There are two very distinct and important sides to web marketing – one of which tends to get overlooked way more routinely than the other. If you were to ask a sample group of 1,000 everyday web business owners what matters most in a web marketing sense, chances are they’re tell you it’s exposure – this being what generates the traffic that heads the way of their site.

Of course to try and operate a business that gets little to no traffic would be a little like running a store with no customers…expensive, pointless and doomed to failure. But while it’s one thing to get a vast army of customers into your store for a look around, what happens if they then leave without buying anything? Or worse still, are so turned-off by it that they leave, never come back and tell their friends not to bother heading over at all?

According to the marketing team at Jenkinson & Associates, the way in which the second half of the marketing process is overlooked by businesses is quite shocking to say the least. The only thing more disheartening that a site with no traffic at all is a site with a ton of traffic and no sales – the reason being that the latter shows there’s clearly something unimpressive with what you’re doing or offering.

Now, not every visit that doesn’t result in a conversion is a waste – it’s not like you yourself buy something every time you head into a shop. But at the same time, a poor conversion rate can kill a business and a fair few rookie errors can kill conversion rates dead – the following examples being best-avoided at all costs:

Mandatory Memberships

Right off the bat, rule number one, two and three when it comes to NOT pushing customers right out of the doors is to never, ever make them sign up for an account or a membership if they don’t want to. Think about it – if you were to head to a store only to find you couldn’t buy anything or even get in the door without handing over a ton of personal data, would you bother? Of course not – chances are you’d be scared off for life. Mandatory memberships cause the kinds of bounce rates that are simply too horrific to risk – the benefits of actually getting folk to sign up just cannot outweigh such losses.

Page Loading Times

Here’s a statistic that might worry a fair few – the overwhelming majority of consumers admit that when a site’s page load times are in excess of three seconds, they won’t bother with it. And even in the case of those that do stick around, every additional second waiting for pages to load equates to a 7% lower chance of finalising the conversion. Yes, it’s tempting to go for a bog-standard $3.99 hosting package, but at the same time this is exactly the kind of corner-cutting that won’t do your conversion rates any good.

No Mobile Optimisation

For online stores and businesses across most industry areas, nothing matters more right now than mobile optimisation. When polled, over 70% of mobile web users stated that they wouldn’t even bother looking past the first page of a site that clearly hasn’t been made to function with smaller-screen mobile devices. Coupled with the fact that more people are now using mobile devices to access the web than desktop machines for the very first time in history, this is a pretty frightening statistic to say the least.

Content Errors

Most consumers don’t consider themselves picky, though nonetheless are the very dictionary definition of the term. It’s all very much subconscious, but these days when a would-be client or customer sees so much as a single spelling mistake or a glaring grammatical error, the business’ reputation takes a tumble…big time. It’s never been more important to have an abundance of content and there is of course a good chance much of it will never get read, but at the same time you simply cannot risk any content errors whatsoever for the sake of your reputation and conversion rates.

Substandard Security

And finally, the way in which some of the world’s biggest businesses like Home Depot and Sony Pictures have recently faced major cyber attacks tells the rest of the world one thing – cutting corners on online security is far from a good idea. And while there’s only so much any business can do for the welfare of its clients, you cannot expect to secure good conversion rates if you don’t make it abundantly clear that your website is a safe place to do business and incorporate the highest level of protection.