There’s nothing more disheartening than spending time and money creating what you believe is a brilliant new website, only for your visitor figures to be desperately low. The new site is on-trend, looks great and is lightning fast – so why isn’t anyone visiting or sticking around?
The problem could be one or a combination of many different reasons. Here are just a few of the options to explore:
- You have no online presence. The internet is a hugely crowded and competitive place, so just having a website isn’t enough – you need to create pathways and avenues for people to actually find it. One of the best ways to do this is social media, with all channels pointing back to your website. You can also start to get reviews published in other places, do some guest blogging to create links back to the site and do some SEO work to move your site up a few places in Google search results.
- You haven’t done anything new in a while. When was your new website completed? If it was weeks or months and you haven’t updated it with any blogs or new content since, it won’t be considered active enough to pop up in search results. Also, anyone who does visit will soon stop coming back if there isn’t anything new to discover.
- Your site doesn’t meet expectations. It’s worth taking a close look at how the people who do visit your site actually get there. Which avenues are they coming through and what will they reasonably expect to find when they get there? If a social media link promises one thing and either the branding or information on your site says something completely different, users will immediately click away.
- Poor SEO. Search engine optimisation isn’t all about tricks and techniques to get your site listed on the first few pages of Google search results. It starts with ensuring that search engines can properly access, read and index your site. You also need to avoid mistakes such as technical issues, broken links, duplicate content and text wholly contained in images (so that Google can’t read it and recognise the keywords). Why is all this important? Because where your site appears in Google search results directly affects how many people find your website when searching for the service or product you offer. If they can’t find you, they can’t visit.
- If you’ve got a brand spanking new website that has appeared out of nowhere, no one is going to know about it or be searching for it. Unfortunately, unless you can get an early buzz started about your brand and business, it takes time to build up a strong online presence and healthy visitor numbers.
What problems have you encountered when launching a new website, and what did you do to attract visitors? Going a step further, how did you encourage visitors to spend more time on your site? Please feel free to share your thoughts.
