Improve your website traffic by improving your SEO, optimizing for mobile and reaching out to customers.
Whether you created your business’ website or hired a professional firm, you spent time (and money) bringing it to life. So why isn’t your website getting much traffic?
Follow these pointers to identify and correct some common web traffic problems, boost your web traffic and win the attention of new customers.
Your SEO efforts are halfhearted
Search engine optimization is the first place you should look when you’re not getting customers to visit your website. Take a look at your site and see how it measures up in these areas:
• If your SEO keywords are overly competitive or just don’t match your specific products or services, it won’t attract many customers to your site.
• Searches on Google and Bing are increasingly locally focused. Add the name of your city or neighborhood to your webpages.
• Make sure the writing on your website is searchable by search engines’ web crawlers. For instance, text in a photo file can’t be crawled by Google—same for any content in Flash.
• Websites without fresh blog posts or recent updates often rank lower in search engine results. Be sure to post new, engaging web content that uses your keywords.
Load times are slow—especially for iPhones and Androids.
Ever left a site you really wanted to visit because it took too long to load? Of course you have. Consumers don’t have time to wait for slow websites. In fact, according to Google, nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile website if the pages don’t load within three seconds.
• There are a lot of free web tools that let you test the load time of your website. Test your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Google’s site tester. Google’s site tester will tell you how mobile-friendly your site is and provide a free report on how to fix it.
• Google will rank your site lower in search results if your site doesn’t work well on smartphones and tablets. Lower search ranking means less traffic to your website when customers search for your products or services. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized site, it’s time to make it mobile friendly!
You haven’t invited people to visit your website.
You might have the best website in the world, but you won’t get traffic unless you promote it. Search or display ads are one way to pay to promote your site. But we recommend starting by making sure your website and its best, freshest content are visible in a number of places online.
• Claim your business listings on online directories and review sites.
• Add your website to all your social media profiles. Post links to your blog posts, news or new product pages to attract customers to your website.
• Find ways to generate links from other websites to yours. You could try: being quoted as a source in an article (request a link to your site); offering to write a guest post on influential blogs in your industry; or ask partners and likeminded businesses to add a link to your website where appropriate on their site or on social media.