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Hopefully as a business owner in the twenty-first century, you realize that gone are the days of the merely obligatory website – just to have a presence.

Your website should be used as a marketing tool and bringing new business in the front door.

Unfortunately, most of the time, that’s not the case. In fact, about 92% of all websites actually prevent your potential customers from engaging with you, causing you to lose business!

Note: Thomas Petty, President of the Bay Area Search Engine Academy is hosting a complimentary webinar, “The 3 Most Common Web Mistakes That Chase Customers Away” During the live webinar, he’ll show participants how to easily spot and diagnose these mistakes on their own website by using his 3-Part Website Test Toolkit. It’s free of charge, and being held on Tuesday, March 10 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve looked at thousands of websites. Websites of every size, shape and color. Some work well, others, well, flop.

But just having a cool or pretty website isn’t enough any more.

It has to be your most valuable marketing tool. By my estimation, about 92% of all websites have at least one major flaw that completely prevents new business from coming in the door.

This is costing you business and dollars.

Top Three Problems With Most Websites Today

Let’s say that the ideal customer is looking for your type of company that provides whatever services you offer. This person is looking because they’re looking for someone with whom they can engage and do business with to solve their specific problem (remember, we’re all in need of solving a problem whenever we do a search on Google or the other search engines).

If your website is like most websites out there, it’s turning away business before your ideal customers even walk in the front door or call you.

Why? It boils down to three fundamental problems that most websites have:

• Poor Client Capture Structure
  

  The common term is a “call-to-action”. If people can’t figure out how to get in touch with you, they won’t, and they’ll go somewhere else.

  How do you want them to reach out to you? Phone call? Sign up for a newsletter? Online free quote? Look at your own website, and look at several pages. Where is your call-to-action? Is it at the top of EVERY page? Or is it buried on a “Contact Us” page?

• Technical Problems 

  I see this more often than not (and I’ll demonstrate a real example on the webinar above!), and most often, the owners of the website are completely unaware of it.

  A friend of mine last year had spent a bunch of time and effort search engine optimizing his website, but a simple bonehead error by his web guy prevented the search engines from seeing any of it. So all his work was invisible and doing nothing for him. Oops.

• Poor (or no) Search Engine Optimization 

  I have clients tell me all the time, “My web guy said he optimized the website already.” But when I look, it’s usually missing most of the common techniques or done so amateurishly that it’s completely ineffective.

  It’s super easy to spot, and usually easy to fix, as we’ll demonstrate in the live webinar.

What about your own website? Is it turning away business too? My bet is that it is. I hope you’ll join us on the free webinar and learn how to simply and quickly diagnose your own website for these common problems.

Click here now to register for the webinar -> http://bit.ly/1B5IJaS

Related article

• 7 Creative Ways to Encourage Others to Link to Your Website (baybusinesshelp.com)