5 Reasons Why Many Small Business Websites Fail

There are a multitude of reasons why many websites of small businesses are not working. Here are the top 5:

1. Content

There are two aspects to this cause of website failure-one is insufficient content or information on the site. You simply cannot rank well for search phrases or topics that do not appear in your website’s content.

The second element is a failure to optimise what content is there for the search engines to ensure the best chance of ranking well. This is on page search engine optimisation which is a fancy way of describing some basic rules for presenting your content well for the search engines to help with good rankings.

 2. Poor or nonexistent call to action

Lots of sites make it hard for visitors to make contact or make an enquiry or provide limited options to do so.

Some people are happier emailing for more information, some people like to pick up the telephone-you need to make it incredibly easy for your visitors to contact you in whatever form they like and respond quickly to their question.

 3. Failure to promote your site effectively

Unfortunately the notion of “build it and they will come” will not work-you need to promote your content and your site.

And promoting it does not amount to exhorting people to “check out my latest blog”-you need a little more imagination than that.

You need to give people a reason to read what you have written and published and answer the question of “what’s in it for me” which the reader is asking. There are far too many competing distractions on the internet for a boring, bland request to “check out my latest blog” to have any real effectiveness.

 4. Cluttered and busy site design

Many sites are simply too crowded and cluttered to ensure effective outcomes from visitors-you should have one or two preferred actions that you want your website traffic to take. And you then need to make it incredibly simple and glaringly obvious to the visitor as to what they need to do next.

 5. Content-failing to cater for what people are actually searching for

Yes, back to content again.

Because website content is the single biggest problem for most small business websites and this aspect of the problem is the failure to target the specific words and phrases that people in your market are actually searching for.

This failure is inexcusable if you are keen to increase your search engine traffic because this data is

• Provided to you by Google and
• Free. (See the Google keyword tool)

The Google Keyword tool gives you priceless data as to what people are searching for in any market and it doesn’t cost a cent. Failing to use this data and build your site around what people in your market are actually searching for is a huge mistake.

Because if you are not doing it you can be sure that some of your competitors are and in the process are catering for the needs and problems of searchers in your industry.