7 Reasons Perfect Prospects Leave Your Company Website

It’s a frustrating reality. Every day, perfect prospects are visiting your company’s website and leaving. Most never return. It’s like they are falling down cracks you don’t know exist.

They arrived on one of your pages from a referral or via Google but something went wrong and they vanished, never to return.

In an ideal world, good prospects would instinctively know your company is perfect for their needs, but they don’t. That’s because you have competitors and a myriad of alternative choices, all jostling for their attention. An online prospect is trigger-happy, in the sense they have their finger on their mouse and are happy to click. People know they have a ton of choices.

So even when a prospect would gain so much from doing business with you, they still leave. That’s really bad for you.

So why do ideal prospects just vanish from your website? What can you do to fill the cracks and stop the flow of lost prospective customers?

Here are 7 reasons why perfect prospects disappear.

1. Poor website design

Your site’s web design is one of the first glimpses of your brand potential clients and customers see. Within a second or two, they make a snap judgement about your identity based on colors, formatting, fonts, and images.

A poorly designed website smacks of amateurism, while a well-designed site instills confidence in the reader that you are truly professional and established. A good design also supports the marketing messages, allowing readers to instantly find the information they require to move deeper into the sales process.

The harder you make it for first-time visitors to find what they need and quickly, the more likely they are to click away from your website.

2. “What do they do exactly?”

Have you ever been to a smart looking company website and been puzzled by what exactly the business does? I have and I’ve zero doubt you have too. You may have found the company via a Google search or from a social media update. This gives you a rough idea of what they do but their website is opaque when it comes to their exact identity.

Visitors need to know within a few seconds that they are in the right place. Your headlines, sub-headers, images, and other micro-text need to very quickly bring clarity to your web readers’ minds.

Otherwise, they will leave, uninspired to waste their time over a riddle they have little desire to solve.

3. Mixed voices

Too many cooks spoil the broth, as the old adage goes. The same can be said for too many mixed voices on one website. In copywriting and content marketing, a voice is the tone that underlies a company’s writing style. It’s ideal, when possible, to have just one ‘voice’ so as to benefit from a continuity of identity.

Readers quickly grow comfortable with a certain brand style and expect it to continue from one page to the next and also beyond. When you have two or more writers, with very different styles, a dissonance is born. This creates gaps and bumps, which doesn’t sit well with prospects, even if subconsciously. And so they leave.

The antidote is to create one ‘voice’ for your website copy and other marketing materials. You can still employ more than one write, but they need to be writing with a similar tone born from a pre-agreed writing style.

4. Too much waffle

Many websites contain too many words. They’re full of waffle and jargon which do little to move prospects through the website and into sales funnels. Long pages, big paragraphs, boring text, and keyword stuffing lead to prospects losing patience and looking elsewhere for a swifter solution.

A lot of text isn’t a bad thing in itself. There are many instances where in-depth content is required, sometimes running into thousands of words. But when it comes to standard website pages, the faster your reader can acquire the information they need to make an informed decision, the better.

Great copywriting is often about condensing powerful information into smaller packages.

5. Poor internal linkage

Your website is in many ways like your company’s physical premises. It requires good access routes and proper internal navigation from one office or room to the next. Without this intelligently designed interior navigation, your staff’s productivity would be stifled, things would go missing, and visitors would get lost.

Strong websites have strong internal linkage, from one page to the next. It has to be carefully planned so as the reader is directed to the pages that will draw him or her deeper into your sales cycle. Where the links are placed is an incredibly important decision to make.

Poor linkage can result in confusion and a hemorrhage of prospects.

6. Too much selling or too little selling

Gone are the days when business owners thought their company’s website was basically like a brochure. At least I hope so. A business website is an essential marketing and sales tool. It needs to convert prospects into paying customers or clients, whether now or in the future.

A problem many company websites have is finding the balance between too much selling and too little selling. When your content is hyper-salesy, it can be a turn off for visitors seeking information first but who would otherwise be interested in what you offer. On the flip side, website copy without any push to purchase or subscribe, is anemic and likely to see prospects vanish without taking any action.

7. A lack of strong CTAs

Speaking of action – let me introduce you to the CTA (call-to-action). Just about every web page on your website needs a CTA, and sometimes more than one. They are incredibly vital to the success of your marketing and sales.

A strong CTA will get readers to take the action you want them to take, whether to buy, subscribe, make contact, click to another page, or download a document. Each CTA needs to be carefully crafted to suit the surrounding messages so there is a natural and instinctive flow of action.

A lack of CTAs or poorly written and designed ones will render your website and its copy mute.

Simple fixes to ensure more prospects stay on your website

These are just seven reasons why perfect prospects leave your company’s website before being converted. There are many more.

However, by fixing the above issues, you should quickly see a vast improvement in the number of visitors actually taking positive action rather than simply vanishing.

Th web designer in St Petersburg, FL will allot time to meetings to fully understand your brand’s concepts and the ideas you have towards your growth.