Consumer technology is moving faster than ever. Only four decades ago, a home computer was a luxury. Now, the world is at your fingertips–literally–allowing you to communicate halfway around the world at the touch of your smartphone’s screen.

That means your potential customers can interact with your brand’s online content from anywhere, at any time. It also means your business cannot afford to ignore effective web optimization practices.

1. You Won’t Reach Your Audience

When it comes to websites, audiences move quickly. Even for a website at the top of a search result, users will bounce out in seconds if it does not attract their eyes. But even a superficially appealing website is no guarantee: most users take only about 20 seconds to decide whether or not to make a purchase on a site. If your content isn’t optimized to show up on a search, and then hold your audience’s attention once you’re found, you will not have a chance to leave a positive impression–or any impression–on your potential customer.

2. Customers Will Choose Your Competitors

If you don’t have consistent branding and an optimized approach across every aspect of your web presence, you run the risk of driving business to other brands that operate in your field. For example:  do you own all the web domains relevant to your website? If you don’t, your competitors may snatch them up and direct web traffic to their sites instead.

When companies can ship products nationwide or even worldwide, you’re competing against a much wider field. To make your business the one your potential customers find, you need to implement strategies that enable your web presence to capture as many potential customers as possible.

3. Your Site Won’t Deliver a Positive Customer Experience

In order to communicate your brand’s message effectively, you need to conscientiously design the experience that your customers get whenever they interact with your brand. A website filled with bugs, errors, or just poorly crafted content sends your potential customers away, and they will forever be left with a poor impression of your business.

4. New Business Will Be Hard to Come By

The vast majority of people utilize the internet whenever they need to find a product or service. And when a search pops up, very few people scroll past the first few results of their search. If your website is buried on page ten because your competitors have utilized effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you’re going to struggle to attract new customers, and you will be forever chasing your competitors.

5. You’ll Lose Brand Cohesion

Communicating effectively with your audience means that your customers are receiving the message that you want to send. But that message will get muddled if you are not maintaining consistent branding on every single web platform that your customers may interact with. If your website is clunky or outdated, you risk customers not having a favorable impression of your brand, even if they may have liked what they saw on a social media page. Cultivating a positive brand image means embellishing it consistently across all your online media platforms.

6. There Will Be Damage to Your Brand’s Reputation

In a world connected instantly by social media and the internet, reputation and word of mouth are everything. If your web presence leaves customers with a negative experience, word of that experience will spread quickly. But the converse also holds true: optimizing your web presence will allow positive word of mouth or, in this case, word of smartphone, to spread rapidly.

7. Your Business Will Be Less Profitable

Ultimately, not optimizing your web content for all users regardless of what device they’re using will affect your bottom line. If you are not doing what you can to reach all of the customers you otherwise would be able to, your business will grow slowly, and may even contract if your competitors are out-performing you online.

Blue Zone Marketing full-service digital marketing agency will help you reinvigorate your presence online. We can help you grow your business and leapfrog competitors who are not optimizing their web marketing strategy. Get in touch with Blue Zone Marketing today to position your business on the cutting edge!

‍