Let’s say your marketing is broken. It sucks. Your current website gets exactly zero visits per day. So you get a slick new website. Guess what? A new website alone ain’t gonna fix your issues. Here are three ways businesses ruin their website’s effectiveness.

Failing to market your marketing

This mistake is simple to make, and it’s also the most common. If no-one knows about your website, guaranteed no one is going to visit. Without attention from visitors, your website’s search rankings tank and it becomes even less likely anyone will contact your business because of the website.

What are you doing to invite visitors? Is your website address prominently displayed in other marketing materials? Are you pursuing a blogging and social media strategy? Have you tried a pay-per-click advertising campaign?

Don’t mistake owning a website for having an online marketing strategy. It’s just one part of a larger puzzle. If the other pieces aren’t there, then you won’t get the full value of any of them.

Not giving away anything for free

Visitors come to your website looking for answers, solutions, and assistance. They really aren’t concerned about how great you are, but how you will help them solve their problem. Give your people what they’re after. For free.

You can be a resource for customers, they’re trusted adviser in your industry. Offer FAQs, whitepaper downloads, shareable blog posts, how-to videos and other helpful content. Consider the car maintenance industry. Valvoline has service centers across the country, but they offer car care tips through their website that may actually help people come in for service less often. Counterproductive? Not at all.

Valvoline’s free articles and motor oil mythbusting make a convincing case for their expertise. I’ll never be a pro, no matter how many car articles I read. But I know where the pros are: at the source of all of those great tips.

You might be tempted to lock your business away behind a “Call Now!” button. Up against a wall like that, visitors are sure to bounce away. (Learn more about interpreting your bounce rate.)

 Fuzzy Geographic Strategy

You want to be the number result in search engines, eh? You’ve got to decide for who, what and most importantly where you want to rank highly.

Including geographic references in your website copy will help your site in easier competitions against other local results. You’ll never compete nationally unless you’re a national brand already. Even a highly specific category like “goose nuisance management” will have thousands of hundreds of websites. Why? Because we live in a big country on a big planet. If you’re just starting out, focus on the local competition first. Try competing on “goose nuisance management Indianapolis” instead.

Wondering why your search ranking is low and your website traffic has flat-lined? Are you sabotaging your own website with an incomplete marketing strategy? Websites are one powerful and essential tool in your marketing mix. But just one. If you’re ignoring the other marketing tools, expect your website to get buried. Don’t be buried.

photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker via photopin cc

More information

Discover other common web design mistakes and how to fix them in our  free white paper “Why People Hate Your Website”