You work hard to drive traffic to your site. Steering people toward your site is hard work. You combine search marketing, social media, and email marketing. You might even be paying good money for those visitors.
But once you have them, are you making the most of those visits? Or is your site sending them down one-way, dead-end streets? Are there places where your user flow completely stops?
Sadly, most websites are filled with dead ends.
Here are seven blind alleys that are probably on your site right now. Those hidden corners where you offer your visitor nothing—your "thank you" pages, your "Nothing Found" pages, and even your most-visited marketing pages.
The following seven dead ends are all common, huge missed opportunities...
1. Service Pages
Amazingly, most marketing websites have pages that just stop. No call to action. No internal links. The text just ends, and the visitor is left at a lonely little footer.
Great websites have pages designed specifically to gently guide visitors toward actions, toward next steps.
Detour: Add calls to action at the bottom of your services pages, offering to answer questions, start a conversation, get in touch.
Detour: Add internal links throughout your site, directing visitors to related, high-value pages.
2. Blog Posts
Great bloggers often end posts with questions or a trigger for comments and conversation. Bad bloggers don't even link to themselves.
It's nice to have a helpful blog, but don't forget that you're a marketer. Each post should send a bit of traffic deeper into your site.
Detour: Check your Analytics for older posts that are still getting traffic. Reread the post. Anything else it should link to? Maybe a newer blog post? Add these links into the body text if possible or as "related links" at the bottom of the post.
Detour: Make sure every blog post links to at least one of your marketing pages.
3. Site Search 'No Results' Page
Does your site have a search tool? What do visitors find if they find nothing? A blank page with the two words "no results"? That is another dead end, and it is especially bad, since visitors may be surprised—or frustrated.
Detours: The NN Group has published guidelines for "no results" pages that offer some excellent ways to keep visitors moving:
- "Did you mean...?"
- Popular Categories
- Search Suggestions or Top Searches
Tip: If you're wondering what to include as your top searches, just check the Site Search report in your Google Analytics.
4. E-commerce Checkout 'Thank You' Page
Would you like to create an account? Or checkout as a guest? Everyone makes the same choice: "I'm here to buy this product, not create an account." There is simply no perceived benefit in creating an account. It's simply a speed bump on the road to checkout. In my experience, it can cost an e-commerce site up to 30% of sales.
On the other hand, if you give people what they want first (the product), they may give you what you want (a new account). So offer to let them create an account after the checkout and tell them what's in it for them. "Save your order history and address for faster checkout next time..."
The results? 40% of visitors who buy also create an account.
Detour: Give buyers a chance to create an account after the purchase.
5. Lead Generation 'Thank You' Page
Success on any lead generation site means the visitor will hit the "thank you" page. But then what? A good "thank you" page sets expectations about what happens next, but it doesn't have to be a dead end.
On the Orbit Media website, we added a "Subscribe to our newsletter" option on this "thank you" page. The result? People use it to subscribe almost every day. We added around 250 new subscribers from this page last year:
Detour: Give visitors an option to subscribe!
Detour: Add links to content that will build even more confidence. Share your service philosophy or best-practices with a link to your About section.
6. Newsletter Signup 'Thank You' Page
Here's another "thank you" page that needs to direct some traffic. A visitor who subscribes to a newsletter already likes you a lot. This is the perfect place to offer a social media connection. After giving you an email address, clicking the "like" button is easy cheese.
Detour: Add a social media widget, like a Facebook box, to this page, giving visitors an opportunity to see which of their friends are your fans. They might like that.
7. 'Page Not Found' 404 Page
Even if you've been very careful when changing the URLs of pages, you may still have a few broken links. Even if you don't some people are still landing on a "404 Page Not Found" page. It's inevitable.
There are many examples of cute, clever, and funny 404 pages. Cute or not, don't make it a dead end.
Detour: As with the "no results" page, give visitors a path forward. Add a short list of links to a popular posts or high-value marketing pages.
Tip: Link to the posts with the highest conversion rate for turning visitors into subscribers.
Reroute Traffic, Then Measure
The goal of every marketing site is to keep visitors flowing through paths of success for themselves and their business. Find places where the flow stops, and then add the detours.
Once you've rerouted traffic, add an annotation into Google Analytics so it will be easy to measure the increase in average pages per visit.
Every page on your site should answer this question: "What would I like my visitors to do next?" And the answer shouldn't be "go somewhere else."
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