Website & Conversion
The Visitors Who Land on Your Site and Just Leave Most people spend a lot of energy making sure their website looks right. Colours, photos, the layout. They get it looking the way they want and call it done. What they don’t realize is that some visitors can’t use their site at all. They land on it, can’t get through it, and leave. You never know they were there. We have accessibility laws that protect people with disabilities in the physical world. Handicap parking spots, grab bars in bathrooms, ramps at building entrances. Those rules exist because everyone deserves to…
People talk constantly about supporting local businesses. What nobody talks about is how unnecessarily difficult local businesses make it easy to actually hand over your money. For the past few weeks, I’ve been looking for a gift. I started with local boutique websites hoping to find something unique, and I kept hitting the same wall. Homepages with almost nothing on them, no way to browse what they actually carried. I’d hop over to Instagram, hoping to see products, only to find a “Happy Easter” graphic and an “It’s Friday!” post. I wanted to give them my money. I just couldn’t…
I am working on a situation right now that reminded me why I keep talking about this stuff. Someone had a website built years ago. She just had it updated by someone new. The newer developer ran into trouble, did not quite know how to fix it, and started going quiet on her. Now her domain is stuck because the person who originally built the site has the login information. We are depending on them to send the right codes and get things moving. It is not their fault. It is just not their priority either. Neither of the two…
Your website reads like a resume. Credentials, history, awards: everything you have accomplished and why you are the best option. But your customer landed on your page with one question. Can this person fix my problem? If your website does not answer that in the first five seconds, she leaves. After all, she has four other tabs open, and nobody has time to dig through a business biography looking for a reason to stay. I see this with non-profits too. Websites written entirely for funders and grant committees, full of impact statistics and organizational history. Meanwhile, the people the organization…
So I’m moving my entire online business to a new platform right now. Website, shop, emails. All of it. And instead of just popping up on the other side as if nothing happened, I figured I’d pull back the curtain. Because if you ever have to do this (and let’s be honest, you probably will at some point), you deserve to know what it actually looks like. Spoiler: it looks like my dining room table covered in sticky notes. The part that actually went well: I used AI to write a Python script that extracted 100 blog posts and 63…
Here’s a question worth 10 minutes of your time today: If you needed to move your website tomorrow, how hard would it be? Not “would you want to”: how hard would it actually be to take everything with you? I’ve been on Kajabi for 6-7 years: an all-in-one platform, convenient, until the recent price increase made me reassess whether they’re actually doing anything spectacular enough to justify what they charge. So I decided to move. That’s when I discovered something I’d never thought to check: I can’t export my site. Over 100 blog posts, and it’s manual copy and paste…
You put an offer out, and it doesn’t quite do what you hoped. It doesn’t crash and burn, it just underperforms. A few people pay attention, someone says, “This looks great,” but the sales don’t match the effort you put into it. And after a while, you start wondering what needs to change. So you go back to the page. You add context, clarify your thinking, and explain the process more carefully, layering in more detail and trying to make the value unmistakable. All good instincts. The problem usually isn’t that people don’t understand what you’re offering. It’s that they…
But did you know it’s usually the second most-visited page on a website? They are usually filled with long stories and big words that do not actually mean anything. You have probably seen them, the ones that use jargon to sound important but leave you feeling more confused than when you started. Let’s be honest: those are just fancy ways of saying nothing. When a prospect clicks that link, they aren’t just looking for your start date, they are looking for a reason to trust you. They want to know: “Are these people experts, and am I safe taking action…
You’ve probably had this thought more than once. If more people saw this, it would work. It feels logical: your stuff is good, your offer makes sense, the business has legs. The only thing missing, it seems, is eyeballs, more traffic, more reach, more people at the door. So you keep trying to get louder. You post again, tweak the headline, and wonder if you should finally try that other platform everyone keeps talking about, even though the idea makes you tired just thinking about it. Here’s the thing that’s easy to miss when you’re focused on getting more people…
Most of December, we were talking about your website. And from your replies, I know a lot of you made small changes that created real movement. So let’s keep going. It’s a new year. If we’re going to spend time on anything, let’s pick the work that actually improves your business. And I need to say this clearly: Social media feels urgent. But it is not the most important thing in your business. Since summer, my posting has been inconsistent at best. And I’ve still been fully booked. To the point that I’ve had to start pushing projects out. What…
Last week, I told you there was another small moment on your site that creates more friction than you would ever expect. It is subtle, familiar, and easy to miss because almost everyone does it without thinking. It is the social media icons sitting in your menu bar. Why You Should Remove Social Icons From Your Website Header Most small business owners add them with the best intentions. It feels friendly, modern, like one more way for people to find you and follow along. But when someone is on your website, something different is happening. They are finally where a…
Unfortunately, your customers won’t email you to say this. There is a moment on your website that almost no one pays attention to, and it is where more sales disappear than anywhere else. It happens right after someone enters their email into your pop-up. The Hidden Friction in Your Checkout Process You offer a small discount to help them take the next step. They type their email because they’re already interested, then hit submit expecting to keep going. Instead, everything slows down because the next thing you ask them to do is leave your site. “Check your inbox for your…
You spent real money on a beautiful website. You picked the perfect fonts, the exact right shade of beige, and a photo of you laughing with a coffee cup. It’s pretty. It’s professional. And it’s doing almost nothing for your business. Your website is a gorgeous, expensive sports car with no engine. It looks the part, but it isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t bringing in clients, it isn’t making you money, and you’re starting to wonder if you just flushed a pile of cash down the drain. Here’s the gut punch: your website is a salesperson, not a brochure. Right…
There’s a spot on your website where people disappear faster than anywhere else. It happens before they scroll, before they click, before they even know what you offer. And yes, this matters all year. But in December, it matters even more. People are rushed. They’re distracted. They’re scanning, not reading. Here’s the part most small business owners never realize: people decide whether to stay or leave based on the very first words they see. And for most websites, those first words don’t actually say anything. You’ve seen these lines everywhere: “Hi, I’m ______.” “Empowerment and healing.” “Your digital growth partner.”…
At 2:00 PM on a Thursday, I got the text. In fact, it was from a client. Someone was hacking her Instagram account, the one with nearly 4,000 followers she’d spent years building. Right then. The hacker had locked her out. Powerless. Watching from the outside as she lost something she had poured her heart into. Here’s the hard truth: When you’re in that moment of panic, there’s very little someone like me can do. I can’t magically stop it. If I’m on a Meta Business Suite I can try to remove your profile to prevent the hacker from taking…
Every week I meet business owners who have no privacy policy, no terms of service, and no idea the law requires either one. Most of them built a beautiful website. Almost none of them checked whether it’s legally covered, because nobody ever told them that part matters too. This isn’t about scaring you into buying something you don’t need. It’s about a handful of pages. They take an afternoon to set up. They can save you a genuinely bad year, if a visitor, a regulator, or a competitor’s lawyer ever comes looking. Do you actually need a privacy policy? Almost…
A stranger lands on your homepage and decides, before she reads a second line, whether she’s in the right place. Confused business messaging is almost always why she leaves. Not the design. Not the load time. The words sitting above everything else on the page decide it. Either they explain your business the way a stranger needs to hear it, or the way you already know it. Most homepage headers aren’t confusing because of bad design. They’re confusing because the person who understands the business best wrote them. That sounds like an advantage. It’s actually the problem. You know the…
Your website looks fine to you. You built it, and you stopped noticing the stock photo years ago. That’s usually the exact moment it’s time to revamp your website, and you’re the last person who’ll spot it. That familiarity is the problem. A new visitor doesn’t get your history with the site. They get one glance, and that glance decides whether they stay or click back to Google. Most business owners wait until sales slow down before they question the website. By then, it’s already been quietly losing people for months. Below are the clearest signs it’s time to revamp…
You’ve been marketing for months, maybe years. Someone finally asks how it’s going, and you open your mouth, then stop. That pause is your sign to track marketing metrics instead of guessing. This is the last stop in our online visibility series, and it lands on the question that actually matters. Is your business growing because of the work you’re doing? Your traffic tells you if people are showing up. Engagement tells you if they’re paying attention once they arrive. Conversion tells you if any of that turns into paying clients. The numbers below live in tools you probably already…
Welcome back to the visibility series. In Part One, we covered the website fundamentals that make people stay once they land on your site. Step two is getting them there in the first place, and that’s what SEO for small business is all about. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Strip away the jargon and it just means helping Google understand what your site is about and who it’s for, so it shows your pages to the right searchers. Done well, SEO for small business does not require an agency retainer or a computer science degree. If you want the…
This is part one of a six-part series on getting your business seen online. Every part covers a different piece of it. Your website comes first, since it’s the one thing all your other marketing eventually points back to. The foundation hasn’t changed Social media brings people in, but your website is where they actually decide whether to trust you. Research out of Carleton University found something striking: people form an opinion about a website in as little as 50 milliseconds. That’s faster than a blink, and long before anyone’s read a single word of your copy. So much rides…
Most SEO mistakes aren’t dramatic. They’re small habits that quietly keep a website from showing up, and nobody notices until traffic’s been flat for months. Here are five worth checking on your own site. Mistake 1: Stuffing keywords everywhere Cramming a keyword into every sentence used to work. It doesn’t anymore. Google’s own spam policies call this out directly. They describe unnatural repetition of the same words and phrases as a real violation, not just bad style. A page written that way sounds awkward to a real reader too, which is usually the first sign something’s off. Use your keyword…
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Strip away the jargon and it just means helping people find your business when they search for what you do. Do it well, and your website shows up when someone types in the exact problem you solve. Skip it, and you’re stuck on page two, where almost nobody scrolls. Start with the words your customers actually use Keyword research just means figuring out what real people type into Google when they’re looking for something you offer. Not what sounds smart to you, what a stranger who needs your service actually searches. Tools like Google’s…
A client told me once that her website felt like a business card nobody picks up. It looked fine. It just wasn’t doing anything. No leads, no sales, just the occasional visitor who clicked around and left. That’s a common story. A lot of business owners either build their own site to save money, or hire a designer to make it look sharp. Both routes tend to miss the same thing. A designer knows colour and layout, but pretty doesn’t make people buy. Words do that job, and most sites are missing three specific ones. Start with the header You’ve…
Nobody thinks about a privacy policy until someone asks for it. A client’s lawyer wants to see it. Your Facebook ad account gets flagged without one. A visitor asks how you use their info, and your site has nothing to point to. I get why this feels like a chore. It sounds like legal stuff, and most of us didn’t start a business to read law. But a privacy policy for your website isn’t optional anymore, even for a small, local business. Most platforms won’t let you run ads or collect leads without one. Here’s the good news: it’s simpler…