Owning a website can be a very enticing venture. You may have heard of a lot of success stories of bloggers and website owners who earned buckets of gold from website traffic and affiliates. However, creating and maintaining a website is never easy. Think of it as starting a new business. You would need to take out starting funds and dedicate a lot of time before you start gaining revenue. But the cold and harsh truth is that nine out of ten business start-ups are doomed to fail. Similarly, a large majority of websites end up as failures. Below are five reasons why a lot of website-based businesses are unsuccessful.

1. They Underestimate the Difficulty of Setting Up a Website

Many people think that starting a website is easy and inexpensive. (Well, that might be true for the few who are skilled and willing to do a lot of work.) Due to these misconceptions, many of those who are unskilled and inexperienced are attracted to the idea of creating their own money maker. To make things worse, they rush things without proper planning and aren’t willing to fork out money to compensate for their inadequacies by hiring a professional web designer and a SEO services firm.

Simply put, there is not enough commitment, not enough skill, not enough budget—not enough of everything. Soon, they lose their patience and enthusiasm and abandon their website after weeks or months of wasting their time.

2. They Disregard SEO Rules and Design Efficiency

Okay, so let’s say they know a thing or two about making a website and created something with high-quality, researched content, and a beautiful layout. However, even the most visually-appealing and informative website can fail if it has not been properly optimized for search. You wouldn’t gain quality traffic if your readers couldn’t find your website on Google.

If just a glimpse of SEO rules can make you dizzy you should seriously consider getting in contact with a SEO services firm. The earlier you start optimizing your content, the greater the benefits for your website. Quality content needs the right keywords and an effective SEO strategy to improve visibility. Design efficiency also helps attract readers and increasing your website ranking. Search engines will rank your site higher if it has quick loading speed and mobile-friendly design. So don’t forget to invest in website speed optimization.

3. They Don’t Put Enough Effort in Marketing Campaigns

It is crucial that the website gains a constant flow of new traffic. However some websites owners just can’t see the importance of marketing their brands, thinking branding is a waste of time and money.

Imagine this—there are millions of websites on the world wide web, and if your niche is popular, you would surely have lots of competitors. Dozens of those are highly-popular or authoritative sites that would be difficult to catch up to even with effort. If your marketing effort is only composed of writing blog posts and sharing them to your social media, you are headed in the right direction, but are not doing enough.

4. Lax Management

The taste of success can sometimes make people negligent. Let’s say they did an excellent job in creating the website. It has a high Google ranking and a lot of page views. It is generating enough revenue that the owner wouldn’t have to work on it himself. Instead, she can just hire a website manager, a few writers, editors, IT staff, and more. Soon they become negligent in monitoring the site. The quality of its content keeps dropping until it has become a whole mess of penalties that are difficult to fix.

Managing a website is not easy. In fact, it can be more complicated than creating a website. You have to make sure you are constantly on top of searches. However, your competitors are endlessly growing in number and are always thinking of innovative ideas.

5. They fail to follow internet trends

Internet trends constantly change. For example, web design that looks great today can look outdated in before you know it. SEO rules and practices also evolve over time. Just a few years ago Google rolled out their mobile-first search rankings. Now AI is impacting websites in a multiple of ways. Early adopters and SEO services firms are already learning to optimize content for voice search.