5 Reasons Why Your Site Isn’t Pulling in the Crowds

A business website is your window to the world. It allows internet users to pop into your business at anytime of the day and from anywhere to sample your goods and services. But what happens if your online business isn’t generating enough traffic? Here are a few things to look at.

User-Friendliness

Your website needs to satisfy the needs of your clients. That means you should consider why your clients will visit your website in the first place and then design your website to make it easy for them to find the solutions they want. User-friendly websites load quickly and have links to the most important content on your website. Make sure these links and features are top on the agenda when building your website. Remember that there are over 1.8billion websites online now, many of which are providing competing products. If users find it hard to locate the information they need, they’ll abandon you in a jiffy.

Mobile Compatibility

Research suggests that as much as 60% of all searches are done on mobile. This means users will be accessing your website on mobile devices more often than on desktops. Which also means that if your website isn’t responsive to mobile devices, people will leave your site the moment they visit.

Remember also that as people use mobile devices to check information online, they are careful about using internet data. Your website should therefore not include too much graphics to deplete their data. Use smaller image sizes to make your website load faster. Also, ensure your landing pages provide as much needed information as possible.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation refers to the process of optimising your website content to rank better on search engine results pages (SERPs). Because more and more users are using searches to find websites instead of domain names, using SEO to rank on SERP is critical to achieving the right traffic to your website. While SEO is an evolving area in online content marketing, there are a few simple tips you can employ on your website.

One is to sprinkle the keywords throughout your website so you site will pop up regularly. Employ meta descriptions in your blog posts and also add alt texts in your image descriptions to improve your website’s SERP rank. Adding keywords to the title tags on every web page is another surefire way of improving your chances of being found being found by search engine bots. Remember that SEO is an overnight magic. Work on your site consistently, and be patient.

Social Media

It goes without saying that social media is where the discussion is happening online. Done smartly, you can use social media to direct traffic to the content you create on your website. The first step to achieving this is to create profiles on social media platforms. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the most popular now. If you create content for businesses, you should be active on LinkedIn too.

Creating profiles on these platforms is only the first step to directing traffic to your website, however. To encourage engagement, you have to share the right types of content across your social media channels. Users follow conversations via hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. On Facebook, videos are evoking more user responses than long articles. LinkedIn users expect business-ready content to take your brand seriously. Focus your online content strategy to feature heavily in these regards in order to increase traffic to your website.

Google Resources

Most users find your website through a search engine results page, SERP. With Google accounting for over 75% of all online searches, it absolutely important to focus a significant part of your online strategy on being Google-friendly. One way to make this possible is to invest time and resources in Google’s webmaster tools.

Google Webmaster Tools is a set of tools that help you track your website’s online presence in order to optimise it for search results. The tools include a search console that helps you pop up in search results by suggesting tweaks to tags and other features on your website.

To use Google Webmaster Tools, you have to create a free account using a Gmail address. Then connect your website to that account and make use of the myriad of tweaks and tricks available to ensure your online content gets ranked properly. By registering and claiming your website, you have access to data analytics that helps you optimise your content to increase traffic to your website.