13 Simple Reasons Why Nobody is Visiting Your Website The whole reason why you created a website, was to have people visit it and check out what you’re offering, right? Whether it’s for your brickandmortar or you have a completely digital business, a website is quintessential to your marketing strategy, and a website that converts – that’s priceless. However, chances are you aren’t getting as much web traffic as you would’ve hoped. You see, starting a website is one thing, but ensuring that you have a steady flow of visitors who are constantly interacting, purchasing and just all around being on your website is a completely different ballgame; and it’s pretty dang hard to hit a homerun. Nonetheless, there has to be something that you can do, right? However, just like every problem you’ll ever come across, before you can fix it, we have to get into why it’s a problem in the first place (think how hard it would be to fix a leak if you didn’t know where it was coming from.) So buckle up, it’s time to help you figure out why nobody’s visiting your website! Aesthetics – that fancy word designers like to use Think about the last time you were drawn to a website, or even the last time you liked a website that you visited. What attracted you it? For example, let’s take a look at the Webby Award Winning website for design (yes, there are awards dedicated solely to websites), as chosen by the people:
What do you notice about this website? Do you feel cramped for space? Is it hard to find what you’d like to see? Are the colors overbearing and make it hard for you to read? Does the layout seem unplanned? The answer to all those questions are no. Therefore, four of the reasons why nobody’s visiting your site relate to how it looks .
1. “I’m claustrophobic, and this website makes me feel like I’m choking.” Your website need not look like it’s a competition to see how much information you can fit into the smallest possible space. It’s a given fact that people like websites that are less focused on dishing out huge blocks of text and more centered around images or tastefully broken up paragraphs; these kind of websites do way better. So if your website looks like an essay that might just be what’s turning people off. 2. “If I can’t navigate easily, I shouldn’t be here.” That’s basically what goes through the average consumer's mind when they peruse a website; if your links are hard to understand, or lead your visitors in the wrong places, it might just be what’s preventing people from returning. Make sure your links make sense, and are easily discernible, you might just gain more viewership. 3. “These colors make my eyes hurt!” Not everyone loves that bright pink on neon green or plum on black color combo as much you do. Sure, it might be part of your branding, but you’ve got to choose colors that appeal to wider demographic – and sadly neons or inexplicably dark colors aren’t trendy these days. Luckily, hiring an experienced yet honest design company with competent web developers to design your website would eliminate much of the hassle of finding the right color combo. 4. “Why is this all so unorganized? How does that llama picture relate to plumbing?” Chances are, the people that visit your website aren’t related to you in any way, nor do they particularly care about what effect you were “going for.” All they can relate to is the effect that they see. Therefore, if your website has images that don’t relate to your service, or is just all around not professional looking, people won’t be attracted to visit it! However, is your website aesthetically pleasing, doesn’t fit under any of these criteria and yet you’re still not getting enough traffic? Don’t worry, they’re other reasons why your website isn’t the traffic magnet you thought it would be.
Marketing? How can I do that wrong? The way you advertise your website has a lot to do with the amount of traffic you receive. That might sound like a nobrainer, but stop and really think about it. This obviously means that not all advertising will be effective. Do you know what constitutes effective digital marketing? Check out the following warning signs of a bad digital marketing campaign: 5. You’re advertising on social networks that nobody uses. Sure, it’s like standard that every company has an Instagram, Twitter and Facebook account ( 71% of online adults use Facebook alone ; why wouldn’t you have one?) Pinterest and LinkedIn are also quickly gaining popularity. However, if you’re spending money having your business promoted on social media networks that have less than 5 million users, and expect to rake in a profit on that investment as well as traffic; there’s your smoking gun. 6. You’re using content farms for your blog posts. Okay, everybody loves a deal, and startups don’t have much cash to spend in the earlier stages of their development. However, if you’re heading to content farms to dredge up content from the boulevard of broken writing dreams, you can’t expect your visitors to be pleased with broken English and strangely worded sentences. 7. You don’t even know what niche you’re targeting.
If someone wakes you up in the middle of the night and shouts at you, “Who’s your target market!?” You should be able to respond accurately with a hazy brain; that’s how clear and concise it should be to you. Therefore, if you’ve got a wide net out, trying to catch every visitor that you can, you won’t get very far. Targeted, specific and calculated efforts yield better results; that principle applies to every area of our life, so why not marketing as well? 8. You shoot for all the high competition keywords . This point is closely intertwined with number seven. You should aim to be specific in the keywords that you target. It might not bring you in as much traffic, but you’ll get a lot more specialized traffic. For example, through proper use of a high competition might yield you 1,000 views in a week, but only 10 people actually subscribe to your mailing list. However, specific keywords might get you 100 views per week, yet 50 of those persons subscribe to your mailing list. Even in the marketing world, it’s still quality over quantity. But you might be thinking, “My website design is responsive and tasteful, and my marketing campaign is upto par. Why isn’t my website ranking higher?” You my friend might just be suffering from a Google penalty.
Google regulates the web…and your website too Since Google basically controls their search engine (it’s called Google Search after all,) they reserve the right to “embargo” your website if they feel the need to. This sort of thing is called a Google Penalty, and you could be flagged for a number of reasons. Here are a couple of the most common: 9. “Haven’t I read this somewhere before?” If your site has duplicate content, you’ll be flagged by Google, no questions asked. They have a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. So if your website matches another too closely, Google probably discarded your website in the “Not Important” bin. 10. Your content is chock full of keywords, and little else – Keyword density has a lot to do with how well your website ranks; therefore, if your website is filled to the max with keywords, Google will see it as an attempt to try and unfairly increase your ranking for searches and flag your website. 11. Hidden links – If you have links on your pages that aren’t easily discernible, Google interprets this as suspicious. This applies to links that are the same color or pattern as your background, or unlabeled image maps. Google can flag your page for this. 12. No mobile version (or not a very good one) – We live in the age of the smartphone and tablet, so it’s not surprising that Google has caught on to the fact that users need a website that’s optimized for mobile so that they can navigate it accordingly. Therefore, if you don’t have a mobile version for your site, or you don’t have a decent one, Google could have written you off a long time ago. 13. The agency you hired is unreliable If you hired an agency(or anyone for that matter) to handle your search engine optimization and ranking for keywords, and they promised you amazing results in an insanely short space of time, chances are they violated some of Google's rules (like a few mentioned above) to get you there. Once Google picks up on this, your web page is basically dead. Still unsure about what’s making your website a ghost town? Get a free SEO report here . However, it’s important that you know what can make your website garner organic traffic. We are a Digital Marketing Agency based out of Vancouver Canada and Bellingham WA respectively. We are passionate about helping small-medium sized businesses succeed online by providing best in class online marketing services.
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