion rate. Once you have statistical information that tells you which combination of website content, product images, headings, and price points produce the most conversions, you can dramatically increase your website revenue.


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