We live in a world where the saying “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” is something people try to live by but unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. Especially when it comes to your website. While every business would like to have a well-designed website that accurately represents them, it needs to to also look good and be responsive. These aspects are crucial in today’s digital world.

Here’s a look at six of the biggest website mistakes that are costing you leads and how to fix them:

1. Your Website’s Loading Time Is Too Long

If you check the stats on this subject, you’ll find that web visitors have awfully short attention spans. Websites that take too long to load can lose up to 40 percent of visitors within the first 10 seconds. Long wait times = higher bounce rates, which obviously isn’t good.

The two biggest tips for optimizing your website are:

• Reduce the size of images and remove unnecessary web pages, plugins, etc. that slow down your website.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve your website up faster. A CDN uses a network of servers in different data centers to host and deliver your website. Different parts of your site are housed on different servers, taking advantage of the high-availability and high-performance of each center to serve each portion of your site faster and more efficiently.

2. Your Website Looks Sketchy

This isn’t directly related to the actual design of your website (although it can be), but rather social proof. How can you show your visitors that they can trust your business? Your website should include some of these following indicators of social proof:

• Social share counts on blog posts and landing pages
• Testimonials from happy clients
• Anti-spam and/or privacy statement to inform visitors of how you’ll treat their information
• Media and/or news mentions from other publications or media outlets
• Registration counts for webinars
• Security badges if you’re asking for sensitive information like credit card information

3. Your Lead Capture Process Is Fractured Or Doesn’t Exist

If your website gets a lot of traffic but isn’t generating as many leads as it should, your lead capture process isn’t working. At the basic level, your lead capture process should include compelling calls-to-action (CTAs), a sign up form, and a relevant reward for signing up. Plant your forms throughout your website so visitors don’t always enter on the home page.

If you do have these basics, try testing out your gated content. By testing it out, you will be able to tell which content works best for each scenario so you can produce more (or less) of the right one. Try these value exchange tactics when you gate your content:

• Give away in return for personal info, such as a name and email address
• Give away an eBook, report, or a whitepaper in return for business info, such as name, email address, and company name
• Offer a webinar in return for business info and a phone number
• Offer a product demo or free trial for the info that your sales team needs to vet them

4. Your Website Has Poorly Written Content

Sometimes the first way a lead will hear about your company or product will be by visiting your website, so it’s important that their first impression is a good one. Let’s assume that you already have a fantastic website design, but once they start reading they realize it’s not on-par with the product you’re selling. We’re not just talking about grammar and spelling, we’re also talking about subtle areas such as voice, tone, and accuracy. If you have a room in the budget, consider hiring a professional copywriter and/or blogger to write content for your website.

Areas to look at on your website include:

• Product pages: Keep the descriptions as crisp and entertaining as possible, especially if your products are complex or ‘boring’. Make the content easy to digest.
• About Us/Company pages: Show off the personality and qualifications of your company’s management team, showing that they’re professional, knowledgeable, and real people.
• Landing pages: Use compelling headlines, images, and actionable CTAs to draw readers in.

5. Your Blog Is Too Corporate

Does your blog consist of press releases and other marketing material? This content isn’t engaging to visitors and it’s very difficult to build relationships with promotional content. Create an editorial calendar and begin writing about topics your leads would be interested in reading. For ideas, speak to your sales and customer service reps to see what customers are asking about or showcase how your existing customers are using your product to solve different issues they have.

6. You’re Not Publicizing Your Social Media Presence

Today’s clients, whether it’s B2B or B2C, are on social media. They expect you to be too, so when you’re not, or when you’re only on there sporadically, they disengage. Lead generation is all about creating and maintaining relationships with people, so doing social media badly or not at all is a missed relationship-building opportunity. Here are different ways you can boost your social media presence:

• Investigate where your leads are on social media and then get on the same networks.
• Post interesting and relevant images, articles, and other content regularly to your leads reading and hopefully talking. Share links to content they’ll find informative, even if it’s not necessarily about your product.
• Add links to your social media networks on your website: in the footer and header of your site, and anywhere else you think is useful, like in your email signature and on your business cards.

Need help navigating the options? J. Fitzgerald Group can help. Give us a call at 716.433.7688 to find out how!

This post has been amended from blog.marketo.com