Why is no-one visiting my website?

Category: SEO

SEO

2023-11-11T09:26:48-05:00

Why isn't anyone visiting my website?

This a question many people ask themselves all the time. You had spent a lot of money, time and resources into making your website available for anyone interested in your products and services. Now that you are finally ready, nobody is coming to find it. Why is that?

The idea of having a website and becoming a successful company almost instantly is a residue we still have from the dot-com era. The hope at that time was that the online world was a gravy train, that once you'd boarded that train your business was made for life. Many of those businesses that tried to get on board that train pinned their hopes on an illusion that never materialised.

How should I expect my website to perform?

During the dot-com boom many businesses didn't have a website so almost any business starting a website would be at an advantage, even if the website wasn't particularly good. Even now, there are some websites that don't work at all well on a mobile. Thankfully they are few and far between.

The internet today is awash with business websites. It is almost a no-brainer that to compete you have to have a website. Many bricks and mortar business have shut their physical high street stores and now do all their business on-line. So people looking for what they think they want or might need do most of their research using an online browser, rather than tramping around multiple stores.

No matter what it is you offer, whether you have a physical location that people visit or not, most of your prospective customers will be searching for your services on-line. If they find websites offering the same services on page one of the search results they may never find your business if you are on a lower page.

That sets the context but how do you get onto page one when there will be numerous businesses like yours all competing for the same customers?

You need to think about your website in the same way that you would if you have a regular bricks and mortar shop. You wouldn't open a brand new shop or restaurant by just opening your door and sitting down to wait for customers to walk in. You would advertise everywhere you could think of to get your bricks and mortar business off the ground and you should be thinking in the same way about your website.

When you launch your business website you need to put the word out that you are open for business, tell everyone where you are and make some marketing efforts to bring in your new customers. It doesn't matter how good your products and services are, or how affordable you make them unless you make it easy for people to find your website and make a business transaction with you. Do nothing and no-one will know you are even there!

What should you do? The first thing you should have is an excellent website, one that not only looks good, loads fast and functions well but one that is also compliant with Google, Bing and other search engines' requirements.

There are a lot of technical requirements that must be properly set up on a website need to follow in order to create better rankings once search engine bots and other organisations start collecting information from it.

Schemas

Structured Data and Schemas Structured Data, also know as Schemas, need to be implemented on the site to let the search engines, and other services bots, know what each section of your site is about. They are a bit like having an extensive index to a book, helping the reader to get to the right page quickly. The Schemas tell search engines in a pre-defined way what each website page is relating to.

Products, services, reviews, blog articles, events etc all need to have a properly structured data/schemas to assist search engines in their understanding of what your site is about.

Website code.

The code has to be constructed in a way that search engines can easily and quickly collect all the information they need.

Hosting.

The site needs to be on fast hosting in order to load the website quickly, especially on mobile devices and also to give search engines the right information at speed.

Images and photos

Website images need to be optimised and displayed with the right information and format and the main image/photo of each page needs to be available in the headers of the site so when social networks engines try to receive the website's data it will be given to them in the best possible way.

Responsive Design

Every prospective client who may find you online has a smartphone at his or her disposal. Your website needs to be able to compatible with all sizes of devices and present your website in a responsive and optimised way, particularly for mobile which now represents over 50% of all internet browsing. If your customer can't read and understand your products or services they won't respond.

Conclusion

There are such a lot of factors at play here that are important to master in order to build a successful website. Unless you have a huge amount of spare time to master these skills it is unlikely that you can be successful building your own website.

Sadly I have witnessed first hand how some people think they can get to grips with building a site using some tool like Wordpress for example and then offer that as a service to others. They then craft a client's website with very little understanding of the requirements search engines have for sites. I have many times been asked if I can repair broken Wordpress sites because the original web developer has disappeared! I usually tell them why I don't think Wordpress is a good platform to build a website from, unless you have a very skilled Wordpress expert and if you have access to one of those it is very likely going to cost a lot of money to keep the website in good working order. I also offer to build them a new website with a Content Management System that is better and easier to use than Wordpress.

Your website is part of your business and as such it is important that you have some grasp of the basics of keywords and how to optimise a website for them. Also you should take advantage of the blog facility to keep your website updated with fresh content on a regular basis.

What you should know about keywords

Working with your web developer make a list of keywords that you would like to appear on the search engines for. Make sure there are not too many (15 to 20 are usually enough) so you can keep track of them. Check your competition for those keywords, make sure your site has as much content or more as your competition and keep posting every week. Ask your web developer for help doing this as there are specific tools that can gather this information. Unless you are planning on becoming a web developer yourself you probably won't want to invest in them or spend time understanding how to use them.

Check how much traffic your chosen keywords attract every month. Get reports of your site and make comparisons with your competition. All this will give you a better understanding of how your site is performing against your competitors and it may influence your keyword planning.

Should I use an SEO company?

There are many SEO companies around who will make promises to improve your website and also your website's rankings. The problem is knowing which ones to trust with your money.

Their offerings usually consist of:

A report which itemises all the things that are wrong with your current site! I am always very wary of these because sometimes they make claims that something is broken when it demonstrably isn't. I then regard these 'reports' as a template sent out to multiple businesses to scare them into seeking help. Of course most of my clients won't know what the report is all about let alone be able to prove that something isn't broken.
An offer to take over the website (in order to improve the meta data usually). This is awkward for me because if access is granted to the SEO company to download the code, change it and then upload the code again, then I cannot re-publish my version of the site because it will overwrite what the SEO company has done. If I need to make any changes because the client requests them or because some software needs updating then I can't without destroying what the SEO company have done. The best solution is if the SEO company can tell me what they are planning (and sometimes I will agree with their proposals) I can then implement it onto the client's site which allows me to continue maintaining the site.
To build incoming links to boost the website. This can be a double edged sword. For sure the best performing websites in any sphere of activity almost certainly have thousands of links pointing to them. Some businesses spend an inordinate amount of their marketing budget paying for link building and when it works it is hard to compete with these sites, particularly with a new domain. Domains like fine wines improve with age so a domain name that was registered yesterday is regarded by search engines less favourably than a domain registered 10 years ago. The problem with incoming links to your site is that the search engines may regard the links that are being built for you as spammy and penalise your website for it.

Doing your own marketing

My recommendation is to do your own marketing. Build your own incoming links to your site by setting up entries on local directories first.

Make good use of social media sites. Use Facebook, Google Maps, Youtube, Instagram etc. I have one nail bar client who posts images of her customer's nails on Instagram and she was doing that even before I built her website. Once I launched her website I saw it very quickly get onto the first page for many of her keywords. Thats because she already had a big Instagram following and her Instagram account was linked to her website.

USA nails rankings as at 11/11/23

You can clearly see from the following diagram where I launched her website and its meteoric rise onto the first page of Google mobile, represented by the red horizontal line.

A quick climb to the first page!

USA nails on Instagram

What this demonstrates is that it is perfectly possible in some cases to get your website to rank well through your own efforts without spending money with SEO companies, who may in some cases turn out to be a waste of money.

Buying Links

You will probably be bombarded with SEO companies who all promise you that they can increase your ranking and one of the services that they will offer is creating links. This is where you need to be wary of what they are offering and especially of the quality of the links that they are providing.

My advice would be to buy one link from a company who look like they know what they are doing. Any self respecting SEO company will send you a report showing a link to the article they have created. There is no point buying links that have been just been added to a page somewhere with no content. To be worth having there should be an article written of substantial length about a relevant topic to your business and written in a style that you can tell is informative and authoritative. The article should also be hosted on a relevant site, i.e. relevant to your business. Another consideration is does the website concerned look like it is there for the long haul as, if it disappears overnight then you have lost that link and the investment you have put into it.

Expect to pay quite a bit for each article if it is worth having and is hosted on a reputable website.

Spammy links

Cheap links can spell trouble as they can be identified as spammy by search engines and ultimately it is your website that may suffer. If you start to get suspect links then there is a mechanism on Google to disavow a link but you may need help from your web developer to use this facility.