No business wants to have low website traffic. In this article we will discuss how we help businesses increase their website traffic from our Northwest Indiana Valparaiso office. We will cover many areas people might forget about or don't put enough emphasis on when building and maintaining their website.
Having No Website
How can having "no website" help my website traffic? It can't and never will! You need a website to sell to your customers. We hear it all the time that "I have Facebook" or something similar so you don't need a website. Although having social media is great as it allows you a mechanism to talk with your current and future customers the branding of these social media sites is not yours but someone else's. To make your business stand out you need a website. By adding a website, even a single page professionally designed website, you can increase the visibility and branding of your company.
You will notice we mentioned professionally designed. There are many free products out there and if you put in the necessary 20-50+ hours you can get some good results. In the end you will still have a stock site that looks like every other site that is built on that template. In these cases, you are not differentiating your business. You are saying that you are like everyone else.
Analytics
Analytics may not help increase your website directly. What it will do is let you know what is and isn't working on your website. If you know that certain pages are getting more traffic (visitors) than other pages, this can help you properly target your customers. You may think product A is the best product in the world. When you look at your analytics you may find that product B that you least cared about is the one that everyone is looking at. This may be because your website is sending them to this product or there is a true demand for it. Using this information, you can make appropriate adjustments in for business.
Meta Information
Many search engines don't take a lot of weight when it comes to meta information anymore. That doesn't mean this information isn't important. Titles, keywords, and descriptions still should be used, filled in completely and be accurate for each page. Each page should be unique as well.
Beyond Meta Information
If there is meta information what could be beyond meta information? Structured meta data. This information is the new and improved version of the original meta information. With structured meta data you can define in great detail items like addresses, hours, and more in a way that means something to the search engines.
Image Information
With each image on your website you need to define what it is. This not only will help you move closer to 508 accessibilities (people with disabilities) but the search engines will know exactly what the image is. If you put in truly great descriptions, you will also be increasing your search engine optimization (SEO).
Quality Content
Anyone can build a website. It's true! It is no longer that hard to do in today's technological environments. This is both good and bad for web design companies like ours. Yes, it does get people building their own site and we lose customers for those that spend the necessary 30+ hours setting up and then 4-8+ hours per month keeping their website updated. For those that build a free site they soon learn they don't get the results they want because a free site isn't optimized to truly rock the search engines. Many web design companies have on-staff like we do people that are professional content writers. These content writers provide a consistent and concise voice about your business. They are experts in their field and will write content that is designed to get people interested in your products and services.
When you have quality content you are building a value for your customers. When there is something that is of value to your customer they are more apt to trust and want to purchase from you. Take your time, write it well, and answer their questions they might have. You are in business because you feel you offer something above your competition. Prove it by being an expert in your field.
A/B Testing
You may have the best site on the planet. You've spent thousands on it. It is beautiful but isn't converting the way you feel it should with the number of people coming to your website. How can you fix this? There are many ways but the way we find that is the most beneficial is what is called A/B testing. For one, or more, pages you build two pages. You try one page and log the results, then another and log the results. Each page has the same information just rearranged with different objectives. Sometimes with just a color change to see what draws customers in.
Reciprocal Link Building
Quality link building is not dead! Crappy link building is not only dead it will make your website move down in the search engine results. Every business aligns in one way or another with companies that meet their corporate culture. The same should be true for linking to others websites and asking them to link to you. This reciprocal link building can help improve your overall trust in the web community.
Internet Standards
The internet is full of standards. This is so that you can reach the widest audience possible. By adhering to these standards you can help people who have disabilities as well as make certain that what you create is properly visible across the largest range of devices. You can view your website with the latest standards at https://validator.w3.org/. This is a free service that will help you achieve greatness when providing a consistence experience across all devices.
Speaking of all devices you should check your website across a multitude of browsers. The top browsers today are Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Apple Safari. The experience on each one of these devices should be the same.
Blogs and Articles
A blog (also called an article) is a page on your website that you showcase your expertise and knowledge to benefit others. That's what this page is. By doing so you increase visibility in your local community. In our case it's Valparaiso Indiana. It also lets you reach across the country and around the world as well. By writing on a consistent basis you will be letting the search engines you care about your customers, have up-to-date content, and are sticking around for the long haul. The longer your business creates and produces quality content the more the search engines will move you up in the results.
Black Hat Techniques
These techniques are evil; pure evil. Many businesses get suckered in by unethical companies promising page 1 position 1 positions. Unless they own Google or other search engines (and they don't) they cannot guarantee you page 1 position 1 results. If they require you to pay hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for this position it's most likely paid advertising. These are not the positions you want. You want to be organically found. Although paid advertising has its place bringing in traffic should be based on organic results. By doing it this way when and if you decide to pay your results will be even better. Don't break the "internet law" to get these positions for a quick gain. Many will get a quick gain and then start falling off the pages and will be hard to recover.
We had one company we had on page 1 position 3 (not position 1) and they were sold that they could be guaranteed position 1. They immediately moved up to position 1 for two weeks. In week three they started dropping. Today they are on page 15. This isn't the first one of our old customers that have been cheated by a snack oil sales man. Companies that guarantee these rankings do not care about the success of your business; only their bottom line.
Settings Goals
How do you know your business is doing good? You set goals. You do this for the core business and your employees. As many who've read our blog for years know we treat a website as an employee. We do this because an employee needs to be well informed and answer the questions your site visitors have. By setting your objectives you can know if your website is doing what you want. If it is keep it up but if it's not doing everything you want that is most likely not the fault of your website. It is the fault of those in charge of your website. This may be you, the business owner, or that of a person on your team. It could be they were keeping the website updated but has fallen off of their priority radar. Make certain this stays on the priority radar and if you are so busy you can't maintain (this is all of our hopes) then align with your web design company to achieve the results you want (just remember to communicate that to them!).
Have a mobile website
This one truly shouldn't be last but we saved it intentionally for being last. The reason is many people will build a website and not think of a mobile site. They may have a framework that gives them a mobile site but not a "mobile experience". What's the difference and how can it benefit me? A mobile site is one that shows information in a mobile view. This means that you do not have to "pinch and zoom" to see the information. There are two ways to build a mobile site. You can build a completely separate website (old school) where a user is redirected to m.domain.com. This method will truly hurt your search engine results. The other is having a responsive design where the screen resizes based on the screen size of the user's device. This can be done incorrectly as well. You may be thinking but how can a site that works on every device be bad? The answer is that on a desktop you have larger images. On tablets you may still have large images but if it's an iPad you can have even better images for the retina display. On a phone you don't need as large of images or no images at all.
If you go to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ you can find out how well your website is performing for free as well as how Google sees your webpage from a desktop as well as a mobile device perspective. Before we talk with clients we always pull up every (not just the home page) up in this type of environment. This tells us immediately how well their website is working for them and where some of the most glaring problems are.
Conclusion
By looking at the information of the latest internet standards, assigning goals and objectives and keeping your website constantly updated you can achieve greatness with your website. If you are not sure how your website is performing, want some expert help, or need a second opinion we would love to help you out. We can be reached at @BUSINESSPHONETOLLFREE@, email at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@, or through our contact form here.
