Five reasons no one’s coming to your website

You’ve set up your website and are ready for customers and clients to come streaming in, but you check your Google Analytics and you haven’t had any visitors for the last week. ARGH! Sound familiar? Look no further than our guide to five common reasons no one’s finding your website.

We’d firstly like to congratulate you if the above describes your experience, 1. because you have a website (and if you don’t but want want, contact us – sorry, shameless plug!) and 2. you’re checking analytics, which is the first step you should take if you want to improve your search presence. Not only does this mean you know exactly where people are coming in to your website, but it also means if people are “bouncing” off a certain page, you can try and work out why.

But what if your analytics say you’re not getting any traffic? We often have clients contacting us to say “people aren’t coming to my website.”

Here are the five most common reasons we find after performing a site audit on their website/brand.

You haven’t adjusted your page titles and meta descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions are the information that shows up in Google when you search for a service, product, brand name or anything else. They’re also the first thing Google looks for when it’s deciding what to index and then rank you for.
Here’s Blue Cactus Digital’ listing:
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OK, so it’s a little bit long to fit in the 160 characters Google allows you to have, but you can see that we’re clearly hoping to rank for “digital marketing in Essex”.

Ensuring your page titles and meta descriptions focus on the keywords you’re hoping to rank for is vital.

You’re targeting the wrong keywords

Which keywords are you targeting on your website? Think about what your customers are likely to be searching for in order to find you. Put yourself in their shoes. Google searches are becoming longer as people want specific search results, so don’t limit your self to a generic term – be specific. Include the location of your business, the colour of the shoes you’re selling, the style of jewellery or anything else that are likely search terms.

Equally, targeting your website on your company name is not a good idea. People will only search for your company or brand name IF THEY ALREADY KNOW YOU. This means they’d probably have had interactions with you in the past or you’ve been recommended by one of their friends.

Performing keyword research is vital to your business and should be one of the first steps you take when trying to discover why no one’s coming to your site.

You don’t have a Google Local Listing

If you don’t have a Google Local listing, get one now! They’re completely free and so easy to set up  and they always show at the top or in the sidebar of a page. Here’s an example:
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Because they show so high up on the page, above websites the chance of your business’s website being seen is much higher if you have one.

You haven’t included keywords throughout the page

Google takes into account how you’re using keywords on pages on your website. As a general rule, you should focus each page on a specific search term, or search term groups, such as “marketing in Essex” “digital marketing in Essex,” “Essex Marketing”. If you take a look around this website, you’ll see pages are targeted on different keyword search terms and the focus for each page appears in the page title, the sub headings and the body copy.

Google reads a page from the top to the bottom, like a human, but first, it’ll read the metadata  -the page title and meta description, then it’ll read the header 1 (H1) text, then header 2 (H2), header 3 (H3), header 4 (H4) and finally the body copy.

If you include the page’s keyword focus in each of those places, Google will understand what you want to rank for. BUT, don’t overuse the search terms – 4-5 times on a page should suffice.

You’re not promoting your website enough

How often are you promoting your website on social media? If you run print ads or give out leaflets, are you promoting your website? If you’re not promoting your website anywhere, how are people going to find your brand?

It’s really important that you include your website’s address in all your company and personal bios to give people the best opportunity to find it.

Blogging is a great way of getting people onto your site without the usual salesy promotion. Find subjects your customers are interested in and write about them, then post on social media. Once a customer or client is on your site, guide them to pages with other links to get them exploring (and hopefully hitting that “contact us” page.

If you want to learn how to address all of these issues, why not come along to one of our SEO courses in Essex? Based in Westcliff-on-Sea, they’re four hour workshops that will help you identify where your website’s going wrong and find out how to make your business more search friendly. Our workshops are priced at just £35 and happen once a month, so get booked!

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