5 Experts on the Website Mistakes Driving Clients Away

Are you struggling to understand why your 🤩 beautiful 🤩 website isn't bringing in clients? 

In this episode, four guests join me to reveal the common website mistakes that are actively costing you business. From confusing navigation to poor calls-to-action, these seemingly small issues create major barriers between you and potential clients who are ready to work with you. You'll discover practical fixes for navigation nightmares, content confusion, and conversion killers. 

Whether you're a solopreneur with a DIY site or a growing business ready for a strategic overhaul, you'll walk away with actionable steps to transform your website from a pretty brochure into a client-generating machine.

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EPISODE 156.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: 

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Join the waitlist for Spring Clean Your Site 2025: https://erinollila.com/opt-in-spring-clean-your-website/

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Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session to get started right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products

Transcript

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Have you ever tried finding information on a government website? You know, if you need to renew your passport driver's license, or maybe you're looking for specific tax information, what happens is you end up clicking through 20 different pages, finding broken links, and maybe even eventually giving up completely, because the path you take from first click to final click is long and winding. If you can understand this type of frustrating experience, well now you know how people feel when they land on a poorly designed website, and if you've given up in the past or you felt frustrated, I bet you don't want people to feel that same way when they land on your website. Last week on Talk Copy to Me, we talked about big picture issues that are affecting your website, but today we're gonna dive into the specific website, mistakes that actually cost you clients. So let's start with something simple, and that's your navigation structure. Think about the last time you went to a place like the Cheesecake Factory, let's say. Have you seen that menu? It is practically a novel or a novella at least. Every time I go to the Cheesecake Factory, I tell myself that I should pick new items off of the menu and just have some variety. After flipping through page after page of possibilities, I always order the same thing, lettuce wraps and banana cream cheesecake. Now my own fault friends, because I know I'm gonna order those things, they're my favorite, but I still put in the effort to try to find something new. However, the feeling of having way too many options is exactly what happens when you have a website navigation that is complete mess, and I see four navigation problems quite consistently. First. Like that menu at the Cheesecake Factory. There are too many menu options in your main site navigation. This is not a place where you should be listing every page on your website, so if you have more than five through seven options, you are already in the danger zone. Next. Unclear labels in your navigation. So solutions, if that's a, a button in your navigation bar, that might make sense to you, but it means absolutely nothing to someone who's visiting your site for the first time. Be clear and precise with your labels. People want consistency here. So if they go to one service provider's website, and let's say they're a photographer. And the about page is says about or about us, and then they go to another, , photographer's website and it says , here's why they're not gonna know What's your about page. The next mistake I see with Site Nav is burying important pages. If your contact page or your pricing information requires three or more clicks to find, most people won't bother looking. And depending on the business that you have, I would then suggest that those pages actually belong in your site Nav. So one click. A huge amount of web traffic is mobile now. So if your menu is unseeable or unusable on a phone, you're losing more than half of your potential clients right off the bat, and that number is likely significantly more than half. But before I jump out of the navigation and structural mistake section, I want to talk about a bigger structural issue at play, but I'm not gonna be the one to do, so. I've actually got a website designer here to explain this to you. Hi, I'm Carolyn from May Pop Creative Studio, and a mistake that I often see on websites is that they act like basic business cards instead of strategic client generating systems that guide visitors exactly where they need to go. And this would be with a clear user journey mapped out before you start building without them. Site visitors are kind of like reading and choose your own adventure book where someone ripped out half the pages. They just show up and then where do they go? What do they click? Nobody knows. They just kinda wander around and eventually they nope. Outta there. Straight to a competitor. And a user journey sounds complicated, but I'm gonna break it down. First things first, you need to get crystal clear on your number one priority. What's the one action that you're dying for people to take on your site? Is it book a call, download your freebie, sign up for your course. And it's totally fine to have multiple actions. It's great even, but you gotta know which one is your ride or die. That primary action should be the shining star in your navigation, and it should be the final destination for all the pathways in your user journey. Got it. Great. Now make a map of every single link on your site. Basically, this is, these are gonna be the pathways through which anyone could flow by clicking a link on any page. So start with any entry page and where any links on that page could go. Eventually, all the pathways are going to be ending at that primary action. So here's an example on my site. I want visitors to eventually fill out my project contact form. So no matter what page they land on and what links they go to, what pages they go to, it'll lead them there eventually. But if somebody gets to that page and they're not ready to contact me, that's where that secondary action comes in. There's a link to my blog or my resources page, and that's the exception to that end all Be All Pathway, because those pages, my blog and my resources page, and in signing up for my email list, which is a secondary pathway to keep in touch and listen any links that go somewhere else on the internet, that's not your website. Those bad boys need to open in a new tab or window. Not only is this good SEO practice because duh, you don't want people leaving your site completely, but it keeps your visitors journey clear and focused. Then you can get into button design and so much more, but we're gonna keep it really straightforward. So creating a user journey map might sound like some fancy UX designer talk, but it's really just about being intentional with how people move and flow through your digital space. When every page has a purpose, every link leads somewhere strategic. It's when your site stops being a pretty brochure and starts becoming your marketing bestie. See, she makes such a great point about user journeys. Take a moment to think about your favorite store. I think you can understand that they have carefully designed the layout to guide you through the space in a specific way. Your website needs that same intentional design. Without it, you're creating dead ends where visitors are hitting a page and having nowhere to go next. You're missing calls to action that clearly tell people what to do, and you're creating confusing paths, and that makes people feel lost instead of guided. But most of all, this means you're losing opportunities to convert visitors at their moment of highest interest. When someone is on your site and they read your services page, let's just say if they're excited about working you, working with you, but there's no clear next step, that's a lost client. Plain and simple. Let's move on to a new section and talk about some of the content and copy mistakes I see on your website, the words that should be converting visitors into clients and how they fail. Sometimes I. The biggest offender I see is an unclear value proposition, and this is marketing. Speak for why someone should choose you instead of choosing someone else. If your homepage does not clearly explain what you do, who you do it for, and why you're the right choice in five seconds or less, you've already lost people. So I'm gonna give you a real example for a second. A few years ago I was working with a client her original headline before we started working together on her DIY site was "empowering your journey to success." Tell me what kind of coach is this? Because it could be literally anything. It could be, , a financial advisor, a spiritual guide, a coach for a women who are sober, curious. It could be a fitness coach, a leadership coach. See where I'm going here? That headline, that value prop that she had said, nothing specific. Now, this is not what we actually changed it to, but what if we updated it to say, "helping women entrepreneurs double their revenue without doubling their workload." Suddenly, you know exactly who she's helping, , what she's doing with that clear benefit right up front,? This has to do with finances. This is for women entrepreneurs but moving on, 'cause I could talk about this all day. Another major content mistake I see is poor organization. Usually this has to do with information overload, which is when people try to cram everything they know, or everything that their clients may potentially need to to hear onto one page. Or poor hierarchy, which is not making it clear on what is most important for the person who's coming and reading that page. Some other mistakes I see are missing key details like pricing or location information., keeping outdated information on your site and that might make your site either look, , outdated or abandoned. There's so much to say about copy. We, we have a ton of episodes that really cover copy specifically, and I wanna make sure I give enough attention to the other types of mistakes that you can make improvements on and introduce you to some incredible guest. So let's move on from here, but you know, if you can take anything away from this section, just remember. People are scanning websites. They're not reading them like books. Same thing's happening with that Cheesecake Factory menu, right? So your content needs to be scannable. You need clear headlines, short paragraphs, visual breaks, and you need to make decisions on what information actually needs to go on the page and how it needs to be presented. So let's talk about conversions now. Because all of the traffic in the world is not gonna help you if your website doesn't convert those visitors to your page into potential clients or customers. This is often where so many small businesses fall flat. They might be great with words, they value prop might be evident, but they're not going in for the conversion. And one of the biggest conversion issues I see is often a poor call to action strategy, but I'm not gonna tell you about that. I actually have two guest experts who are gonna weigh in on this, , to help you understand more about , what's wrong and how to improve on it. Hi, I'm Samantha Mabe from Lemon and the Sea, where I design websites for health and wellness professionals. A mistake I most often see on websites is. Not using your hero or headline section to the best of its ability. Many of my clients will use their business name or a really generic headline that doesn't help them to attract visitors to their site. It doesn't help them with SEO. And then they will use a really long subheading that goes into a lot of detail without saying very much. The other mistake in this section that I see is not including a call to action button. I think most people, I. Think that because they have a button in their main menu that is enough to get people to book an appointment or learn more about working with them, but it's not, we want to include that call to action button multiple places on your website, so right under the headline and subheading. Obviously at the end of the page where we're kind of wrapping everything up, but then anytime you're kind of thinking about where does it make sense for somebody to click to take a next step, we want to reduce the friction of booking an appointment, and we want to make it clear through our copy exactly who we work with and exactly what we do for them. All right. Now, Samantha nailed it with her advice about making the most of your headline and hero section, but let's talk a little bit more about keeping that message clear. Hi, I am Devora Epstein. I'm a web designer and owner at Studio three 11. A mistake I often see on websites is the lack of a clear call to action button. So a good call to action button is something like, book a call, request a quote, get started or join today. So there are two main ways that this can go wrong. So A is offering too many options for visitors to choose from, and B is not providing a clear direction of what they should do next. So for example, if your main goal is to get someone to start working with you, you wanna have a clear button, usually at the end of your navigation menu that says. Book a call or request a quote or just get started. You don't want to clutter up your menu with too many options because that can confuse your visitors and prevent them from taking the action that you want them to take to get started working with you. And remember that consistency is important, so you wanna make sure that this call to action. Button appears in a few places across your website, so that way it's easy for visitors to know exactly what to do next, and then you'll get more potential customers. So best of luck. Such important points about making your message clear and accessible, but beyond what they've shared. Here's a few more lead generation issues, , just worth mentioning. One, making it too hard to contact you. If someone has to fill out a 10 feel form just to ask a simple question or inquire on pricing, they're probably not gonna bother. And. Specifically about forms, if you have complex forms that are asking for way too much information too early, that can reduce your, you know, contact form submission rate significantly. And one of the ways that I see this is asking for too much, private information too quickly. I certainly know that if I was looking to hire someone, even if it was a significant investment, I would not want to include information about my financial status, or I would not want to talk about the type of clientele I had until I was sure that we were a good fit together. And to finish this section, a few other things I notice are missing follow-up systems. So let's say someone does fill out that contact form. Is there a pop-up or information about what comes next or when they can hear from you? If someone joins your email list but they don't get a welcome sequence, you know, any of those type of things, they're gonna forget about you. Or if they remember, they're gonna feel really frustrated by the fact that you didn't communicate well with them. Let's move on to a new section and talk about trust and credibility mistakes. Now you can have a beautiful website. We have great words, but if there are no credibility signals, you're likely not gonna get that conversion. You know, in the, in the offline world, there's a lot of ways to gauge if a business is trustworthy. You know, if you walk into a store, is the space clean? Do the employees seem knowledgeable or approachable? Are there other customers shopping there? Do they have a storefront that's beautifully designed with their products? Those are all ways that we can, start to build trust with the stores that we shop in person. But online we often need different trust signals. And if you're missing them though, that can influence exactly how well your future income is gonna be, let's say. First, where's the social proof? If you can't find testimonials, case studies or reviews on someone's site, you're probably not going to believe that those people will deliver what they're promising because you want the proof that they've done it before for other people. Second, hidden contact information can sometimes make people nervous. You know, if I can't find where someone is located, , a contact. Form on their site to ask a question or a phone number or email. It's makes people nervous depending on the type of business that they have. third outdated testimonials., if it's evident that those moments of that case study, let's say, or those testimonials are your site are from 2010, people are gonna wonder what's happened since then. And finally, a lack of transparency is a credibility killer. Today's consumers expect. Openness, , transparency and when you hide information that really does breed suspicion. So if you don't have pricing information on your services pages, if your site is missing policies like shipping policies, return policies, if your process, if your service provider, if your process is not clearly, described that's, that's, those are the transparency issues that often tank conversions. Let's move on a little bit 'cause I wanna talk about presentation. Often people think a beautiful site just covers them for presentation, but pretty sight or not. If you have inconsistent branding throughout your site, that's gonna make it look cobbled together. Similarly poor image quality on your site or using so many generic stock images or blurry photos. Maybe like phone photos, even though obviously in 2025, our phone photos are looking pretty good these days. You get my point here. If the image quality is off, they're gonna wonder what that means for the. Things like typos or other grammatical errors may make you look careless. Now, I reference my perfectionism episode. If you want to know my thoughts on this. There's nothing wrong with having tiny typos. There's nothing wrong with shifting grammar to meet, meet, and match your own editorial tone and voice. You just wanna be consistent with those things. So if you have a couple typos, don't. Don't let that stress you out. That's life. I've had typos in my site. I probably still have typos, and that's after, you know, having a master's degree in writing and hiring a proofreader to read my website copy. It happens, but if it's all over the place, it, it just looks careless. And since we're talking about typos and errors, let's talk about type face for a second. Yes. Font the words on your website. Hi, I'm Alyssa Downey. I own Amped Designs. I design strategic and beautiful websites and brands. And a design mistake that I often see on websites is text that is illegible. When you work with a great copywriter like Erin, you want people to be able to read the text, right? And One design issue that makes text illegible is placing text on top of photos. So sometimes this can work, but it really has to be the perfect photo. More often than not, the photo will be too busy and it will compete with the text. It will be too dark in some areas and too light in other areas, and the text will just be too hard to read. So the solution is to place a colored box behind the text, on top of the photo, or just avoid putting text on top of photos all together. Find another solution. Another illegible text issue is text that is simply too small, or the color of the text is too similar to the background color behind it. We cannot assume that everyone who visits your website has impeccable eyesight. It is really important to make sure there's enough contrast between the text and its background so that people can read the wonderful words that you have worked so hard at writing. Such a good point. It's important to remember that people do business with individuals or businesses that they know, like, and trust. So your website can be pretty, but it needs to be consistent and well put together so that you can build the trust from the first impression. All right, let's move on and talk about technical and user experience. Because even the most beautiful well written website will fail if it has technical problems. These backend issues may seem minor, but they can create major friction for your website visitors. Speed and performance is always gonna be at the top of this list of things that need to be fixed because most people will abandon a website that takes more than three to five seconds to load. Yet the average small business website can take anywhere from five to eight seconds to load, and that's considered, will throw some air quotes on this word, quick or normal, let's say. And why is that happening? Well, it's because of unoptimized images that are way bigger than they need to be. Too many plugins or scripts or, you know, running in the background of the site. If you're choosing cheap hosting that can't handle traffic spikes or just consistent traffic. You know, the most obvious is the poor mobile responsiveness that's gonna make your site not translate well on phones or iPods, but there's also functionality issues that are really making your site look amateur. One easy one. Broken links that lead to error pages, forms that don't actually submit when you click through and after you fill them out., or like I mentioned before, if you're not getting confirmation pages once a form has completed, maybe it's missing error messages when things go wrong, or if there's a search function to the site that doesn't return relevant results., these technical issues. They cause people to feel frustrated. And when faced with friction, most people, most of the visitors to your website will not actively try to push through the issue. They're just gonna leave and they will find a , competitor of yours whose site does work properly, but. Most of these technical issues are relatively easy to fix and often without needing to hire a developer for your site, though you could do that as well. If you look at tools like, , Google's Page Speed Insights or GT Metrics, they can help you identify the problems,, that you may be experiencing and hosting companies, for example, even have optimization services as part of their packages that you could choose. All right. We've covered a lot of ground today from navigation problems to technical issues and everything in between, and you might be feeling overwhelmed and wondering where to begin. Well, the key here is to distinguish between quick wins and strategic fixes. Quick wins are simple things you can do this week. Small changes can make meaningful differences right away, but strategic fixes on the other hand take a little bit more time. That being said, I also think that they create more lasting results. The most successful website transformations are gonna combine both approaches, quick wins, to stop issues that are immediate and obvious and strategic fixes to create a site that is truly working for your business. Next week we'll go deeper into the difference between quick fixes and strategic updates, what you need to know to figure out where you fall and what you should invest in at this time. See you next week and we'll keep talking. Copy.