Many small companies jump on the ‘let’s-build-a-website’ bandwagon shortly before they launch, and with good reason. Not having a web presence means that you are invisible to the majority of consumers who are looking for a business just like yours. The problem, however, is that just having a website is not enough to generate sales. In fact, building the website is often the easiest part of the e-commerce equation.
In this article, we will share with you some things that you want to know if you hope to get people to visit that beautiful new website of yours.
- Many web designers are rubbish at SEO. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but most of our clients who have had a website made by a designer, comes to us without actually knowing what it is that they have purchased. The best analogy I can give is that paying someone to build a pretty website it is a bit like buying a car for the way it looks on the outside, but ignoring vital components like the engine, electronics, and functionality of the vehicle. You need a website that not only looks good and is effective at converting visitors, but that its on-page SEO is on-point. Talented designers know how to balance beauty and search performance, but few know how to do it well. So before you buy that new web design, wait for the agency to talk about how the build websites to rank well…if they don’t broach the subject, you’re probably dealing with someone who has very little experience with getting their client’s sites to appear for search terms. If you’re reading this, then you found us via online search for a SEO or web design related term, which goes to show that we know what we’re talking about.
- New websites take time to rank. You have to manage expectations for your website and its ability to appear in search engine rankings. Just because you pay someone a few thousand dollars to construct an elegant site about your industry, product, or service, does not mean that Google is going to fall all over you in an effort to raise you to the number one search position. In fact, the reason why those other sites in your industry are on the first page is because they have ticked a number of Google’s boxes for consistent period of time. While Google does not reveal the metrics that uses for ranking websites, they have told us that there are about 200 different criteria that they use to evaluate the worth of a website. So one of the reasons that nobody is visiting your site could be due to one or more of those 200 variables. The job of an online digital marketing agency is to fanatically test, discover, and fix whichever elements might be missing from your site in order to allow it to reach its ranking potential.
- There are non-technical reasons why nobody is visiting your site. Being tied to one geographical location can make it difficult to appear in search results for neighboring towns unless you employ strategies to rank for the adjacent town names as well. For instance, imagine you are a dentist whose website already ranks on the first page for the term ‘Palm Coast dentist’, but you would really like to rank for the term ‘St Augustine dentist’, since you are close to this much larger market. What you would need to do is consider either developing an entirely new website to serve that new market, or employing strategies involving what are known as subdomains or splash pages for that new location. Again, most search problems are fixable if you know what to do and can find a digital marketing agency familiar with the process. Another example of a non-technical reason why a website isn’t getting much traffic might be someone who owns a Christmas ornament business. While Nov-Dec are the big months, they probably will not get much traffic in the middle of June. Factors like seasonality play a large role in how visible some sites are, but there are ways to keep yourself relevant during these seasonal ebbs, such as making videos in writing articles that appeal to a different aspect of your business.
- There are any number of reasons why people are not visiting your website, and in addition to the ones already listed, we could add things like user experience, time for pages to load, site layout, clarity of the message, and more. Some of these factors are aesthetic and others are technical, but in getting new people to visit your site and engage your services, both elements have to be working together like a well oiled machine. We like to think that we are the best in the business at making this happen for our clients, and so, if you have questions about your website and how you can improve its visibility and ability to convert visitors into paying customers, please visit our contact page now.