12 Reasons I Won’t Buy From Your Website

You’re wasting your money.

Every time you spend big on AdWords, SEO and social campaigns – it’s all pointless.

Because people are clicking, but your website is scaring them off.

First impressions count. In fact, research shows us that web design drives a whopping 94% of first impressions.

Bad design leads to lower trust and higher friction. This means, no matter how much traffic you drive to your site, if your design isn’t right, your leads will walk straight out the door.

Make your website earn its keep, put it to the litmus test of these common design mistakes.

Here are 12 common mistakes that mean people won’t buy from your website – you don’t have to be making them.

Mistake 1: Low quality visuals

I’ve seen thousands of websites in my online marketing career and most have something in common. They don’t sell. Rather they are simply online catalogues.

Here are some samples of what some study participants of the research Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites had to say about poorly designed sites:

• “[On] one of them I didn’t like the color of [it]. I couldn’t wait to get out. It was an insipid green backdrop. It just put me off reading it.”
• “There was nothing I liked about it at all. I didn’t like the colours, the text, the layout.”
• “I found the screen too busy. I couldn’t quite latch onto anything straight away.”

Take a look at this example of the Gordon Vet Hospital.

Before

The ‘before’ home page represents fairly typical mistakes. It’s a list of the services on offer—an online catalogue.

After

Notice the difference in the ‘after’ web design?  It uses real staff photos instead of dated stock images. There’s a call to action above the fold and solid reasons to choose Gordon Vet Hospital. And there’s a visual tour of the hospital facilities and staff, which encourages great impressions of a well-functioning medical centre.

Mistake 2: The site doesn’t appeal to the target Audience

Who is your target audience?

Do you sell to consultants, academics or truck drivers?

Now examine your website.

Does it speak to your demographic? Has it been translated into the same vernacular they use? Is it comfortably within their education level? Will the design, images and content appeal to them?

It’s unlikely that a truck driver will willingly read the Financial Review, or an MBA-graduate read a trucking magazine, so don’t try to make them.

Mistake 3: Content is stale and boring

Users spend roughly 5.59 seconds focusing on a site’s written content. These statistics come from eye-tracking studies conducted at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. This means you don’t have much time to capture a readers’ attention, so make sure that you write great stuff.

Have you ever scrolled to the bottom of a web page to where a copyright date is listed, and found that it’s outdated by a year, or two? It doesn’t offer much confidence that the company who owns the site is doing any recent business.

A website that’s outdated, or looks that way because of an outdated design is an instant turn off to clients. Ensure that your website is current by implementing the latest technology, refreshing existing copy regularly, and adding new, quality copy every week.

The ideal length of a blog post is claimed to be 7 minutes or 1,600 words according to research from Medium. However, this assumes it contains interesting, informative material.

Long stories or page content with rambling copy about how great you are without any proof or examples to back up your claims, tends to have the shelf-life appeal of a month-old cooked prawn left in the sun.

Mistake 4: Under-estimating the importance of the ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ pages

You’d be surprised at how many users check out your ‘About Us’ page. I used heatmaps to track users’ behaviours on our websites across 10 different industries and found that ‘About Us’ is one of the most visited pages on the website.

The ‘Contact Us’ page ranks almost on the same scale. Even if you run business from home, your website should have a phone number and email address for users to see and call or email. Having a simple web form without any basic contact information looks transient and suspicious.

If you look carefully at this example, you’ll see the tiny little yellow dots on each of the menu items of the Gordon Vet Hospital website. These are heatmaps that show the most visited option is ‘About Us’ and ‘Our Friendly Staff.’

Users do actually want to know more about you so showcase what you’ve got. If you have great staff, tell them. If you have high profile clientele, let them know.

This is a poor example of an ‘About Us’ page. It does not provide any ‘personable’ information. It doesn’t say who they are. It doesn’t say how they operate. If there was a heatmap indicating trust levels, and wouldn’t that be handy, this page would be colorless.

Mistake 5: The shopping cart doesn’t work properly

Have you ever personally bought something from your website?

How many steps were involved? If it was more than one, then it was too many.

In other words, your checkout should be a one pager. Requiring guests to sign up before they can check out, or even view the home page, is another turn-off. You need to facilitate a checkout option for guests.

See below an example of a better way to do this – one page checkout process. It’s a website that Result Driven SEO built for Bean Offroad Camping.

Mistake 6: Your trust indicators are missing

When users first land on your website, they don’t know you, they don’t trust you, they might not even like you, so how can you expect them to buy products from you?

Missing contact information, bad reviews, and a lack of social proof can damage a user’s confidence in your brand.

Prior to doing business with your company most clients will cast their eyes over online reviews from third-party sites such as Trip Advisors, Google Plus Local or other local directories. These independent reviews carry a lot of weight on the ‘trust’ scales. It’s important to generate them, and to ensure they are positive. Set up Google Alerts to monitor what other people are saying about your business and address their comments immediately to manage your online reputation.

According to research on Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites participants mistrusted websites because of these elements.

• Busy or complex layouts
• Pop-up advertisements and flamboyant ads
• Small print that’s hard to read
• Boring web design/lack of colour
• Slow website intros and load times

Take a look at this example. How do you feel about doing business with Web Marketing Experts now?

On the flip side, noting company partners, media mentions, staff photographs, certifications and links to active social media accounts generates strong credibility for Delacon.

Mistake 7: Bad SEO

Bad SEO techniques can hurt your website and make it a complete waste of time.

Google will crack down on your website if it detects questionable practices such as links that are irrelevant to the website’s theme, keyword stuffing, cloaking, linking to irrelevant websites.

It will tighten the penalties and be harder on those who appear on guest blogs.

For information on how to recover from such Google penalties see here.

Mistake 8: Not being mobile friendly

Mobile search is the future and 72% of Consumers Want Mobile-Friendly Sites, Google Research indicated.

 

Image credit: Search Engine Watch

55% of respondents agreed, “A frustrating experience on a website hurts my opinion of the brand overall.”

So what, exactly, are consumers looking for in a website accessed from a mobile device?

• Site speed—loading time of 5 seconds or less
• Big, finger-friendly buttons
• Limited scrolling and pinching
• Quick access to business contact information
• “Click to call” access to phone the business
• One-direction scrolling, either horizontal or vertical, but not both.

In April this year Google’s MobileGeddon started penalising mobile-unfriendly websites. T

o examine if an individual page is mobile-friendly, go here or to check the status of your entire site, go here .

If your site’s pages aren’t mobile-friendly, Google warns there ‘may be’ (read ‘will be’) a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search. But once your site becomes mobile-friendly, it will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages.

You can expedite this process here.

Mistake 9: Not having video to illustrate products

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is said to be worth a thousand pictures, or a million words.

Either way, video is powerful and provides a quick and easy way to impart a lot of information effectively and in a digestible format.

If I’m seeking a sales report extension for a Magento website, I am more likely to consider a provider offering a video that demonstrates how the extension works. See this blue ribbon example of an aheadWorks landing page for their Sales Report Extension. It offers video, demonstrations and plenty of reviews.

Your Google ranking for your website will be prioritised if it hosts a video, because Google now owns YouTube, so consider getting a 90-second corporate video to improve your SEO.

There’s a new breed of specialists emerging who do this quickly and cheaply. See a great example here of construction company AMG Constructions by YouTubeHelp.com.au.

 

Mistake 10. Not having a clear value proposition

In a nutshell, a value proposition is a clear statement that:

• explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevancy)
• delivers specific benefits (quantified value)
• explains why the customer should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation).

Your value proposition should be the first thing visitors see on your home page, and on all major entry points of your website.

Good value proposition

Why this works

• It’s clear about what it is and for whom
• There is a specific lead paragraph
• Key features are outlined above the fold
• There’s a relevant image
• It features a booster – “100% rebrandable”

Bad value proposition

Why this doesn’t work

• It relies only on the video to do the job. Your value proposition should also be in words that people can read. Video supplements words, not replaces them.
• Awful clarity: “We’ll supercharge your website”? Nobody will understand what that means.

Mistake 11: Cheesy stock images

Example of Go Rapid’s cheesy stock image representing a movie-star good looking financial advisor who talks to a ‘bad credit car finance’ audience.

Example of Harley Finance using images that relate to their target audience—owner-drivers who might not have good financial resources.

Mistake 12: No available calls-to-action

You don’t want your website visitors to leave your website without doing anything. You need to at least capture their basic information so you can follow up.

You can do this by providing a free consultation or offering a great deal. Who doesn’t like free stuff, after all?

Techniques that entice visitors into signing up include:

• “Download a Free ebook”
• “Sign up for a webinar”
• “Talk to our sales team”
• “Request a demo”

You need to highlight the call to action you prefer users to take.

Two best practice examples of how to do this.

This landing page itself appeals to small-business owners by highlighting the benefits of using their product, namely being able to accept credit cards for transactions – something that was previously out of reach for many merchants before Square came along.

The call to action itself uses simple language that can be successful for many types of business. The word “get” is often highly motivating. The fact that Square doesn’t charge for its product is likely to be genuinely surprising to many prospects, which reinforces the value of the offer and makes it more tempting.

Between the minimal form (just three fields), the strong indicator of potential benefit (“Start accepting credit cards today”) and the great offer (the free Square card reader), this landing page/call to action combo is a winner.

Another example of a strong headline and a clear call to action above the fold of the website

So, how does your website sell?

Share with me! If you can tick all the boxes, well done. If not, tackle each point one at a time and remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.

Guest Author: Huyen Truong is a SEO Manager at SEO Agency in Sydney – Result Driven SEO with a passion to help small and medium-sized businesses get found online in digital world through search-engine friendly website design, digital marketing strategies and tactics. Follow her on Twitter to see her latest articles.

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Why Did Your Last Social Media Marketing Campaign Fail?

Social media makes us lazy.

We think it is a quick fix to our lacklustre marketing efforts - but it’s not.

Throw a few tweets out, blast some connections on LinkedIn and like a few Facebook pages.

That’s all it takes right?

There is a fundamental problem with the way we approach our social media marketing campaigns.

We are forgetting who they are for in the first place – our target audience.

I want to share with you some common reasons social media marketing campaigns fail and provide tips and tools you can use to increase your chance of success.

Problem 1: We don’t identify a target audience

Whether you are promoting products and services or planning a nationwide protest, identifying a target audience on social media is a necessity.

With that being said, a major reason behind the failure of a many social media marketing campaigns is their lack of commitment to identify a target audience.

This results in us sending spammy promotion to a group of individuals who – quite frankly – don’t care.

How do we change this?

First you must ask these two questions.

• Who will use my products or services?
• How does this demographic gather information?

Thankfully there are a multitude of tools on the internet that will assist you in confidently building a target audience, as well as pinpointing a strategy for how to market to them.

Useful tools

MosaicHub

MosaicHub is a great tool that helps businesses and entrepreneurs identify the thought-leaders throughout their industry. This will allow you to identify who they are talking to and what they are talking about. MosaicHub also offers a resource center where you can create and share your ideas within your industry.

FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk is a great tool when it comes to identifying a target audience. This allows you to search Twitter profiles for certain keywords in your industry, allowing you to find and build relationships with important individuals all over the world.

 

Problem 2: We don’t create the right type of content

Remember the questions we talked about?

The second question comes in here. When creating content to share on social media, it is important create a piece of content that caters to how your audience will want to view it.

All too often we see a business create a monotonous 3,000 word article and try to share it out to a group of individuals who aren’t willing to even read it. That is essentially like throwing a sheep into a pack of wolves and expecting them to have a conversation.

Well, okay, maybe it is not entirely like that, but you get the picture. Certain content just will not do well with certain demographics.

With social media being one of the leading factors in lead generation these days, it is incredibly important that you are creating quality, shareable content on a regular basis.

This is a great way to build yourself and your business up as a leading provider in your industry and establish trust and respect between yourself and the community.

Articles, infographics, contests and videos are all pieces of content that do very well on social media (Disclaimer: The content must be good!)..

In short, there are two things to keep in mind:

• Is it easy to read and/or visually appealing?
• Would YOU share this piece of content?

Useful tools

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows you to search specific keywords and it will show you pieces of content that were most popular based on social shares across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pintrest, and Google+. This will give you an idea of where your audience is and what types of content they like.

FluidReview

Contests are always doing well in the social media world, and will help you raise awareness of your brand throughout a vast community. FluidReview allows a contest creator to set up and manage a contest efficiently through a smartphone.

Problem 3: We forget about timing

Social media is a tool that you need to be using aggressively to achieve success. In the book, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users, Guy Kawasaki stated,

“If you’re not pissing someone off on social media, you’re not using it aggressively enough.”

This is a great quote to keep in mind when managing your social media marketing campaigns; however, timing is going to be a key factor in the success of your social media crusade.

To get the most out of your social media marketing campaign it is important to analyze your audience and find out when the ideal time to put something in front of their face is.

For example if you are trying to present a piece of content to the business world, it is probably not a great idea to publish it at 5PM. At this time, most of your audience will be heading home from work and by the time they get home, it will be buried in an hour’s worth of other posts throughout their news feed. In this case, it may be better to shoot for a 1PM publishing time when people are getting back from lunch and checking their social media pages before diving into work.

It is important to understand that every audience’s ideal sharing time will differ. It is up to you to analyze this and strategize your content plan.

Useful tools

Buffer

Buffer is a great way to schedule social media posts. This will allow you to set aside some time in the morning to schedule your posts to publish at the ideal time, and not worry about missing your window of opportunity for the day. It also tracks twitter analytics!

 

TweetReport’s Twitter Chat Schedule

TweetReport will give you a hub of all the relevant Twitter chats in your industry – providing time, dates, and a short description. Keeping a schedule like this can ensure you will never miss a chance to share your insight and establish a name for yourself in the industry.

Overall, establishing yourself and your brand on social media in today’s world is one of the best ways to build relationships with influencers and customers. While it does require a lot of dedication, these tools can help pave the way to a successful social media marketing campaign without letting it take over your life.

Please feel free to follow me on Twitter and share any tools that you have used to assist in your social media campaigns in the comments!

Thank you for reading.

Guest Author: Taylor Tomita is a creative writer and musician residing in Boise, Idaho. He loves all aspects of marketing and social media, and spends too much time researching these topics. In his free time you can find him creating music or exploring the town in search of good pizza. Follow him on twitter.

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16 Irreplaceable Tools For Content Marketers To Make Your Content Unique

Unique content gets you found.

It places your brand at the top of the pops as a thought leader – someone people trust and admire.

Unique content helps you push the boundaries. It challenges the status quo and inspires your team to innovate.

But it’s not easy.

Always delivering a unique style, unique feel and unique substance to your content is hard.

That’s why most of us don’t.

We are happy to write a link bait headline or create a viral cat video – because it’s easier.

It makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside when we get a bunch of likes and re-shares. We are “content marketers”.

But it doesn’t work.

Our businesses don’t grow, our customers don’t care and our marketing department loses credibility.

Forget about creating content for the sake of it, and start worrying about creating unique content.

Unique, unique, unique… can’t be said enough.

To help you get started here are 16 tools for content marketers that will help you create unique content more often.

1. Power Words for headlines

This list of power words is a great resource to tap into next time you’re writing a headline. Or, if you aren’t up for the task, hire someone who is!

2. Guru

At Guru you can order unique content, with a fee comparable or better than  other freelancer sites. Many freelancers are going to Guru now because they offer a smaller service fee.

3. Unplag

Unplag provides an assurance that your content doesn’t infringe on the works of others. It is a reliable plagiarism checker offering various checking types including a check against the internet in real time and your database of files.

You can create a personal storage of your documents here to avoid self-plagiarism in the future. The history of all checks is saved, so that you can trace all the changes made in a text.

What’s hot? What’s not?

Today’s fast paced media world provides topics that change not only daily, but also hourly.

Transgender issues are a big topic today, and smartphone apps were yesterday. For topics, there is no need to re-invent the wheel – just create the best wheel on the market.

Use trends to generate new and unique ideas. If you feel you are “out of the loop” about what people are talking about, or if you need to hit a target market for demographic reasons, let these sites help you:

4. Topsy

This tool for content marketers helps you search and analyze the hottest trends in your niche among blog posts, tweets, photos, videos.

Also you can use Topsy to find influencers and contact them about collaboration.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is similar to Topsy and can be used for the same purpose – to find the hottest trends on the internet for a specific niche.

All you have to do is to type a keyword (for example, ‘writing’) and choose the type of content you need in the left sidebar.

The free version shows only the top 10 results, but sometimes that’s enough.

6. aHrefs Content Explorer

If you have an aHrefs paid account – you’re lucky.

Using a service such as a content explorer let’s you see the most shareable content in your niche. It works similarly to the previous two services – just put your niche keyword into the search bar and enjoy the result.

7. Feedly

Using Feedly you’ll learn more about what has to be said of relevance for your topic or product. (It’s a modern version of an RSS feed reader)

Images

Nothing is better than creating your own unique content. This eliminates the fear of being repetitive, irrelevant or plagiarizing.

Start with a captivating image. There are plenty of places to find just the right one to act as the stepping-stone for your content.

The digital image world is aplenty, but only some sources will help you with your unique needs.

8. HaikuDeck

HaikuDeck is a simple, beautiful, and fun tool for creating presentations. Using this tool you can easily design any kind of presentation for any purpose: a presentation of a new business product, blog content, article illustration, etc.

HaikuDeck has two versions: for web and for iPad.

9. Canva

Canva is a universal tool for visual content creation.

With the help of Canva you can create almost anything: gift cards, content for social media pages, infographics, featured pictures for your blog posts etc.

10. InfoActive.co

This tool will be totally useful for those who want to turn complex data into interactive infographics and reports – InfoActive was created for this purpose.

Here you can find lots of graphic and diagram types to visualize your data and make it look better.

11. Fotor.com

Sometimes a collage or montage of images could be better suited to your needs.

Look at what they offer at Fotor.com – it’s a tool for collage creation.

Also you can use this tool for editing a photo or card designing.

12. BeFunky

If you have images or photos that require expert editing assistance, you can get some help at BeFunky.com.

I believe it’s  the best online photo editor, for now. It is easy to use, free and comfortable.

Video

One of the fastest growing trends in digital marketing today is the use of video. By giving a potential customer a “real life” perspective of the message you are trying to convey, you are engaging their senses in a whole new way.

For example, why just write about a great restaurant with website pages and reviews, when you can see and hear satisfied diner’s comments and impressions or get a virtual tour of the setting with a video on the site?

We all want to be “in” a movie and video content can give your website guest, or blog reader, that desire to be there, or to engage more directly.

Video production may seem daunting if you are not a Spielberg-type, but nowadays even young kids are learning about the basics of filming, which means there are more sources for you to use.

13. PowToon

Try PowToon where they can create quality video for you or guide you through the process of video creation.

PowToon has free and premium accounts. The main difference is that the free account service will automatically add their logo at the end of every video.

14. GoAnimate

This is another video creation tool for corporate and personal use.

GoAnimate has a large library with ready-made characters and scenarios. Just drag and drop the needed element into your draft.

15. ImgFlip

People love funny and engaging gifs. But almost all gifs are already published somewhere.

You can generate your own gifs (graphic interchange formats) with this tool – ImgFlip gif creation tool.

Music

Voice overs or narration are great means of getting your content delivered effectively, but truly setting a tone for your message is more captivating.

This is where music plays a key role. Imagine talking about tropical vacations with soft ukulele music, or selling tattoo designs with funky vibe music, our subconscious also needs to be engaged throughout the delivery of your content.

Don’t know how to add music to your site?

16. YouTube AudioLibrary

Browse a plethora of musical genres and options at Youtube AudioLibrary. This is a free gallery of Youtube audio selections and you’re bound to find just what you need.

Or, if you are keen to try the original route, you can have your own jingle or song composed, affordably with artists who offer their skills at Fiverr.com.

Your choice

You can choose to provide unique content to your audience, but it requires time and effort. However, if you are ready and willing the results can be spectacular.

If you’re up for the challenge, get started with some of the tools for content marketers on this list.

Guest Author: Lynn Usrey, a newbie essayist, freelance writer and content creator. Also she teaches writing on writing courses in Orlando, Florida. Visit her LinkedIn page.

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