Marketing through a website: The more traffic, the more potential customers …
Attracting visitors to your website is the base of your marketing.
9 reasons why your website does not attract visitors.
A website is only effective when it attracts traffic: People who find the website by typing specific words into their search engine (like Google).
So how do you get people (traffic) to your website?
There are many books written about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So there are several ways to go about this, but in the end it is also dependent on experience and a bit of art thrown in the mix.
There are many possible reasons why people who could become your customers do not find your website:
1. Many images, and often really big ones too, on your website pages and hardly any text. To give google and other search engines real, clear information about where your site is about, they need text. If there is not enough text, the engines do not know enough about your company and website. If this is the case, your site will not be flagged for the correct content and therefore the search engines will not send people to you who are searching for your products and services.
3. To get traffic to your website, you need to provide a certain amount of information in the titles of all articles you have on your website. The titles and sub titles are used by the search engines as a guide to what your website is about. It is possible that the titles you use in your articles and pages are just not clear enough for the robots.
3. The text on important topics you want people to find your website on, as this is the essential service or product you are offering as your business, is kept too broad. Especially website designers or developers often let copywriters who do not know enough about your business write the texts for your website. This is necessary, as doing it themselves is way too expensive (they often ask 120 to 180 dollars an hour). This is not the fault of the text writers either, they really can not know everything to the required level of detail. So you need to be involved!
4. Almost all older websites that still are used now are too slow to load. Extensive research has been conducted showing how many seconds someone who is interested in your topic, allows to load the website onto their phone or computer website. If it does not happen quickly enough, the potential customer simply closes your website and goes somewhere else. There are many tools available, free or at low cost, to ensure that your website is loaded quickly. These tools can be integrated with tools to check website traffic. As part of our monthly maintenance reporting, we will continuously monitor these parameters and report about this to you. See our maintenance page for more information on this.
Contact us at 09 889 1963 to discuss your requirements!
5. When a website is not designed correctly, it is possible the site is not attractive enough to potential customers. This can cause them to them to click away quickly. Important points here are menus that are not transparent, pages that are being loaded too slowly or something as small as the wrong color combination! The overall ‘feel’ of the website is much more important than you would expect. Also with regard to these factors, research into what people like under which circumstances is available.
6. Keeping a website updated continually with fresh content is very important. Not only do search engines see when your work is done and they will also give your website positive points, it is also important to your customers. They want to see new things, otherwise they will probably not return to your website because they can see information is outdated and they do not trust the information anymore.
7. Insufficient communication about your website in general, outside of the website itself. Examples are newsletters, listings in leaflets or social networks. If not out there, it may also be a reason why there is little traffic to your website.
8. At the beginning, a website needs to get established. This means that the information must be found and digested by the search engines before it can actively be used to send potential customers to your site. This takes time, actually it takes months. Of course, when people search for your specific URL, enter your specific website address, the site is immediately available. So if you email links or hand out material that has you website address on it, people have immediate access. Yet, the more important process of getting your site ranked by the search engines so you get people who don’t know about you to your website usually takes months, depending on your business and location.
9. The last problem that we encounter when looking at how to get traffic to your website is to build links, backlinks and optimize your images in general. These subjects are quite specific and require attention in the longer term. For more information, see the Maintenance and Optimization page of our website.
An important point to consider when you primarily work on a local market is that there are ways to perform a local search engine optimization so that you are found by people in your area. This is often the best way to start. After that you can start to tackle major international companies that are less relevant to the local market. Local SEO will promote and rank your website where it matters most: In the (Google) searches of your local customers.
Do not hesitate to call us for more information on: 09 889 1963