You’ve spent some of your hard-earned money on a new website and you got really excited to launch it. The day came and the website went live. Yet, here you are, still not getting the results you wanted from your website.

When you don’t get results from your new website and when you don’t even get a return on investment (ROI) you’ve probably started questioning if the whole exercise was useless. I’d love to answer that question in this blog post.

So, is your website useless?

If you’ve based your new website on the core principles that you need to have then, chances are, your website isn’t useless – it’s just not being utilised effectively. If you haven’t, I’d really recommend looking at how you can improve your website so that it can really start giving your business results – even if you do it step by step.

Once your website is set up with the fundamentals in place, we can really look at the difference between websites that are being effective and ones that are not. I’ve broken the differences down into three main issues that could be making your website “useless” in your eyes:

1. Are strangers coming to your website?

Just like the good ol’ brick-and-mortar stores that require people to pass by and, ideally, enter the store, so too does a website require people to visit. When it comes to getting people to your website, there are a couple of ways that you can push or pull to your website.

The first is a more traditional form which is advertising or “outbound marketing” as we like to call it. This when you put up radio ads, billboards, or run paid adverts on Google or social media platforms. We love using outbound for short-term results but we know it’s not a sustainable solution over the long-term.

The new and exciting form of attracting people to your website we call “inbound marketing”. This is where you create specific educational content tailored to the exact audience you are wanting to attract.

How is this effective? You’re creating content that is shareable (great for social media), findable in search engines (great for specific problems your clients are having) and receives long-term results (great for ROI).

Lack of content that brings people into your website is generally the fundamental issue when a website is not giving you any results.

2. Am I getting the right visitors?

Once you start getting visitors to your website, you have to ask yourself “Are the people you want as clients coming to your website?” This is a very important, but often overlooked, question often overlooked question when people start creating content on their website.

When creating content, it helps to define the exact audience (client persona) you are wanting to attract. This means that when you are writing content, it shouldn’t be targeted to just anyone. It should be giving the visitor answers to questions they may have at this point in time (more on this shortly).

Generally, when you’re blogging, you want to create content that helps your potential clients find reasons why they are having problems (sometimes they don’t even know they have a problem and you help them realise this). When you’re effectively reaching your audience with targeted content, you’re going to get a lot more high-quality visitors and less poor-quality ones (one way to achieve this is using a long-tail keyword strategy).

3. Am I giving the visitor the content they need at the right time?

Most sales people want to jump to selling as quickly as possible. This worked when everyone didn’t have a world of information at their fingertips. These days, consumers want to know “why” with everything. Why must I buy this? Why must I invest in that? Why? Why? Why?

This is why it’s so important to give users content that makes them understand the value of the products and services you offer. Showing them the value and how it will solve their problems before selling to them will give you much better results than just trying to sell them every product or service you have.

Why? (see what I did there?) Because buyers want to compare quality and work with someone who is an expert before even considering and comparing pricing – sometimes pricing isn’t even a factor when you’ve built enough trust.

Conclusion

You have a website that isn’t working, creating a content strategy is the best way to get people to come to your website and convert them into those precious leads. Continuously refining that content strategy based on who you want as customers will then start getting you high-quality leads that don’t waste your time.

This will take a website from being a useless online property to being the lead-generating tool you hoped for.