Why Isn’t Anyone Coming to Your Website?

The whole point of having a website is to have visitors come and learn about your product and service and ultimately purchase something. Even if you have excellent content and gorgeous pictures without traffic your website is essentially like an office located on an island. We both know that without traffic coming to your site you can’t sell anything.

Here are five check points to review to make sure you have everything in place to get the most from your website.

Determine if traffic is the problem

The first step is to evaluate whether you’re getting plenty of traffic. If you determine that you are not getting sufficient traffic you will want to evaluate how you intend to drive traffic to your site. You must engage audiences in order to have them stick around. Think of how a store brings people into their place of business. They have a new window display every month, they advertise, they host events and they have excellent customer service and client relations. You need to do the same for a website. How is your presence on social media? Are you using the mighty Facebook machine? What about Twitter and Instagram? You don’t have to do them all, but you have to do something, especially if your audience is your local community. If you are not blogging, get started. Companies that blog just 4 times a month experience twice as many monthly site visits than companies that blog just 2 times per month. If you don’t want to deal with blogging or content marketing then hire a company to do it for you. Ideally your social media engagement should be directly from you since audiences love the transparency of engaging directly with business owners and will buy when they feel connected.

Is your site properly SEO’d?

With SEO you  not only need great copy, but you will need great copy with keywords. This can be tricky. First you want to determine what keyword searches you want to represent and then to study what your competition is doing to get ahead on searches. Then you want to integrate the keywords in your content in a way that sounds conversational. It is ill-advised to write your website copy with only search engines in mind. Even if you do rank, what will happen when people land on your page? They will bounce because everything sounds like a robot. Your content should always be written for your customers first, and then for the Google bots.

Today you might consider SEM (or PPC: Pay Per Click)

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) was once used as an umbrella term to encompass both SEO (search engine optimization) and paid search activities. Over time, the industry has adopted the SEM acronym to refer solely to paid searches.

Gone are the days when people frowned on paid ads on Google searches. Now everyone is competing for the top spot with cold hard cash. This makes sense for saving time. Why spend hours paying someone to write 40 hours of SEO copy when you can hire someone to use your money to use SEM to get you to the top of searches with a marketing plan that works. You’ll still need good content, but with SEM you’re sure to get people to notice you fast. With a great website you can convert those visitors to customers.

Check Your Conversation Stats.

Without conversion traffic won’t matter. Ideally your traffic would convert into paying customers, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes you have a lot of traffic and no conversion to customers.

There are numerous reasons why visitors to your site may not be converting, but here are some of the most common ones:

• You’re not attracting your target market. Before figuring out your content strategy, make sure you define your ideal customer and to attract the kind of customers you know will want your product.
• They are window-shopping. You want to make sure your content is appealing and that your content speaks to the audience you are targeting.
• Your content doesn’t have a call to action. Even the best content needs useful calls to action. Make sure you are telling your readers what to do and when to do it. For instance, creating a sense of urgency for a special deal can help convert visitors to customers.

Your site is not Mobile responsive.

The number of smartphone users far out numbers PC users and is continuously growing, which is why the possibility of reaching the mobile audience is imperative. Mobile marketing allows you to reach your targeted audience anytime, anywhere. You will lose traffic if people can’t engage with your website using their smartphone, so make sure your site is easy to navigate on a smartphone. Also, mobile users are more apt to be ready to buy when they are searching from their phones, and are often ready to contact you with one click from their phones to inquire about your products or services.

Your Cousin built your website. 

You thought it was a great idea to save money having your site built by someone you know. How much money did you save? Good websites don’t come cheap. Make sure your website is clean, crisp, and easy to navigate- even if it means investing the extra capital. You won’t regret it.