Fatal Mistake 1: Information Overload

“Less is more”. You’ve heard that saying and it holds true when delivering your message online.

The average company website tries to put everything possible on the home page, hoping to attract more new customers.

The sad fact is, cramming all this onto one page simply makes any useful information on the page hard to find.  If you focus on your company instead of what problems you can solve for customers, you dilute your message to the viewer.

Web sites with too much information frustrate customers are looking for quick access to a product or service, not an education in the company’s market or their history.

Visitors to your web site scan pages rather than study them. Studies show that readers can’t, or won’t, read large blocks of text. In fact, many people will only scan highlights and bullet points. Your pages should have plenty of white space to make your important points stand out, and your message must be simple, compelling, and easy to read.

A web page with simple layout, clean graphics, bold headline, few bullets and with a clear call to action is much more effective than a cluttered page.

But what if you have a lot of products or services to promote?

Don’t try to put the entire store in one page. Create a page for each product or service, with information specific to the problem that product or service corrects. Focus just on a single service and your messages will be shorter, more focused and more useful to the person searching for that service.

‘Optimizing’ each page for a specific search helps it turn up in search results, and each page acts as its own on-line ad, drawing customers interested in that specific product.

Most keyword choices business owner make for their website are dead wrong! Many business owners either aren’t aware of keywords, or they ignore keywords and search- ability when they create their pages.

Businesses think they need to advertise who they are instead of what they do. The fact is most local customers are searching for what you do and that should be the focus of your keywords.

When people DO use keywords, they often select the broadest terms imaginable, in hopes of getting more traffic to their web site.

The opposite is true; picking keywords that are too broad means facing unbeatable competition and guarantees the page will be hard to find.

Are you being found when customers are ready to buy? Who is the more motivated buyer? The one who is browsing for ‘fencing contractor’ (with 70 million competing web sites), or ‘fix my broken gate in <your town>’?

The first is doing broad research, maybe thinking about a project down the road, but the second has an immediate, specific need and their credit card is in their hand. Which customer do you want to attract?

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