Getting more visitors to your website is crucial when you’re looking to consistently generate leads. However, if your website isn’t optimized, all that increased traffic goes to waste and say goodbye to boosted revenue and conversions. 

When money and business growth are on the line, identifying the areas in which your website isn’t optimized for success is crucial. But websites are intricate, and there’s a lot of room for error. This is why we figured we’d make your job a little bit easier by identifying key areas for you to look into first. 

Read on to discover five telltale signs of a poorly optimized website, as well as some tips for how to put everything back on track. 

1. Low Subscriber Rate

The subscriber rate equals the total number of conversions divided by the total number of website sessions multiplied by 100. If, for example, your website has 100,000 sessions every month that generate 1,000 subscribers, then: 

Your conversion/subscriber rate equals = (1,000/100,000)*100 = 1%

The average subscriber rate varies between industries, but good rates range between 2% and 5%. If your blog is getting a steady stream of traffic but isn’t hitting a desirable conversion rate, that’s definitely a sign it’s not properly optimized.

Some of the things you can do to improve the subscriber rate include:

  • Create an irresistible value proposition for your CTAs
  • Ensure your blog posts focus on topics and areas your audience is genuinely interested in
  • Add a newsletter pop-up form to pages that see the highest traffic

2. Pageviews are Down

Another sign your website isn’t optimized is when you’re seeing your number of page views decrease. A drop in pageviews leads to low subscriber/conversion rates, which could hurt your revenue. It also means that no one is engaging with your site, which is just bad all around. 

There are various causes of a drop in page views, such as a recent search engine algorithm update (like the Google Panda or Penguin update). Other causes include redirects, Google penalties, ranking losses, or incorrect robots.txt rules. 

To remedy a drop in page views, you have to track the number of visits or sessions to pinpoint areas you can tweak throughout the website. In addition, consider other solutions such as:

Veniz Maja Guzman from SEO Hacker recommends monthly site audits. “That means checking on-page factors and technical factors, ensuring that the site will give our leads a good experience, and our blog content is relevant and useful to our readers.” Make sure you tap into your page views each month to identify areas that need some help, as this will help you address issues before they get too big. 

3. Time on Site is Down

The average session duration on your site equals the total time spent across sessions divided by the total number of sessions. For example, if your website gets 20,000 sessions every month and a total session duration of 500 hours or 30,000 minutes, the time spent on the website equals:

30,000/20,000 = 1.5 minutes

The average time spent on a website ranges between two to four minutes, so if your website “dwell time” is below that, it’s underperforming. It means web visitors are engaging less with your content, which could lead to an increase in bounce rates and a significant drop in conversion. 

To grab the visitor attention and nudge them to spend more time on your website, be sure to:

  • Tidy up your web design
  • Optimize web pages with eye-catching images and visual content
  • Add videos to inspire a more interactive experience
  • Improve readability of web pages

4. Broken Links/Pages, Redirects, etc.

We’ve all experienced it at some point: you click on a link, and it leads to a “404 error” or a different page other than what you wanted. Broken links are a sign your website isn’t optimized, and they happen when:

  • You rename or move a web page and forget to change the internal link
  • The source removes the video, article, or PDF you had linked to
  • A third-party moves or changes the URL of the page you had linked to

You can use tools such as Google Search Console, Xenu, or WordPress plugins like Broken Link to audit your website and identify broken links. The best solution to each case will depend on the type and purpose of the link: 

  • If a third party removed the page or resource, consider deleting the link or pointing users to similar content. 
  • If the links are internal, set 301 redirects.
  • In case of 404 errors, be transparent. You could suggest users check your latest article or products if what they are looking for is missing. Alternatively, return them to the home page. 

5. It Isn’t Ranking for Your Keywords

If your website is ranking for the wrong keywords, it won’t generate high-qualified leads. It’s a sign that you’re missing some points when it comes to web and SEO optimization. Either you’re shooting for competitive keywords, your content is thin, or the on-page optimization is poorly done. 

Some of the on-page optimization you can do to rank for the right keyword include:

  • Create enticing, concise, and natural title tags
  • Add unique meta descriptions that entice people to click
  • Add keywords to Alt tags
  • Create an XML sitemap, adding canonical tags to sidestep duplicate content

In addition, go for low competition keywords, update your posts to be at least 2,000 words long, and double down on building backlinks. Longform content provides more opportunities for you to get in-depth on a topic and include more keywords to applicable content. And by building backlinks you’re able to absorb the SEO juice of high-quality sites which will help increase your rankings online. 

Don’t let an unoptimized website go unnoticed. Tap into these five areas to see if your site could use any improvements. Your lead generation and revenue efforts depend on it! 

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by Benchmark Team