How Your Website is Hurting Your Conversion Rate

You’ve spent time building up your B2B digital marketing assets. You’ve started a byline program that’s getting your name in front of your target audience. You’ve created blog posts to capitalize on that awareness. You’ve tied those blogs posts to whitepapers, ebooks, or other downloadable content. You’ve created lead nurturing automation that will help move leads towards becoming customers. But you aren’t converting leads, not at the rates you want to anyway.

What’s happened?

First, let’s assume a few things. For starters, you aren’t just treating digital marketing like a checklist, just ticking some best practice boxes and expecting success.  B2B digital marketing is more nuanced than that. You can do everything “right”, follow all of the best practices and still not see leads coming into your funnel or not moving through the funnel like you want it to.

Most of the time that’s because you are targeting the wrong audience or your messaging isn’t aligned with who your buyers really are. But, if you’ve done that kind of foundational work—identifying who your buyers really are and creating messaging specifically for those buyers—and still aren’t seeing conversions, then there could be something wrong with your website that isn’t giving visitors the conversion opportunities you need to fill your pipeline.

If this sounds like you, we’ve identified three areas you should consider first.

Your site isn’t getting enough traffic.

On average, the best performing websites convert 5 percent of their traffic into a contact. So, considering that, if you do have a site converting between 2 and 5 percent of visitors to leads then conversions may not be your problem. Are enough people getting to your website in the first place? You could have a traffic issue and getting more people to your site would actually be your solve. But how do you do that? With smart SEO strategy.

There are two approaches to increasing traffic, and successfully increasing traffic usually requires you to do both.

Organic: This is the tried and true SEO approach to getting your site found online. Start with a keyword strategy, identifying those keywords that you need to be found for and also those keywords where the search volume is high but the people competing for that keyword is low. That second set of keywords is where you’re able to find some quick wins and increase your traffic. If you already have a keyword strategy in place, be sure your site is healthy with good inbound and outbound links, helpful metadata, and minimal crawl errors (redirects, 404s, etc).

Paid: A solely organic approach when it comes to website visibility doesn’t work anymore. Too many companies are controlling too many algorithms and suppressing organic interest in your site or your social posts. They are now requiring you to pay if you want to be seen. While it can be expensive, that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Because you determine who sees your ad you can target a very specific audience. So, even though a paid approach may not raise your traffic exponentially, you will be getting increased traffic from an audience that is much more likely to convert.

You don’t have enough conversion points.

If you do find that you are getting an acceptable amount of traffic to your site but still aren’t seeing conversions, you might not be giving your visitors enough opportunity.

If you are relying on a “request a demo” button or “Contact Us” is the only form on your site, then we’d argue that this is at least part of your problem. Sure, some potential customers are going to be willing to dive right into a conversation with a salesperson from a contact form or a demo button. But for many more, that’s an approach that’s too aggressive. Sixty-eight percent of B2B customers prefer to research independently online, so ask yourself how you’re helping your buyers conduct their research. Would rather ease into a relationship with your organization by downloading an ebook or infographic or whitepaper, a much less pressure-filled start to your relationship.

So, give them the opportunity to convert with content that is helpful and valuable.  Add mid-page CTAs that send your visitors to a downloadable deliverable. Add hypertext links in blog posts and other pages throughout the site that will send people to landing pages.

Keep in mind, though, that this is a balance. Your conversion points need to come at natural points in the user’s reading or site experience. Your site should be telling a story, and too many conversion points make your site unusable, and the story gets lost.

You’ve built it on the wrong CMS.

If your site isn’t natively connected to your CRM then you are making the process of moving someone from curious to client much harder. Tools like HubSpot that allow you to connect your site’s CMS to your company’s marketing automation tools make it much easier to track user activity on your site and then retarget those visitors who aren’t converting with relevant content, helping them move from initial engagement to final agreement.

And, yes, we know there are tools and apps that integrate with other dedicated CMS platforms that can allow you this kind of visibility. We prefer something with native integrations for peace of mind if nothing else. When you are on an all-in-one platform you lose the worries of an app or tool going out of date or exposing a security vulnerability because of a missed upgrade. And if that platform decides to sunset a tool, you will get plenty of notice to make adjustments if needed.

Conversions are and should be the goal of any growth-focused digital marketing program, fueled by your website. When you try for them but don’t see them, it’s frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be hopeless. Assuming you’ve done the foundational work of identifying your buyers and developing messaging that speaks to them, you can easily overcome other challenges preventing your visitors from engaging with the content you worked hard to create.