Pop-up Ads
Everyone hates pop ups, it is disruptive marketing. The purpose a visitor is on your site is to find out an answer or purchase something. They don’t want to be distracted with you trying to get them to sign up for a newsletter or something.
Automatically Playing Multimedia Content When a Page Loads
Picture it, you are in a busy office work and doing some research, you visit a website and all of a sudden an annoying voice and background music starts blaring out your computer speakers. What are you most likely to do? Press back or click the red X on the top right hand side of the screen. If I want to listen to your audio or watch your video, I’ll press play.
Disorienting Animations
If your personas are children then these are great for your website. If not, your persona will not appreciate them.
Generic Stock Photography
Images of people happy and smiling around a table and working? Everyone knows this is not normal therefore they don’t relate to the web content. Stock images can be great but at least make it relate to what the content is about. Remember an image can tell a 1000 words.
Don’t just use contact us
Don’t just use contact us. ST recommends giving the visitor several options to choose from such as email address, telephone and social media accounts. And even top of the funnel content such as whitepapers.
Inarticulate ‘About Us’ Page
“We are marketing leaders for SEO/PPC and provide CRM and CMS software to our customers”. This is a an example of jargon that a company has on the about us section on their website. Ask yourself would you actually say this when someone asks what your business does. Every person visiting your website wants the question answered – what’s in it for me? Does your website answer this?
SEO-Driven Copy
Writing for search engines is both boring and wrong. I reiterate the fact people are looking for answers not a bunch of your keywords stuffed in a page making it hard to read also be aware Google penalises companies for keyword stuffing.
Not Including Social Sharing Buttons on Your Content
People would rather not spend more time having to copy and paste your web URL, logging in to all their social media accounts individually to share your content. Make it easy for visitors to share your content as this can help you increase website visitors. If your content is compelling and useful, people will want to share it. Include social sharing buttons in an easy-to-spot location on your page. Some of the more popular buttons include Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn.
Titles and Content are Mismatched
If the content in your page title doesn’t resemble the content on your site, visitors will bounce. It is better to have a page title that tells you what the content is about, not just for visitors but also for search engines. Great titles are what cause people to click through in their RSS, emails, and search engines to read what you have written.
Your Call-to-Action (CTA) Copy Doesn’t Align With the Offer
For example, if your CTA says ‘download whitepaper about inbound marketing’ I expect to get a whitepaper about inbound marketing not me to give my details to be entered into a prize draw.
Your Internal Linking Isn’t User-Friendly
This refers to having links on your web page that link to other pages on your website. Contextual links are good and are mainly used to help with search marketing however don’t have too many because it annoys anyone who is reading it.
Sliders That Take Forever and Ever to Load
If you have an image slider on your website, make sure the images load quickly. People aren’t going to wait around to see what fancy graphics you have!
Using Flash
If your flash takes a very long time to load or if it really doesn’t serve a useful purpose – don’t use it.
Poor navigation: I Don’t Know What to Do
Your visitors should immediately see what your website does, what the value of it is and what they should do next. If someone is lost on your website, they won’t be sticking around for much longer.
At MarketingMavens these are the number of things that we have come across that we don’t like. If you are wanting to change your website why don’t you contact us to and get an inbound marketing audit.
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