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Tag: organic search

This is Why Your Website Isn’t Getting Any Traffic — And 3 Ways to Fix That

In today’s digital world, your small business website is everything. Your site should represent your brand, attract new customers, and convert visitors into leads. After all, you can’t do business when no one knows you exist. But if your website isn’t getting any traffic, it doesn’t matter how great your products, services, or content is — no one will ever see it. The good news is you can take steps to make your business website more visible online.

Here are a few of the most common reasons your website isn’t getting any traffic and what you can do about it as a small business owner.

READ — eCommerce SEO: 6 Easy Tips to Drive Organic Sales

1. Your Website Isn’t SEO Optimized

If you want people to find your website, it needs to be optimized for search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your digital assets — like your website — to maximize your organic visibility.

You want your website to be among the first results when people are searching for the type of product or service you offer. For Google, your website is a crucial factor in determining your position in their search engine results pages.

The higher your website ranks in the results, the more likely it is that searchers will find and click through to your site. If you’re not SEO optimizing your website, you’re limiting its potential to attract organic traffic from search engine users.

READ — Organic Search Vs. Paid Search: What’s the Difference?

So how do you make your website SEO-friendly?

Start by doing some keyword research and crafting content that speaks to the terms people are searching for. Make sure you’re using meta tags, titles, and descriptions to give search engines (and potential customers) an easy overview of your content.

You also need to make sure you’re creating quality backlinks, which are links from other websites to your website. Consider using tools like Google Search Console to identify and fix any indexing issues your website might be having. Finally, don’t forget to optimize the images for your site and pay attention to page speed — both of which Google takes into account when deciding your ranking.

2. Your Website Isn’t Mobile-friendly

Nowadays, people are accessing the internet more and more on their mobile devices. In 2019, 53% of total web traffic was made up of mobile users.

That means if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re missing out on a major source of traffic. If visitors can’t navigate or read your website on their phone, they won’t stay on it for long.

Tips for making your website more mobile-friendly:

To make sure your website is optimized for mobile users, you need to start by doing a full audit of your site and its pages to identify any potential issues. In addition, focus on making sure your web pages are loading quickly and that the website’s navigation is easy to use on a phone.

You might want to consider using responsive design, which allows your site to automatically scale and adjust its content depending on the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. You should also think about increasing the size of your text and buttons on mobile so they’re easy to click with a finger instead of a mouse.

READ — 12 Ways to Repurpose Social Media Content for Email Marketing 

3. Your Website Doesn’t Add Value

Ultimately, if your website isn’t providing any value to its visitors, they won’t stick around. Take a look at your site. Are you talking about yourself the entire time? Is it outdated? Do you provide helpful resources for potential customers? 

Websites that don’t offer anything useful or interesting will quickly turn away users.

How to make your site more valuable:

If you want to attract traffic to your website, the best thing to do is focus on adding value.

This can be done in a number of ways. You should start by making sure that your content speaks directly to your target audience and provides them with helpful information or resources.

READ — Determining Your Business’s Target Market: Why It’s Necessary and How To Do It

Plus, make sure you’re regularly updating the content on your website so it remains useful. Google likes relevant content. Doing so will help boost your site’s visibility in search engine rankings, as well as make sure visitors stay on your page for longer.

The Bottom Line

Truth is that your potential customers are already searching for your business online — you just need to make sure they find you. If your website isn’t getting any traffic, it’s time to start doing something about it.

If you’ve been struggling to attract visitors to your website, chances are it’s one of the issues discussed above. Fortunately, there are solutions and you can start driving more traffic by optimizing your website for SEO, ensuring it’s mobile-friendly, and adding value with relevant content. Start by making these changes and you’ll soon be on your way to success!

 

Madeleine Costa HeadshotAs the CEO of a digital marketing agency, Madeleine Costa is dedicated to helping people, students, and small businesses thrive. Madeleine founded Succeeding Small with a simple mission: help small businesses get the visibility they deserve through search engine optimization, web design, paid advertising, social media, and more. With a personal and family history rooted in entrepreneurship, she strives to lift up small businesses digitally through integrity-filled marketing services and empowering education. With her degree in English and Marketing, Madeleine is a proud SEO enthusiast, rhetorician, and avid learner.

Organic Search Vs. Paid Search — What’s the Difference?

Today, marketing efforts are a far cry from what they once were. While businesses used to pour most of their marketing dollars into television, radio, and print ads, the internet has forced the field to evolve substantially over the last several decades. That being said, 2023 will surely see its fair share of organic search vs. paid search debates.

Given the remarkable access to consumers that the internet has allowed organizations to cultivate, it makes sense that businesses are doing everything they can to drive more traffic to their websites. In particular, ranking highly on search engines has become a common — and in many ways vital — marketing method used by organizations and businesses worldwide. 

READ: eCommerce SEO – 6 Easy Tips to Drive Organic Sales

Understanding the difference between the types of search engine resources that organizations can invest in can provide a broader understanding of how companies utilize search engines to drive traffic to their websites.

Here is the difference between organic search vs. paid search.

Organic Search 

Put simply, organic search is content from a business’s website showing up on search pages without being paid for. For example, a silverware business may have a blog article about “silverware that’s perfect for BBQs,” on their website. When a consumer types in the keywords “silverware for BBQs,” the silverware business’s blog article may pop up on the first page of a search engine results page, making it more likely that the consumer will visit their website. 

This practice of bolstering websites to show up on search engines is called search engine optimization or SEO. While organizations may not be paying search engines for their links to appear on results pages, that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t costs associated with organic search. 

READ — Determining Your Business’s Target Market – Why It’s Necessary and How To Do It

Organizations may have to hire SEO strategists, copywriters, web designers, and other professionals to engage in robust SEO practices that drive significant traffic through organic search results. In addition, SEO practices aren’t overnight solutions and may take months to start driving substantial traffic to an organization’s website. 

Though organic search results may not be free, they can be substantially cheaper alternatives to their paid search result counterparts. Given this cheaper opportunity to reach consumers, many savvy organizations have begun to consistently engage in specific SEO practices that make their websites more authoritative in the eyes of search engine algorithms. 

Some of these practices include consistently posting blogs that contain keywords that target consumers are likely to search for, rewriting homepages to contain relevant keywords, and developing relationships with other websites so that they link to one’s website. 

Paid Search

In opposition to organic searches, paid searches require an organization to purchase a placement on a search engine’s result page. Depending on the keyword that an organization is attempting to rank for, the price for paid search results can vary widely. 

For example, if a pizza restaurant wants to buy a search result on the first page for the keyword “best pizza,” it would likely cost them an exorbitant and unreasonable amount of money. However, there are practices that organizations engage in to reduce the cost of paid search results. 

One method that is often used is being more specific with keywords. Rather than buying a paid search result for the keyword “best pizza,” an organization may instead buy a search result for the keyword “Neopolitan pizza in Scottsdale.” The fewer organizations there are attempting to buy a specific keyword, the cheaper it will be to buy a search result on that page. 

One of the most significant advantages of utilizing the paid search method as opposed to the organic search method is the fact that results are instant. While engaging in organic SEO practices could take months to have an organization’s website show up on a specific results page, a paid result could have it on a results page immediately. 

Having the ability to time when search results appear can make it easier to combine search engine marketing methods with other marketing methods when rolling out a specific campaign. The immediacy and greater degree of control of paid search results are some of the many reasons that this marketing method is a favorite among many marketing communication managers. 

Organic Search and Paid Search can Both Be Effective 

While each method has its pros and cons, both organic search and paid search can be extremely useful and effective for organizations. Which method one engages in will depend largely on the goals, budgets, and time restraints of one’s specific organization. 

Though the world of search engine marketing may seem intimidating at first, anyone who takes the time to explore their options can surely find a way to make it work for them. 

 

Andrew Deen HeadshotAndrew Deen has been a consultant for startups in a number of industries from retail to medical devices and everything in between. He implements lean methodology and is currently writing a book about scaling up business.