If you have a website, you’ve probably been briefed on things like click through ratio and conversion rates – but these metrics don’t mean much if your website isn’t getting a steady number of visitors. Without visitors, your website isn’t going to make you money, or be able to make its way to the first page of search engine results.
For many business owners, a lack of website visitors isn’t just frustrating, it’s also difficult for them to pinpoint what the issue is. While there are likely hundreds of factors that could play into poor website performance, most issues fall within just a few very important categories.
You Have the Wrong – or Too Many – Keywords
When it comes to getting a website to rank on search engines, keywords are king for proper SEO. But if you don’t have the right keywords, you might as well not use them at all. The keywords on your site shouldn’t just be relevant to your industry, they should also be things that you know people actually type into their search engine. In order to figure out what keywords to use, you will have to do a little research, but there are a number of free or inexpensive keyword research tools available online these days.
While we’re on the subject of keywords, let’s talk about another issue we commonly see: people using WAY too many keywords.
Back when Google was still new and developing their algorithm, they relied heavily on keywords to understand what websites were about. This led to nearly every business putting keywords in their text at an obnoxious rate, making the content practically unreadable but boosting their SERP rankings. These days, Google has gotten wise to this tactic to try and “hack” the rankings, and will actually penalize you for having too many keywords. Ideal keyword density is just 1-2%; that’s enough for Google to understand what your site is about in order to categorize it properly, and keep your content easy-to-read for visitors.
You Don’t Have a Blog
Websites with blogs receive 55% more traffic than those without, because blogs help add another layer of relevant keywords to your website. Blogs also help by adding additional pages to your website, which also helps boost your SERP rankings. Websites that have more than 300 pages get an estimated 236% more traffic on average compared to those with less than 300 pages.
Your Website is Too Slow
Let’s face it, we are living in an instant-gratification world these days. And if your website doesn’t load fast enough, you’re likely to lose visitors who will instead go to your competitors. Over 40% of consumers say that they give a website just 2 seconds to load. Speeding up your website is an easy task for a website design company, who can utilize a number of different tactics to significantly decrease your load times.
You Aren’t Promoting Your Website
It should go without saying that, if you aren’t promoting your website, people aren’t going to find it, and yet many business owners are guilty of this. They falsely believe that, once a website is live, it does all of the work itself. Instead, promoting with paid advertising is the way to get traffic to your site. Things like pay-per-click ads, social media ads, email marketing, and more, can be quite cost effective and get you the boost in website traffic that you want to see.
Your Website Isn’t Mobile Friendly
Responsive web design used to be an option just a few short years ago, but today, it’s a requirement if you want to be competitive. With over half of all users accessing the internet with just their smartphone, a business can’t afford to avoid catering to this audience. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, it isn’t going to display correctly on mobile devices – which means that users are far more likely to leave before seeing what your business has to offer. In addition, in 2019 Google announced that they were going to give preference to mobile-optimized sites. That means that you can help increase your SERP rankings by just making your website mobile friendly.
Is your website failing to drive the traffic that you’d like to see? Contact us today! Our team can assess your website’s strengths and weaknesses, and help design a plan to boost your traffic and SERP rankings. At Gulf Coast Web, we have over 25 years of experience in managing all types of digital design and marketing campaigns – even for companies outside of our immediate area. Our staff consists of highly-trained digital design advertising professionals who are both passionate about their jobs and excel at what they do. Contact us today to book a consultation with our team. We look forward to outlining exactly how we can help you grow your business with our digital media agency services.