Nurturing your leads on a constant basis is one of the many things you can do to keep your business performance steady. If you neglect your traffic’s needs and wants, you might find yourself spending extra time, attention, and money to keep your business stable and running.
Whether you like it or not, website visitors are sensitive to changes. If they like something about your website, content, or products, they’ll keep coming back. If you do something wrong, they might never return.
On the other hand, obsessing over optimization can make you confuse and uncertain when you must take important actions. If you are constantly changing your website, content, opinions, or brand culture, your brand will start losing its identity.
That’s exactly why you must be careful with what you add, remove, and modify whenever you think of some new implementable ideas. In today’s post, I’m sharing some of the most unpleasant updates that may decrease your leads’ quantity in the long term. Try to avoid these changes or do your best to minimize the damage they do to your brand.
1. Changing Your Brand’s Name or Logo
Changing your brand’s name or logo might be one of the reasons why your traffic has recently dropped. Some people fall in love with their favorite brand’s image, hoping that it’ll never change.
The moment you produce significant chances like modifying your brand’s name or logo, some of your followers might start rejecting the new version of your brand.
Think about it – how would Nike supporters feel if the brand’s name would change to Ekin? It would be kind of weird, right? It works the same with small businesses. Once the prospects and customers have gotten used to a name, all their experiences and feelings about the brand are linked to that name.
2. Modifying Your Website’s URL
You might have or want to change your website’s URL due to various reasons. When you plan to do that, you must always take into consideration the impact this action will have on your business performance.
If and when you modify your site’s URL, make sure that you publicly announce this move as soon as you can. Email your list, update your social media followers, and change all the links that point to the URL you’re about to change. I’d advise you change your URL only if it’s absolutely necessary!
3. Updating Your Meta Information Too Frequently
Organic traffic that comes from the search engines is always appreciated. Google gives you the chance to describe your pages’ content and objective through meta information. Your meta titles and meta descriptions are the first elements that show up when people search for your targeted keywords.
If you update your meta information too frequently, Google’s crawlers will have problems indexing your site. Therefore, your rankings might drop and so will your leads’ quantity.
4. Publishing Pages that Don’t Load or Load Slow
People hate to wait for websites to load. In the present moment, Google is prioritizing pages that load faster than others, mostly because your users’ experience should be highly prioritized.
When you add new content, whether its text, pictures, or videos, do it without sabotaging your website’s loading speed. There are countless ways speed up your pages’ load time, so make sure you update your site properly all the time.
5. Adding New Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are intrusive forms of advertising that may instantly turn off your traffic. Whenever you add pop-ups, make sure that they’re not intrusive. This means that they should never be an obstacle for the user. For example, if a website visitor reads an article, he shouldn’t be interrupted by a promotional pop-up.
If your users decide to exit the website, don’t add an annoying pop-up that begs them to stay. It’s unprofessional, and it’ll probably annoy a lot of people.
6. Distributing Irrelevant Content
Lastly, the biggest mistake you can do to decrease your leads’ quantity is to publish poor quality or irrelevant content. Your target audience is frequently visiting your platform because they’re satisfied with what you’re offering.
Change the theme or the quality of your content and your most loyal brand advocates will eventually leave you.
The content you publish on your site and social media networks will define your business potential. If you keep your reputation high, your sales volume will remain steady or will even improve. If your content’s quality decreases, your reputation will drop and so will your revenue performance.
7. Making Grammar and Spelling Mistakes in Your Writing
If you make a public announcement, write a new blog post, or publish something publicly, ensure that your writing is impeccable. Whether you acknowledge it or not, bad grammar and spelling will hurt your reputation and make you look unprofessional in front of your audience.
Jane Huffs, a content professional who offers top-notch yet cheap writing services, suggests that “Nobody will click your links if the sentence that points them to your links misses an important word. Bad writing might even be considered an offending deed, as many people value their time and attention more than anything in the world.”
There are many online tools that provide specific grammar spellchecking solutions. For example, you can use Grammarly to check your grammar as you type on multiple platforms (Browser, Word, on a mobile device.) Make sure you use them – they will always point out some mistakes that you might not even be aware of!
8. Providing Controversial, Irrelevant, or Fake References
Your website visitors, prospects, and customers want to trust you. Believe me, they do. It’s truly your responsibility to provide good quality content, a sense of decency, genuine facts, and a responsible conduit.
If your public declarations, your new content updates, or your case studies contain controversial, irrelevant, or fake references, you’ll lose a lot of fans and potential leads because you’re not proving yourself worthy.
When you link to something, always consume the information carefully until the end. Simulate your traffic’s experience and be objective about the quality of the content. If you link a study, make sure you read it and understand it. Don’t just like it for the sake of proving that you did your research because that would be a lie!
9. Announcing a Cooperation with a Hated Company
If you start cooperating with “hated players”, you will suffer the consequences of their bad reputation in the marketplace. Even though the partnership might be beneficial for both you and the other company, this agreement will generate side-effects which are basically produced by the dissatisfaction of your brand subscribers and customers.
You have two solutions: keep it secret, which I wouldn’t recommend, or simply don’t risk it. If your business is supported by a loyal hand of customers and leads, better keep it sustainable and risk later when your resources can guarantee that you won’t end up bankrupt.
10. Raising the Prices of Your Products and Services Too Much
Pricing strategies are good and bad, depending on the situation. Every brand is testing different price variations to improve their return on investment and make better profits. I get it, that’s your goal too. However, when you run a business, you need to think of what’s important first, and that is your target audience (a.k.a. prospective future customers).
When you started your business, you thought up of a target audience. When you started marketing your first products and made the first sales, you probably took into consideration the characteristics of your target audience and responded accordingly with the right offer and the right price.
As time passed by, you might have forgotten who your core audience is. Raising the prices won’t always guarantee an increase in profits. Quite the opposite, it can trigger negative consequences that’ll hurt your business performance and metrics.
11. New Negative Comments and Testimonials
Another update that’ll decrease your leads’ quantity is the negative feedback received from prospects or customers. Some people express their frustrations and anger on other people or products, blaming for their lack of results.
At other times, it might have been you who has done something wrong. It might be one of your employees who treated a customer badly or one of your new articles that offended a group of individuals.
Regardless of the motive, negative testimonials and feedback will affect your business’ reputation and image. If you neglect them or respond to them impulsively, it’ll hurt you even more.
That is why you should treat every new feedback and testimonial update with much professionalism, care, and humbleness. Try to fix the problems and offer additional valuable solutions to the unhappy customers.
Takeaways
Keeping your traffic satisfied is a matter of trial-and-error. You should consistently analyze your traffic’s behavior using professional analytics software like Hotjar and Google Analytics. Find out what they like, what they dislike, what they share most, and what they appreciate most about your website and brand.
Keep improving your content and your users’ experience by implementing positive changes rather than negative ones. To keep your leads and followers happy, stay sharp, adaptable, and consistent!
