Title: Big Mistakes Businesses Make With Their Websites feat. Chris Goldman
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: There’s plenty of other places in your business to make mistakes in, but, you know, your website shouldn’t be one of them. Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.
Today, my guest is Chris Goldman. He is the marketing messaging specialist for bizmarketing.com. We’re going to talk about big mistakes people make with their websites. Chris, you’ve helped at least 43 companies with their marketing messaging, and you’ve seen some mighty big mistakes people make with their websites. After looking at so many different websites, I thought it’d be a great opportunity for you and I to sit down and have a little chat about what are the biggest mistakes we see when people are doing website.
I wanted to start this out by saying, let’s not say what are the big mistakes. When somebody comes to a website, what should they see?
Chris: Oh, this is great. So for example, when I’m doing a quick survey of a business owner’s website, I’m looking for the core things I need to know. A typical customer client coming to your sites can give you eight to twenty two seconds. And if they can’t figure these things out in eight to twenty two seconds, data tells us they’ll leave your site. First of all, they need to know the name of your company, they obviously need to see that.
They also need to know in about five to eight words, what you do for them to help them win the day. They need to understand clearly in your tagline, if you will. Here’s how this company helps me. This is what they do. How And this is how it
Peter: helps they’re gonna solve my problem.
Chris: Right.
Peter: Or Yep.
Chris: Help
Peter: me out. Yeah. You mean no. Wait a minute. I didn’t hear you say anything about how many years we’ve been in business.
Chris: No. They don’t care about that, as a matter of fact. Until they decide to do business with you, they are not going to explore what we call your authority to do what you do. Because today, let’s face it, there’s a bunch of startups that are the best companies in the world. So it no longer is necessarily forward to tell people, hey, we’ve been doing this longer than anybody else.
Most people don’t care. They wanna know if you do it better than other people. They’re also not looking for you to brag about yourself upfront. Companies that do that typically turn customers off. Mhmm.
So, I’m looking for that quick, concise tagline.
Peter: Got it.
Chris: And I’m also looking for a clear call to action so that I know how do I do business with you. I need to see that in maybe two or three steps. Here’s where you start. Here’s what our process looks like. Mhmm.
And then I also want to understand what the benefits are of specifically working with your cuss company Mhmm. Versus working with another company. What makes you different? And I need to be reminded that a problem or the seeking of a solution is the reason I’m at your website. So I may need to be reminded why I can’t.
Got it. Those are my core things I’m looking Okay.
Peter: So now let’s turn the question around. So what are the biggest mistakes you see?
Chris: The one I’ve been seeing a lot lately has to do with business owners who want a unique site. They want it to be completely different. So it’s structured different. It’s laid out different. And what they don’t realize is customers are coming to your site to do business quick.
And when you make them figure out a maze on your website, that just turns them off.
Peter: Like, you look at a site like Amazon, for example. Right? There’s gonna be a logo in the left. There’s going to be a menu either across the top or, if it’s on a mobile device, it’ll be like a little three stripe hamburger menu that you click on and then it it drops it down. So you’re saying people that are like, no, no, no.
We don’t need that kind of website. We want to do something completely different. That’s bad idea.
Chris: Bad idea, because you want to get out of the way of your customer clicking and buying your products or services. So that’s number one, make your website unique only makes your website harder to navigate. Think of it this way. What if you had a car that only had one entry from the rear of the car? Everybody’d come out the car and go, why is that happening?
Why don’t you have two, you know, driver door and a passenger door and Right. Backseat doors. We don’t need to recreate that. Right. We know that works.
And there’s a lot of things on website structure that simply
Peter: Right. Don’t make your website so unique that nobody knows how to use it because our brains have been trained.
Chris: Yeah. We’ve
Peter: been using websites for twenty five years. So what’s next on your list there?
Chris: Second thing, and I’m observing this a lot, and I think it comes from some of the cookie cutter. Don’t mean that derogatory, the quick website builders that you do DIY. And it means that action, the one that says buy here, start now, contact us simply looks like another one of the menu items rather than a button. And I’ve been seeing these popping up more and more and more where the direct call call to action isn’t offset as a button. And I would just encourage you as a business owner to make sure that your direct call to action, and usually sites are going to have two or three of these on their front page, stands out.
It’s easy to see. Usually, we like to stack them under a phone number if a contact phone number is given so it’s easy to see where it’s at. So that’s my second one. And when I don’t see that direct call to action is just one of the menu items. The first thing I ask is, why is that so generic that I don’t want to click on it?
It’s a problem.
Peter: I’ve got one that’s related to that. And I don’t know if this is on your list, but I saw this yesterday. One of our clients was working with this big corporation that put a website together for them, and the contact form was not actually integrated into the website. It was actually hosted through a separate window on the site, so to speak. And because it was not hosted directly on their website, it didn’t render correctly when I clicked on contact us, and the thing was blank for like ten seconds.
And then all of a sudden, a question popped up in this little contact form, and it then, so I clicked on it. It was like, are you a new patient or an existing patient? And then when I clicked on that, it pulled up this massive form that it wanted me and it wanted me to pick a time. It wanted me to pick all this information out. Basically, it wanted me for the contact form, it was basically book an appointment with us now.
No other option.
Chris: Wow. Yeah. So you wanna give people options as well as a direct call to action. And one of the things Pete is referencing here, I’ve seen also with, major websites. I mean, we’re talking about websites people pay tens and tens of thousands of dollars for With forms that pop up that while the website is mobile friendly, the form itself is not.
And so I’m having to move on my phone left to right to even fill it out. And by the time I get done, I’m so frustrated. And business owners, I didn’t have this on my list, but this one maybe should have been top of the list, is make sure your website and every form is mobile friendly because somewhere and there’s debate about this. It’s somewhere between 6080% of every business’s customers are using mobile to access your information. Yeah.
So you wanna make sure it’s all and that includes the forms. Yeah. Here’s another one that I run into. I don’t know how to describe this better than say this. I run into business owners who want a website created for their eyes, not their customers.
They will sweat over the tiniest little things on their website, and it literally doesn’t matter to their customer. So this one leads me to another one that’s adjacent to this one is a mistake that business owners make is they think people are going to come hang out on their website. You need to know people are not going to come hang out on your website. They’re either going to come do business on your website or they’re not.
Peter: So what do you mean by hang out? You mean like, oh, they’re gonna check out our every single blog post, and they’re gonna check out is that is that kind of what you mean by that?
Chris: So if they become a loyal customer, they’re gonna probably be informed and educated through your blog post.
Peter: But Which you’re gonna send to them via email probably.
Chris: Exactly. So when I come to your website, and I’m with an owner all the time, looking at their website, they’ll they’ll talk about, oh, look at this fun little thing this does and look at look at this little motion, all that. And that’s kind of fun if you have a great designer, great coder that can put all that in. And it is fun. We do that, you know, to just add a little pop to it.
But here’s what you gotta remember. Your customer is not gonna come back to your website tomorrow and the next day and the next day unless you are like Amazon. I mean, we all go to Amazon back, but you’ll notice when I go to Amazon, I’m not exploring Amazon’s website. I go to Amazon. I put in a search filter what I’m looking for.
It takes me to the product list. I get my product. I put it in my cart. I check out. And if I can buy now with one swipe, I do that.
So even Amazon that I mean, certainly, they’re the top of the food chain on effective ecommerce. When you’re looking at Amazon, they understand people don’t just say, hey, family. Come gather around. Let’s just go looking around at Amazon’s website. They’re not gonna do that.
So your website has to be functional before it’s cute and creative and all that stuff. Yeah. You just got to be careful of that.
Peter: Yeah, for sure. There’s one thing I do want to jump back to speaking of mobile and speaking of call to action, some of the clients we work with hide their phone number on their website, hide it. It has got to be accessible from the top menu. If you’re on a desktop, it’s got to be on the upper right corner of the page if it’s on desktop. If it’s on mobile, it should actually follow you around and be at the bottom of the website all the time in the footer regardless of what page you’re on.
So you can just click on it and contact. Or
Chris: what we do calling.
Peter: Yeah. One touch calling or what we do is we actually have it split. So you’ve got a call us or, contact, which will open up email or or an appointment form or a you know, just like a contact form. But, anyway, I just don’t get it. You know?
It’s like I pull up a website, they’re like, what do you think? I’m like, well, what’s your phone number? Oh, and where are you located?
Chris: Yeah. Where do you do business primarily?
Peter: Because if they have a generic name, we’re, you know, Smile House Dentistry. Okay. Are you in Lynnwood, Washington? Are you in Miami, Florida?
Chris: Yep.
Peter: You know, you’re just like, wow. These guys are missing out on an opportunity. They and as soon as a local person sees a local address or at least some local reference, they’re gonna go, oh, yeah. I’m in the right place. Otherwise, they might be like, I don’t know.
Chris: I ran into this just this last week with a golf course. I was, invited to go play at a golf course that I’ve never been to before. So I remembered the name, and I just put it in, such and such golf course. And, apparently, there’s about 10 golf courses with exactly the same name. And, you know, we look with different eyes because we’re always setting up digital marketing.
And I’m sitting there looking down and going, okay, three of these things have no location. Just on their Google search, there’s no location. So they really made me work Yeah. To find the right course. And so, yeah, you just wanna watch that.
Make sure people do your phone number. Let me tell you, Pete, why I think one of the reasons people don’t want their phone number on there. They don’t want spam calls. But here’s what you need to
Peter: know. Alright.
Chris: If you don’t put your phone number on, you’re gonna get no calls, and the phone’s not gonna ring. Everybody is dealing with spam, but there are ways to protect it from certain limits of robocalls and things like that. You just need to have somebody who knows what they’re doing, that knows how to set it up and protect you. You’re never gonna get away from all spam calls or robocalls, but you can certainly limit them, more than people think.
Peter: Absolutely. What’s
Chris: next? Okay. So the last one that I wrote down was this one is either too many words or not enough words. I was at a website two weeks ago with a client and they had, I believe, four pictures on their front page and probably about 12 to 15 paragraphs of copy. That’s out of balance.
Peter: Sounds like a magazine article.
Chris: Yeah. Really, I had to read a lot and they were explaining to me that they had stuffed it with language for SEO, the person that built it for them. And I said, you know, what’s interesting is those keywords that we talk about with SEO and things, you can pack those in. So if you have an image on the right side of a block on your website, you’re gonna have maybe 35 to 50 words with that block. You don’t wanna have four paragraphs.
Peter: Right.
Chris: And and here’s the key that I I tell people, look, this is when it comes really handy. Look at it in mobile. Because if I have to swipe down more than once or twice to read the copy with that image, it’s too much copy. Now the other thing that I saw just today actually was a website that had didn’t have near enough words. It literally had the logo, the call to action, a great picture, three services, and I will say had amazing listing of the specific communities that they work in.
But other than that, there was no other copy except for three rotating what do you call it?
Peter: Sliders. Slider.
Chris: Yeah. Sliders for reviews. So that’s not enough copy to compete in getting graduated with Google. So the business owner was complaining that they were no longer on the front page when people Googled their specific line of work. And when I looked at it, I was like, oh, you don’t have enough copy.
You’ve got the opposite problem. Most people do. Mhmm. You have to remember that people still search using words. And so Google still ranks based upon certain words and all.
They’ve gotten really smart Google has about people are trying to stuff SEO content.
Peter: Oh, yeah. They’ve they’ve got that figured out a long time ago. In fact, I recommend if you’re trying to do, you know, optimize for SEO. Yeah. Your homepage needs to be optimized, but it is not the only.
You need to have a whole bunch of content on your website.
Chris: Yep. And so if you don’t have enough words, you’re not gonna compete in the Google rankings.
Peter: Sure.
Chris: But that’s rare. That’s for what I usually see. And let me give you an example about what I do. I work in messaging. Right?
So we have a new designer. Welcome to our new designer. We’re loving working with him already. Marcel. And I sent a wireframe to Marcel with the initial look for a website.
And Marcel, I just started laughing because he goes, there’s too many words. And I just started laughing. He goes, what? And I said, yeah. When you get it, it’s gonna be about 40% overage.
I’m gonna have to cut 40% of the words. Right. I usually write my first draft, then I do my condensed draft. I put my condensed draft in the wireframe. And then while design is taking place, I now begin looking at every word I can cut Mhmm.
To get it down to about 60% of its original. So I had to cut 40% of the words. And that is where your language gets dense and rich. And really means something when people especially again on a mobile device or reading a block that they can understand quickly and they don’t get fatigued. Right.
But I love that Marcel already can just look at that and say, hey, there’s too much copy with this.
Peter: Well, I mean, there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of copy and the amount of time it takes to prepare it.
Chris: It’s an old saying that if you need me to speak for an hour, give me ten minutes, I’m good to go.
Peter: Yep.
Chris: If you need to speak for thirty minutes, give me a week, I’ll be good to go. If you need me to speak for ten minutes, give me a month, and I’ll be ready. Yeah. Because it takes time to get that density. One of the biggest mistakes are people, business owners who they say, I’m gonna design my website.
They begin working on that. What what you need to know is that on average, you’re gonna spend thirty six months creating that website. We see over and over and over the DIY approach to a website, you’ll end up with a website that you’re not happy with, that you’ve dumped a bunch of time into and time is money. And at the end of the day, if you worked with a firm that knows what they’re doing, you’re going to get a lot more for your money. And you’ve developed a relationship that when you need to move quickly for adjustments and adaptations to the market, they’re there helping you win.
Peter: Paul The thing I think about is avoiding mistakes. Let’s help people avoid mistakes. And and even better, it’s not just about avoiding mistakes. It’s actually winning. There’s plenty of other places in your business to make mistakes in, but, know, your website shouldn’t be one of them.
Chris: A couple weeks ago, I had kinda like a two or three appointments back to back to back of business owners that said, would you give me a twenty minute scan of my website? And I went through all of them and said, yeah. Here are the here are the major mistakes you’re making. And that’s really what led to this conversation Yeah. Is they were making mistakes, trying to do it on their own, frustrated, having a tough time.
It’s a big deal to start a business. You know that, Pete. You started a business. Yeah. And we understand that pain.
At some point, it really does pay to invest in your marketing, and we wanna encourage you to do it right. Because if you do it right, good things come.
Peter: Well said. Chris, thanks for your time today. I can’t wait to have another conversation about another marketing topic with you real soon.
Chris: All right. Thanks, Pete.
Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
