How to Avoid the 4 Biggest Mistakes New Website-owners Make

Websites have never been more important. Never before in human history has it been so easy to make a large number of people aware of your business, but with potentially huge audiences, you will want to make sure that everything is perfect. Of course, in reality, nothing is perfect, but there are a number of unique challenges that those new to owning and running websites face. Failing these challenges can either severely limit the audience that your site is actually exposed to, or damage your brand’s reputation in the eyes of those viewers, hampering your business over the long term. Here are some of the biggest mistakes that new website-owners make.

Not questioning themselves

If you’re human, you’re going to make mistakes. It’s true that making mistakes leads to important and valuable learning experiences, but make too many unnecessary mistakes and you can suffer unnecessarily. A surefire way to make loads of mistakes is to never question yourself. This is especially damaging when you use a website designer as, according to this web design Staffordshire agency, many web design companies can be ‘yes men’ – people who build whatever you ask them to without question. When your designers are ‘yes men’ or if you design the site yourself and you don’t question your decisions, you face the risk of going off-road and making decisions that don’t fall in line with your brand and what you want to achieve. Losing this perspective can derail a brand and erode the effectiveness of your messaging.

Not promoting their site

No matter how brilliant your site is, nobody is going to visit it if they aren’t told about it! You should focus on continuously promoting your site. This can be by writing great and relevant content that you then share on social media, by running a paid advertising campaign or even by handing out flyers. However you do it, you should send visitors to your site in any area that you would normally promote your business. You can promote your site for free pretty easily, so make sure you’re aware of the tools at your disposal.

Ignoring technical SEO

How fast does your homepage load? Is your code compressed? How are your meta-tags? When was the last time you updated your robots.txt? If these questions stump you, you might have a problem with your technical SEO (search engine optimization) awareness. All SEO is important, but website-owners are often intimidated by the concept of technical SEO, finding traditional, keyword or UX-based SEO much easier to get to grips with. Technical SEO is important because things like code compression (which can impact loading speeds) can have a very distinct effect on your site’s user experience, and is scrutinized by Google’s algorithms.

Other SEO mistakes people often make are not creating unique page titles for their pages, not doing any keyword research at all and not including enough text on their websites for crawlers to crawl properly.

Paying no attention to their lead generation funnel

Have you ever heard of the lead generation funnel? If your site is for a business, you need to understand and utilize one. Simply getting traffic to your site is not good enough if you want to make sales. You need to guide your visitors down a funnel in a way that results in sales. If you’re looking to increase sales with a marketing campaign, you will need to fully utilize a lead generation funnel. A real-world example of this looks like this:

1. Draw in traffic with a lead magnet (e.g. a giveaway).
2. Require an opt-in on your website landing page to enter the giveaway (i.e. get an email address).
3. Display a thank you page.
4. Follow up via email – only with high-quality content or more giveaways or deals.
5. Throw so much enjoyable or valuable content/offerings visitors’ way that they are drawn to your website and buy a product.

This simple progression shows how potential customers can be drawn to a website, encouraged to engage with your brand and eventually converted into a paying customer. This example of the funnel might not work for you, as the best lead generation funnels are fully tailored to specific businesses, your needs and your requirements. Work on first obtaining attention, then generating interest, then desire and then finally an action (whether it be a sale or an opt-in).

Avoiding these four mistakes can turn a doomed website into one that enjoys great success, but it’s crucial that you understand how you can best do so: hard work and determination.