9 Reasons Why No One Buying from Your Website
Updated: Jan 16
Several months ago, Sarabeth and I removed a large block of copy from our homepage. We did it without giving the decision much thought.
Within a few weeks, our leads almost completely dried up. We didn’t immediately suspect causation. After all, freelancing regularly ebbs and flows. Maybe this was just another quiet spell.
But we became more skeptical when the silence continued another few weeks. Finally, we reverted back to the original website copy. Sure enough, leads picked up again and we returned to business as usual.
What to do when leads aren’t converting
When no one is buying from your website, it’s time to take an honest step back.
Conversion optimization is all about iteration and experimentation. It’s impossible to know what will make a meaningful difference on your website until you start testing multiple hypotheses.
There are many factors that can raise or plummet your leads. In this article, I’ll cover nine of the most common reasons no one is buying from your website.
1. There’s simply not enough website traffic
Selling online, to some extent, is a numbers game. No matter how brilliant your product is, most people who arrive on your website will not immediately convert into customers. Your first step toward improving conversions may simply be to increase the number of website visitors you receive each day.
There are dozens of ways to increase your website traffic. Here are a handful of common tactics:
Write SEO blogs to appear at the top of Google search results
Use paid advertising to drive targeted traffic
Post regularly on social media
Guest write for popular blogs
Speak at events, webinars, and conferences
But if you have high traffic and low sales, that’s another issue entirely...
2. You’re receiving the wrong website traffic
If you have traffic but no conversions, you may be attracting the wrong website visitors. Your ideal customers are out there somewhere, they may just not be the same people who are landing on your website.
Open your analytics and go back to the marketing drawing board. Who is your ideal customer? Where do they spend their time online? How do they talk about your products or services? What are their exact problems in relation to your solutions?
Don’t try to answer these questions in your head. The only way to properly get these answers is to listen directly to your customers. Learn to speak their language. Once you understand your solutions through the eyes of your best customers, you can tailor your marketing efforts to meet their specific needs and expectations.
You do this by using what they tell you and how they talk about your product to rework your website copy. Often, using exact customer language on your website results in more powerful and clear copy than you could write on your own.
You can learn more about using customer language to write your website copy in point one of this article.
3. Your website has a poor user experience
Consider the websites you buy from most often. They usually have a simple buying experience, use intuitive and clean design, and use reassuring language to make you feel comfortable pulling out