Website not Performing (not getting you any business)?
Posted on 4th December 2024
This is something we hear often when it’seeze Nottingham we has been referred by a client or networking contact; when we speak to them, they’ll tell us that their website doesn’t get them any enquiries through Google, and that’s what they need to talk about.
Fundamental Website Issues
When we check out their website we'll find a single page website, a website that has not been well planned out, that has fundamental technical issues or even ones where the design leave makes you say “What on earth were you thinking?”. So, we recommend that they start again from scratch.
This can happen with website built by other web design companies, but especially when a business has created the new website themselves – the problem is, despite our advice, they tell us that they don’t want to build a new website as they have “spent so much time on the one they have”.
A fundamental part of overall website business performance is in the planning and the way a website is built.
Planning includes aligning the structure of the Pages (Page Map) to the keywords and user experience as well as the way each page is laid out, plus calls to actions etc. The build side of website performance includes the technology that’s used, the speed it loads, the efficiency of the code, the hosting, mobile responsiveness etc.
The problem is that without knowing how website technology and search engine optimisation (SEO) works and how to achieve them, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful in ranking highly on Google or any of the other search engines. This is a key part of website business performance – generating leads, phone calls, enquiries, sign-ups and product sales.
As a result, you could find yourself in the frustrating position of putting a lot of time and effort into your new website and not getting the results you want.
1. Use Google to check your website
If you want to check how Google “sees” your website there are some steps you can take.
The first thing you can do to quickly check how Google sees your site is to use the “site:” operator in Google Search to check what pages Google has indexed and how it has indexed them.
To use the “site:” operator:
first load up your website and then copy the full web address from the address bar.
second, go to https://www.google.co.uk/ and without pressing enter, type in “site:”, then paste your web address on the end. NOW press enter.
Look at the search results that have come up. For your website to perform on Goole, you’ll expect to see multiple pages listed, predominantly one page per product or service, plus contact pages, privacy pages etc, and blog pages.
Typical things we see:
One single result usually means your website is seen as single page by Google. Single page websites were a design trend a few years back, and became an easy way to create a cheaper website, but the bad news is that they don’t perform with Google Search.
A few results, but not as many as you were expecting/some pages are clearly missing usually is a result of Google not indexing ALL of your website, which means that your potential clients are missing out key information from your website when they search.
A few/many results, but the entries have very simple page titles and descriptions like, “Home”, “Services”, “Page1” or “Test Page”. This means that your crucial on-page Metadata has not been correctly filled out. Again, potential clients won’t be seeing key information from your website when they search.
You might also see some pages on your website that you don’t recognise – often test pages or unfinished pages that were left over from the build. These pages will be diluting your website’s keyword density and reduce the perceived quality of your website. Both of these mean Google will lower the ranking of your site.
You’ll find some more helpful tips around investigating your Google landscape and what it looks like in this Google Landscape blog article.
2. Test your Competitor Websites
You might then try the same test with your competitor websites and look at how much more of their website Google is seeing – if you want your website at the top of the Google Rankings, generating more business for you, your site will need to be higher than these competitor websites.
3. Check Google PageSpeed Insights
You can also use another service from Google to test your website’s technical performance: https://pagespeed.web.dev/. The results from this are fairly self explanatory, if a little technical at times.
They are split between mobile and desktop, and each section is scored differently – to be doing well, each of the scores needs to be green (although a perfect score is practically impossible).
4. How to Improve Website Business Performance
Of course, you could take all the tests above and improve your website yourself, but often the self-build platforms don’t allow you to fix some of the issues and platforms like WordPress are too difficult to get to grips with.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were great search engine rankings, it’ll take at least two to three months for you to see any results – and quite a bit longer if there are technical issues with your website such as slow loading speeds. So, you’ll need to be patient and keep an eye on your Google Analytics reports over time to see how things are working out.
Sound like a lot of hard work? it’seeze Nottingham can help!
Website business performance, technical performance, website planning & design and search engine optimisation (SEO) is often best left to the experts when you want the best results whilst focusing on what you do best. it’seeze Nottingham are here to help fix all your website performance issues – and we could even improve your site’s design and functionality at the same time.
Contact us today for a free website health check and a chat about how we can help.
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