You've had a website for several years. The statistics show that your traffic is stable or even growing, and everything looks good on paper. And yet you feel a gap: no real impact on your business, no qualified leads, no requests for quotes, no relevant contacts. Just figures that reassure on the surface, but don't trigger anything concrete.
This feeling of inefficiency is much more common than you might think, particularly for B2B showcase sites. The good news? It doesn't mean that your site is a failure or that you need to start from scratch. It simply indicates a gap between what your site attracts and what you expect from it. Before thinking about a complete overhaul or letting your site lead its own life alongside your business, Pépinia offers some food for thought.
1. Traffic, but not the right visitors
Traffic volume says nothing about relevance. A site visited = a site that works? that's not true.
Visitor numbers measure exposure to an audience, not relevance. Thousands of visitors can arrive on your pages without any of them actually being interested in what you have to offer.
A simple example to understand the problem
Imagine an e-commerce site selling snow tyres. Its incoming visitors are mainly young people without a driving licence, without a car and living in sunny regions. The site may get thousands of hits, but it won't sell anything. Is this nonsense? Well, that's exactly what happens when you measure performance solely in terms of traffic volume, without analysing the results. who visits and why.
So the real question is not «how many people are coming?
- Why do they come?
- With what expectations?
- Are they in my target range?
Indicators to monitor to understand who your visitors are
Types of pages visited
Analyse the distribution of visits. If the majority of traffic is concentrated on :
- General blog posts
- Editorial content unrelated to your offering
- Peripheral pages with a high bounce rate
So your site is visible, but not positioned as an entry point to a purchasing decision.
Input keywords
Use Google Search Console to identify the queries that bring visitors to your site. If these keywords are too broad, generic or off-topic, you are attracting an unqualified audience.
2. A site often visited too early in the purchasing process
Your site may also attract a majority of visitors in the exploratory phase:
- They seek to understand a subject
- They compare approaches
- They get an initial idea
- They are not yet ready to decide.
This is not a problem in itself, but if 100% of your traffic is at this stage, the site gives the impression that it is not making any money. The volume of visits becomes misleading: it masks a gap between visitors' intentions and what your site can trigger.
In B2B, the decision is never made in a single visit
Let's take the example of a prospect who is deciding between several service providers for a project. They visit your site to understand the key features of your services. He leaves again, refines his ideas and consults your competitors. Weeks or months later, they come back to take action (or call you directly). In the meantime, your site has played its part, but if you only measure immediate conversions, you'll conclude that it's useless.
How to identify maturing prospects
The rate of progression
Analyse the relationship between :
- Number of visits
- Engaging actions (clicks to «Expertise» pages, downloads, in-depth reading)
Traffic that never progresses to more engaging content is often traffic that arrives too early in the journey.
Visits versus unique visitors
If you observe visitors who return regularly over a long period, they are probably maturing prospects. They are interested in you, but are not yet ready.
Return to the field
Ask your customers when they sign: have they visited your site beforehand? This will give you a real idea of the role of the website in the sales cycle.
3. When the site reflects the internal customer but not the prospect
The «we know what we're doing» trap: a website is often a very good reflection of how the company sees itself, but much less of how it is understood from the outside. The internal teams know what they do, why they do it and for whom, but the site itself sometimes struggles to make these elements obvious to someone discovering them for the first time.
As a freelance consultant, I often notice jargon or abbreviations - known to everyone in-house - but not always to prospects. You always have to try and read things «outside yourself»: if I wasn't an in-house consultant, would I be able to understand what was being sold?
When someone arrives on your site, they are looking for a quick answer to the question: «Can this site help me in my specific situation? If this answer is not clear within the first 10 seconds, the visitor hesitates and then leaves.
Signals that your message is not being understood
The exit rate on key pages
Examine the exit rate on :
- The home page
- Expertise pages
- Main entry pages
Quick exits at these points often signal a lack of immediate understanding, rather than disinterest.
Feedback from the field
Listen to your sales and customer-facing teams. They will give you key information:
- Features missing from the competition
- Your perceived strengths and weaknesses
- Recurring misunderstandings
Develop your site based on this feedback. (See also How to improve the customer experience internally: five levers)
4. A B2B site is not always used to trigger an action
A website is not always consulted for immediate action: contact by email, request for a quote, etc. Very often, the website is also used as a checkpoint.
We come here for :
- Reassurance
- Confirm a printout
- Validate an intuition born elsewhere (network, word of mouth, recommendation)
The site becomes a «silent validation» and this is particularly true in B2B and common in contexts where commitment is high: institutions, healthcare, strategic support, etc.
Before contacting, recommending or committing to an organisation, we «check out the site». Not to read everything, but to check that what is promised elsewhere holds up here.
For example, we can check that :
- The speech is coherent
- The level of quality is there
- There's nothing to doubt
- If it is up to date and your examples and references are recent...
When this reassuring role is fulfilled, the site acts as an invisible accelerator. It facilitates the final decision. When it is not, the effect is the opposite. A site that is vague, too generic, too marketing-oriented or badly aligned can have a boomerang effect: it creates doubts that will call into question the final decision. The site then becomes a form of silent customer reference: it doesn't trigger the action, but it makes it possible.
In these cases, you might think that your site doesn't «earn anything», but it plays a decisive role: it reassures your prospect or, on the contrary, makes you less credible.
The website as a silent validation of the decision
There are many criteria that your prospects will judge when they visit your site. These range from technical consistency (fast loading time, fluid navigation, impeccable responsive design, absence of bugs, etc.) to editorial consistency (content in line with what is said elsewhere, level of language suited to the target audience, spelling mistakes, etc.).
It is difficult for the uninitiated to check all these criteria, but some can be checked by everyone. For the others, only digital experts will be able to help you identify what might be holding you back.
Before concluding that your site is useless
When a site seems ineffective, the temptation is great to question it as a whole. In the majority of cases, the problem is not the site itself, but the role it is being made to play - often without having clearly defined it.
An effective site is not one that attracts the most visitors, but one that helps the right people, at the right time, to think. Before redoing everything, it is often more useful to take the time to reread what your data already says.