12 Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Converting

According to Hubspot's annual marketing survey, the majority (63%) of respondents say that their biggest marketing challenge is generating qualified leads. For any business to be successful, marketing teams need to master the art and science of building a website the converts well, and does so predictably. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why your website might not be converting well, and it will require some sleuthing on your part to get to the bottom of the root cause. With that being said, there are 12 common reasons why most websites don’t generate leads. Use this list as a guide and start digging into the most likely culprit based on your best guess.

Failure to Understand Buyer Personas

A buying persona is an archetype for marketers. Essentially, it is a collection of psychographic and demographic information that helps customer facing employees better engage with prospects and customers. In order for you and your team to create a website that converts, it’s critical that you actually understand who you are trying to convert and what their frame of mind is when you are trying to convert them.

Azazie does a great job of knowing exactly who their buying personas are and writes content that speaks to these website visitors. Azazie is an e-commerce company that sells wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses. Their content is perfectly created to engage the various personas who visit the company’s website. For example, the website navigation makes it simple for each persona to select the type of dress they are looking for. This straightforward navigation helps to convert website visitors by reducing navigation friction.

High Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a technical term available on most website analytics tools, like Google Analytics. It is expressed as a percentage and refers to the percentage of website visitors who leave the page they land on in under a certain amount of time. If a high percentage of visitors are bouncing from the website, it means that they will never take the time to convert to a lead.

Usually, a web page with a high bounce rate (one company found 49% was average for reference) the best thing to do is to ensure that the content is aligned with visitor expectations. Then check to see if the content is engaging enough to encourage people to stay to consume it, rather than immediately leaving.

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Poor Landing Page Optimization

Landing page optimization is a dark art that can dramatically increase website optimization. A landing page is your “money” page; it’s where you convince a website visitor to fill out a form to become a lead, or to make that purchase if you are an e-commerce company. While there are many different variables that can impact page performance, there are two types of improvements that can be made.

The first set of improvements are design related. These improvements have to do with the way the page looks, how people navigate the page, and how people submit their information. The second set of improvements are content related; make sure the content is compelling and is aligned with your buyer personas.

Content is Misaligned with the Buyer’s Journey

Marketers typically conceptualize the buyer’s journey as a funnel. As the buyer moves down the funnel and becomes closer to making a purchasing decision, the content becomes more increasingly related to the product offering.

It’s important to align the content you produce with the buyer’s journey. Lexington Law does a good job of this on their website. The company offers credit repair services, and the website offers various pieces of content designed to drive awareness, educate, and convert based on the customer’s decision-making stage.

Too Few People Are Visiting Your Website

As the legendary hockey player, Wayne Gretzky is known to say, “you miss 100% of shots you don’t take.” Similarly, you can’t convert visitors to leads if you don’t have anyone visiting your website. If you have a low number of website visitors, the first thing to do is work on bringing more qualified visitors to your website. Once a good chunk of people are visiting the site each day, you can begin to make optimizations that convert visitors into leads and customers.

Broken Links and Error Messages

Broken links and error messages ruin your chances of converting website visitors to leads. Whenever a visitor stumbles across an error message or broken internal link, it causes the visitor to have a frustrating experience. The visitor may even decide that the website is not trustworthy, at which point converting them to a lead will be nearly impossible.

Confusing Website Navigation

As someone trying to optimize a website, the first thing you want to do is reduce frustration and friction on behalf of the website visitors. You want to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to provide you with their information. Considering that after 4 seconds, 25% of website visitors will leave a website if it still has not fully loaded, it goes to show that we are very picky when it comes to using websites.

That means creating an easily navigable website is key to converting more visitors to contacts.

Website Is Not Mobile Optimized

According to Statcounter, more people used a mobile device to browse the web than a desktop last year. This trend is expected to persist this year as well. Despite this trend, as much as 91% of businesses don’t have a mobile-optimized website. Websites that are not mobile optimized are difficult for visitors to navigate and hurt conversion rates as a rule when visitors are viewing the site on mobile.

Offer Is Blocked by Ad Blockers

AdWeek reported that 26% of desktop users have enabled some sort of ad blocking plugin. Ad blockers can hurt website conversion rates because they can remove calls to action (CTAs) and website forms. If the CTA or form simply is not visible to the visitor, conversion rates will understandably suffer. Consider asking visitors to disable ad blockers on your site in order to overcome this conversion obstacle.

Visitors Mistrust your Brand

If your brand has been in the news for the wrong reasons, website visitors may be uncomfortable sharing their personal information with your company. While it may be difficult to figure this out simply by looking at the numbers, you can try adding forms of social proof to your website to inspire confidence. Things like customer testimonials or trust badges can help to give visitors confidence.

Limited Product/Market Fit

If all of the other options on the list have been addressed, your website might not be converting well because of poor product/market fit. If at the end of the day, visitors simply are not interested in the product or service being sold, then no amount of clever “marketing hacks” will be able to overcome this problem. If you suspect this may be the case, leave the office and have conversations with your ideal customer to gauge their excitement about the product.

Conclusion

There are many different factors that could be hurting website performance. Those factors range from a poor understanding of your personas to engaging content, to bad website design. By testing for each one of these factors in a methodical and thoughtful way, you’ll be that much closer to creating a website that converts.

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