Does your website need to sell better?
Is a DIY Website Service Hurting Your Business?

This article contains some common reasons why a website may not be selling up to its potential.
We’ve seen these issues on all types of websites in virtually every industry but most often on websites hosted by DIY service providers.

What are the real business results from DIY website services?
We’ve all heard them: the do-it-yourself website commercials that sell instant websites and the “Your website in 30 minutes – no IT Guys”. Just choose your template, upload your photos and presto! You are in business!

The sad truth is many business owners don’t know because they are not able to measure the right things – or they are not able to measure at all because this type of report is not offered by the DIY service.
The many businesses we’ve talked with about this topic are not receiving many sales and are disenchanted with their results.

How much time should we invest?
If we are really honest with ourselves, shouldn’t something that is facing the whole world 24/7 and representing our company require more time investment than a typical fast food meal?
Shouldn’t a website be able to actually sell in a compelling and measurable way while serving our business needs?
The answer is yes and yes!

That old saying “you get what you pay for” is especially true when it comes to investment in quality website marketing and content.

After learning the experiences of our customers, here are several reasons why a DIY service could be short-changing your business.

Poor Search Engine Optimization:
Many of these services suffer from poor SEO optimization capability. This means your site isn’t optimized for Google to index it as being relevant to your business topic. This can be a dagger in the wallet for cash-strapped small businesses who can’t afford to go all-in on Google Ad campaigns. A properly optimized SEO site should be bringing in 60% or more of your lead traffic from organic search results.

Some platforms actually inhibit search engines because of the system requirements to serve thousands of websites versus the most important website – yours.

The website loads too slow:
It is not uncommon for these services to load several times slower than a dedicated hosted website. This means many of your potential customers will leave before the site loads. No one wants to wait for a slow website! A good website should load in less than two or three seconds.

A major issue is caused by the self-design software the services employ that adds a lot of extra weight to the code. This is required so that their customers don’t have to learn programming to build their websites.
The result is the equivalent of you trying to run a race with a 50lb bag of weights on your shoulders. You are going to be slow and not competitive in the race!
The extra weight of the code slows down browser rendering for your customer’s which causes a significant loss of sales after they abandon their visits in high percentages.

Another problem is the DIY services have to generate a very high volume of customers to keep such a low cost, and they are all hosted on one platform. They need to pack in as many websites as possible into shared platform resources.
To keep meeting their profit margins, you can bet that your business will always lose out in this math equation.

The designer of the template didn’t know your audience or industry:
The truth is that the designer probably never worked with the industry that your site needs to serve. Without a sound marketing strategy, they would not know what your audience needs at each touch point during their journey to a purchase.

The design is not optimized for conversion:
Conversion optimization is the science of optimizing key design and usability areas to achieve significantly more sales from the same traffic. This is why testing services like Adobe Target and Unbounce exist. They help their clients with testing services that allow them to optimize designs to achieve better sales performance.

The problem is that templates are not usually designed based on high conversion principles. Conversion optimization is a very different science than creative design and is often counter-intuitive to website design approaches.
Quite often the service template designers have just copied an unoptimized industry template and have copied all the flaws that came with it.

We’ve seen as much as a 50% sales increase from the same traffic after a conversion optimization project is completed.
Not only does the site sell more but in turn also saves hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in customer acquisition costs. This allows you to reinvest those dollars into new growth areas within your advertising channels. This will allow businesses to scale bigger and faster than ever before.

The design was not strategically created
If the design was not carefully customized and crafted around your specific audience needs, then customer motivations will likely suffer from low engagement and poor sales results. This means that it may look very nice, but it’s not going to cater to what your audience wants or needs. We’ve seen this issue day-in and day-out over the years.

The Product Value Propositions Are Weak:
You are guaranteed to lose sales if your value propositions are not optimized and compelling enough to develop an emotional attachment. This is the most important trait for online customers to consider using your company to make their purchase or call you with questions.
To compete with your competitors, your product value propositions must either meet or beat your top competitors in at least one area or key trait. As it turns out, a website is just the envelope that product information and value benefits are delivered with. It is the combination of content quality and optimization that is the real engine that drives online sales and will determine if a website will provide a return on investment.

We always tell our customers they know their products and back-office needs best. We know the science behind your customer’s online purchasing behavior and use it to craft compelling content to trigger the emotional actions that generate more sales for your company.

We hope this information has been helpful and enlightening about the many pitfalls our customers have faced. Our company exists to solve these problems and provide optimized marketing services that sell better right out of the gate.

We would be honored if you would consider Ascent Digital for your next advertising or website project.

Contact us today for more information about our services.