It’s all well and good saying “I want more website visitors”, but what if one of the main reasons that your visitor numbers are dwindling along with your search engine results is that your website is simply not holding their attention.
Search Engines such as Google look at how visitors interact with your website. They see how the visitor found the site (via a link, a search term or directly typed the website address in to the URL bar), how long they stayed on the website and what they did whilst they were there – did they watch a video, read a page, visit a blog post or did they jump back off the website after 2 seconds.
The longer you can keep visitors on your website, especially if they visit multiple pages, the better you are credited by Google.
Paying for Website Visitors
There are a few services where you can pay for your website to come up higher in the search engines amongst the sponsored listings. The main one is Google Ads which uses a bidding and pay per click system. If you use this system, it works only whilst you are paying and does not automatically increase your SEO.
I have had many clients who pay for Google Ads, they get the visitors because they pay the money, that is the service doing its job well.
A few come to me and they tell me, “I get lots of hits (visitors) but they are not buying anything, or they are not booking my services, what is going wrong?”
The answer is obvious, whatever they are finding on the website, is either not what they hoped to see, or it is not providing them with the information that they are looking for fast enough.
So that leads us to question the following:
Design – is the design of my website putting people off, does it appear dated or complicated to use?
Layout – is my website too busy, or too sparse, are there too many images or is there too much text?
Usability – is my website too complicated to use, does the menu system not display correctly in some browsers or on a phone, could my contact form or internal links be broken?
Readability – Is my website hard to read, or is it too boring or too full of industry jargon?
Sometimes it is difficult to find the answers to these questions yourself, often because you are too invested in the website to see the issues and often because to you, the jargon seems completely understandable, because that is your world.
I always recommend having someone else review the website and tell you about how they found it and used it. It doesn’t need to be a professional, in fact it often works better to ask a couple of different aged people to separately review the site for you. The main thing to remember here however, especially if you are using friends to review, is that you cannot take offence to anything they say, you must ask for an honest opinion and accept that opinion in order to move forward.