A Note On Website Traffic
There are a number of reasons your website might not be getting the traffic you want. It might be due to poor design, technical issues, or any other number of factors. While a perfect traffic recipe doesn't exist, there are a few things that could be holding you back. Here are 3 common reasons you might not be getting the traffic you want.
Lack Of Quality Content
If your content isn't engaging enough, the result is for most users is click off your website. The percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page is your "bounce rate". The lower your bounce rate, the better your traffic gets.
Getting users to browse though your website requires getting and maintaining their interest. You can do this by making your content easy to read, using visual elements like pictures and graphs, and choosing interesting topics. You want to ensure your content, design, and the overall experience of visiting your website is enjoyable to visitors, and that it is easy to take desired actions to engage with your website. This will ensure they don't want to click off early, they spend more time and actually engage with your site and business, and heavily reduce bounce rates!
Relying Too Much On Organic Traffic.
While organic traffic is important, relying on it for all your visitors can hold you back. This is especially true while you are still figuring out how to increase your search engine rankings. Sometimes your website needs a bit of a boost in order to get more visits!
Creating social media posts is a great way to direct people towards your website. This includes encouraging viewers of your social media post to visit your website, by providing value they can receive by heading there. When using Pinterest you can directly link your site to each pin which is great, or you can include your website url in the bio of most social media platforms and encourage followers to visit the link in your bio if the option to link directly on posts is not available.
Another great option is paid advertising. You don't have to go out and purchase hundreds of dollars of ads right away, but consider some outside marketing to boost your ratings through Facebook ads or Google ads for instance. If your ads are enticing, this is a great way to get more people to visit your site.
And there are plenty more ways! You can encourage your in-person customers if you run a storefront to visit your site if you put up signs, you could send out printed materials with QR codes to your surrounding areas, etc. Be sure to think through all the ways you can encourage traffic to your site!
Poor User Experience
When your users run into issues navigating through and engaging with your website, it leads to high bounce rates. Like I mentioned previously, this is bad for traffic.
We want to not only make sure the content of our website is engaging, but that users can access that content easily. Too many popups, confusing navigation systems, and cluttered layouts all lead to bad user experience. Make sure each element of each page has a clear purpose and plenty of white-space. Ensure that the process of getting to your forms and products is clear and easy. Include a navigation system that is easy to understand and use. Make sure your website isn't so littered with ads and popups you can't even use it.
Essentially, ensure anything that would affect the user experience to make it confusing, frustrating, or overwhelming is eliminated. These touches will improve your customers experience, leading to lowered bounce rates and higher revisit rates.
Now Start Improving Your Website Traffic!
While there are plenty of other things you can do to start getting more traffic to your website, I hope these few tips helped you identify part of the problem! Being informed about the ways your website can be improved is the first step towards fixing it. Check out my article on the basics of SEO for more help getting organic traffic from search engines.
And if you want to read a few more reasons your traffic may be low so you can look into fixing them, check out our other blog post on this topic, 3 more reasons you aren't getting traffic.
Thanks for reading!
Meagan
