As an internet marketing agency in Toronto, we see simple mistakes that can drive away customers from client websites. It’s not that we are looking for them, they just seem to jump out at us.

In October 2012, we posted Five website mistakes that drive your customers away. Six months later, we decided to post PartII to illustrate another 5 common web mistakes that will potentially drive away your customers.  So, here is our second 5-point checklist  to help you give your visitors what they really want when they come to your  website.

From our perspective, and we keep our thumbs on the Internet Marketing activities in Toronto, make sure your website isn’t doing the following:

1. Lacking Focus

If your web page lacks focus and not written around a single topic or keyword, the inevitable result is a high bounce rate. Your page title should contain your keyword and should be expanded on in the page content.

When writing your content use synonyms for your main keyword. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. These keywords support your main keyword, keep you on topic and show the search engines what your page is about. They also help you avoid keyword stuffing.

2. Using Elaborate or Distracting Designs

You want your website to look professional and attractive but excessive design elements tend to draw the attention of your reader away from your content which can hurt your Internet Marketing - Toronto companies take note.

Use a white background for most content and choose a subtle background color for your page that frames the content and naturally directs the eye. Graphics are great but shouldn’t detract from the page but enhance it. And avoid any photos that take forever to download.

3. Sporting Confusing Site Navigation

We mentioned this before, but it doesn’t hurt to mention again. Site architecture is a hot Internet Marketing topic in Toronto. Consider these guidelines to help build a website that has great usability.

In your blog, use categories to achieve this result. Site categories should be a broad keyword and the articles within the category should contain long tail keywords related to the name of the category.

For example, a car dealership could have categories for Trucks, Vans, Sedans and Sport Cars. Posts within these categories would contain content about specific models within the category.

Similarly, with page navigation you might have Vehicles and then a drop down set of links under this pointing to Trucks, Vans, Sedans and Sport Cars. This allows site visitors to easily and quickly find what they are looking for.

In addition, it’s important to link to related content on your posts and pages. This enhances the user experience by making it easy to find all the options that are available related to their topic of interest.

4. Ignoring the need for mobile optimized pages

Any Internet Marketing agency in Toronto will stress to need to mobile optimized pages. Depending on your business, you may find more than 50% of your site visitors might be viewing your page on a mobile device. However, if your page is difficult to view on any mobile device you’ll loose customers.

Google specifically recommends that websites should be built on a Responsive Design framework. This means that your website is designed so that it can recognize the type of device viewing it and automatically adjust the width of the content.

Mobile pages should have large navigation buttons and tap to call links. The pages need to be optimized to load fast because studies have shown that if a page takes more than 5 seconds to load, most people will give up and go somewhere else.

5. Lacking proper contact information

We agree a contact form is one way to fight spammers, but that doesn’t mean that your company information should be a secret. Local businesses in particular should make sure that the company business, the name, address and phone number is not only in the header and footer on each page - but clearly on the contact page.

Remember, if a customer isn’t comfortable using your website and leaves it’s your loss. Your internet marketing efforts should be about your customer - not about you.

Image: Uhurunetwork

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