Whether you have an existing website or are planning to build a new website, it’s important that you put some thought into it.
According to 2019 small business statistics from G2 Crowd, 83% of business owners feel that having a website will give them a competitive advantage.
I have to agree with these statistics.
As a marketing strategist and implementor my team I get to work closely with a number of coaches so I see the value of having a website that helps to market their business.
Having the right website enhances their business greatly and gives them the marketing platform that they need to capture leads, make sales, and grow their business.
Think of your website as being the home base for all of your marketing efforts.
If you don’t have a website or have one that is working to help you build your business, getting this in place should be your #1 priority.
Let’s go over what your website should be doing for you before we dive into the mistakes that you don’t want to make.
What Your Website Should Be Doing For You
Take a minute and go through this list and carefully consider whether or not your website is doing this for your business.
- Represents your business, engages and educates your ideal clients.
- Educates your visitors as to how you can help solve their biggest pain points with your products and services.
- Collects leads for you. Are you building your email list?
- Converts leads into customers for you. Do you market to your list weekly? Do you have a way for website visitors to contact you via email or pick up the phone and call you?
- Connects your visitors to your social media platforms so they can come and visit you there too.
- Full of educational content that leads your visitors to want to work with you by positioning you as the expert in your niche.
Does your website perform any or all of these important tasks for your business?
I’m sure you can see from this list why it is so important to have a website that has each and every one of these 6 elements incorporated into it. When you do, your website will be helping you to market your business 24/7.
Let’s tackle the most common website mistakes coaches make when building their website so that you don’t make those same mistakes on yours…
9 Common Website Mistakes
Mistake #1: Relying solely on third-party platforms such as social media to function as a website for your business.
Many coaches feel that with all of the marketing and advertising that is available on social media platforms that they don’t really need a website to build their business.
If you’re one of those who are relying on Facebook or any other social media channels such as Instagram to only build your business you are really missing out on collecting leads and making sales.
Why is this so important?
The big problem is that you do not own these platforms and you are at the mercy of them when they make changes to their algorithms or content changes. The people that you gather in your communities on these platforms are there only. You can’t email them and you haven’t collected their email lists so you don’t really own that valuable marketing asset called a lead.
This is why you want to get started building a website and make list building one of the main goals for your website.
Mistake #2: Investing in a website that you really don’t own.
I work with a lot of clients where they come to me and for some reason, they have been working with a web developer who actually owns their website and when they quit working with that person the website goes away.
In my opinion, this is the worst thing that you can do for your business because all of your hard work ends up going away when you part ways with the person that you were working with.
Here are a few other reasons why you don’t want to work with someone who owns all of your website properties.
- You lack control which can add up in added cost time and headaches.
- It is very difficult to make changes because you have to go through them and it could end up taking a lot of extra time.
- It can be very expensive to have to go through them exclusively to make a small change that you could have made yourself.
Here’s an example from a client of mine:
Susan, a business coach had a very successful company and had a really good looking website. However, she was looking around for some new help to develop her website and her marketing further and she went with a big marketing agency.
What ended up happening is that they own her website and all of her marketing collateral. she ended up being unhappy with the performance and wanted to change where she could have more control over the timing of changes and working closely with someone one-on-one which was more of her style.
When Susan parted ways with the marketing agency she was left with nothing and her old website where she had built up all of her SEO juice was gone.
Susan then had to start all over from scratch and losing all of that great SEO juice caused her website traffic to virtually be non-existent.
Make sure that you own your own website it is on your own hosting and you have all the control over all of the passwords and content there in the same could be said for all of your social media platforms your email marketing and list building as well.
Mistake #3: Building a website without a strategy in place.
Having a plan in place where you define your goal, your audience, your content and even how you measure is so important to the success of your website helping you to market your business.
Here’s a list of things that you should take into consideration when building your website:
- Who is your ideal client audience?
- What is the goal or goals of your website
- What kind of functionality do you need for your website
- What kind of customer Journey do you want to provide for your website visitors
A pretty website without a strategy will do nothing to help you build your business.
Mistake #4: Building a website that doesn’t reflect your branding
The bottom line is that one platform doesn’t match the other it confuses your audience.
You may already have your branding in place or an idea of how you would like your branding to look. Everything should be consistent between your online and your offline branding across all platforms.
The other consideration here is that you want to have a clean and simple design and not make it overly complicated. You want to be smart about what colors, fonts, design elements, white space and how you use them all to create your overall design.
This is where having a professional design team that will create a mock-up of your website before getting even started really helps to build a better website for your business.
This step is the most essential part of our website and digital marketing services that we do for our clients.
Mistake #5: Not having any or unclear call to actions
Remember how we talked about what the goals are for your website? You must clearly state what you want your website visitors to do. Believe it or not, people want to be told what action to take.
You should take a look at every single page on your website, and think about where and how you can add a call to action.
If list building is an important goal for your site, then you want to make sure that you have things like forms alert bars pop-up any kind of lead form that you have should be prominent and click Worthy.
If you want people to pick up the phone and call you then you need to put your contact information in a prominent place on your website. Actually, you’re going to want your contact information in a couple of places on every single page of your website.
Mistake #6: Focusing more on the creative aspects than the goals of your website
As I have mentioned before, the main goal of your website should be to collect and convert leads.
You can’t rely on a pretty website to collect and convert leads for you. Your website has an important job to play in helping you to market and build your business. It must present visitors with the right information and give them the next steps. This is how you create an effective and user-friendly experience for your visitors.
You must engineer your content layout and design to support that.
The bottom line is that you want your website to be a lead-generating, customer-converting machine that helps to build your business.
Mistake #7: Your website isn’t properly built for mobile browsing
Did you know that 30% or more of all website traffic these days comes from a mobile phone or a tablet?
The number of mobile browsers is increasing every single year and if you haven’t properly optimized your site, you’re essentially turning customers away.
When you fail to have a mobile responsive site, you drive away customers, you hinder your search engine ranking and pretty much end up looking unprofessional.
Here’s how to know if your website is responsive or needs a little work use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool here’s the link: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Here’s how to test your site:
1. Enter in your URL for your website
2. Click Test
3. Google will rate your website mobile-friendly nice using a color-coded guide
4. Review their list and make a list of changes that you need to make on your website and make those fixes a priority.
I highly recommend doing this test at least 2 times a year to make sure your site is working properly.
Mistake #8: Forgetting to include SEO as part of your strategy
Do you know that there are close to 3.5 billion searches conducted every single day? The odds are pretty good that there is somebody right now searching for your help.
SEO is invaluable.
You need to have an online presence supported by organic search. Customers are searching for your business and you need to make sure that they can find you. Just being on social media or having a website is not enough.
You need to have these SEO basics in place on your website:
A keyword for every single page and blog post on your site.
Add that keyword to your page title
Add that keyword to the page URL.
Include the keywords in your content on the page
include your keyword on your page images.
- Install the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress and use it to help you complete the page description in the focus keyword in there and also use it to help you tweak your page content so that it is search engine friendly.
Besides having the SEO basics in place you need to consider how well your site’s load speed is. Making sure that your website loads quickly not only improves the customer experience it also impresses Google.
A website with pages with a higher page speed gets you ranked higher by Google.
Also note that your website page speed also affects your page rank your bounce rate and your bottom line because all of these affect your user experience which Google put a big emphasis on.
Mistake #9: You built your website and you never touch it
Lots of coaches build websites and never come back and add any content, or update it on a regular basis.
This is a big mistake and a missed opportunity to help you build your business.
Owning a website is not a one-and-done marketing task. Now I’m not saying that you need to revamp your website every single day, but you do need to make it a point to continually add fresh content to it.
You can do this by adding blogs and social content.
The best way is to keep adding new fresh content on a weekly basis it’s not something you need to do every single day but adding a new piece of content to your blog weekly is a good marketing tactic.
Here’s a couple parting thoughts on websites:
Before you start building or revamping your website remember that you should have a good plan in place.
If you feel that you can’t dedicate the time or are unsure about where to start, then you might want to consider hiring a team that specializes in building websites for your particular niche.
When you work with the right team they will know what elements that you need to include in your design and will help guide you quickly to create a website that helps you market your business 24/7.
Remember that creating a lead generating and converting website is the is the #1 foundation you should be focusing on first in your online business.
If it yours isn’t working for you then we suggest setting up a 30 minute digital strategy session to see how we can help you build one that helps you build your coaching practice.
Schedule Your Website Strategy Session Here
