Is Your Website Doing More Harm Than Good

Is your website inviting people in?

Is your website inviting people in?

You already know how important it is to have a website for your business. However, is your website doing more harm than good?

More than 80% of people will immediately exit the website if it has an outdated design. But it's not only a matter of appearance. In fact, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in organic searches.

But why should this matter to you?

When you have a website, you're looking to build an online brand. So, you need to drive online traffic to your website. However, if you don't have a modern design and if you're website isn't mobile-friendly yet, this can be hurting your business.

Paying attention to the algorithms that Google, Bing, and Yahoo! use to rank the websites as well as knowing what consumers are looking for and how they are doing are crucial for any business. When you're not making an effort on both fronts, people may not even be able to find you because you're not ranking well on major search engines, or they simply find you but they quickly hit the back button.

According to a Google study in many countries, people do search Google more often using their mobile devices than using their desktops. And this includes the United States as well.

Here are the 3 main reasons why your website may actually be doing more harm than good to your business:

#1: The Website Isn't Mobile-Friendly:

Simply put, all you need to do is to make sure that, no matter which device people are using to visit your website - either smartphone, tablet, or desktop, they see the same website but adapted to the size of the screen. The visual presentation may need to be slightly changed to make it easy for your visitors to navigate when they're using a smaller screen.

Despite this may seem a bit overwhelming if you're reading it for the same time, you need to know that WordPress templates are already responsive by default.

Plus, a 2015 Google update to the algorithm said they would be prioritizing website-friendly websites.

#2: Your Design Is Outdated And It Doesn't Provide A Good User Experience:

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Putting it on an extreme, consider that you have the best product in the world. However, you have a website with flowers in the background and the color scheme is just strange. Well, as soon as your visitors click to see it, half a second later they're clicking the back button.

Design does matter. However, you need to balance a good design with a good user experience as well. People expect some things to be in certain places. Like the navigation menu, for example. They expect to find it on top or bottom. If yours is in existent or is cluttered, they won't see it.

#3: Your Website Isn't Optimized For Search Engines:

You can have the best-designed website in the world, but if it isn't optimized for the search engines, they will not rank it. So, you won't get visitors.

One of the things to have in mind to rank well on search engines is to make your website mobile-friendly. Then, you need to take care of SEO, like using the right URLs, keyword tagging, among others. This will make it a lot easier for people to find you in search engines.

Kwame Johnson