Picture this... You have a new Website, and you are waiting for the orders to come rolling in. After a few months, you are looking rather despondent. After six months, you are looking definitely jaded. But there are still no orders.
The Website gets only the occasional visitor. This, after all the expense of hiring a graphics artist and having a Website designer create the most delightful website. You are back to placing expensive advertisements in the local newspaper - knowing that the return will be negligible. It is of little consolation knowing that you are in the same boat as 60% of all website owners.
Is it the "Sandbox effect"? No, the Website has been up and running for some time now. Using your selected Keyword Phrases, you do a Google search to see where your website ranks amongst the millions of entries. But it cannot be found. A dark, brooding and sullen cloud of despondency settles over your head.
Well, before you give up in despair, here are some suggestions.
The First Steps
You need to find out why the Website has failed to perform and how to improve it. Don't just sit back and mope. This is time for action. For effective marketing of a Website's products or services, ongoing monitoring, evaluation and modification of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) elements are essential.
There needs to be an evaluation of what will persuade visitors to purchase your products or services. What is required is a reassessment of the target audience and consequent tailoring of all the content. This research and analysis must be continued at least until there is an improvement in the quality of visitor traffic and the consequent conversion rate.
Here is a list of the essentials that you should do:
• Define the Website's Objectives: The Website must have a defined purpose or focus, and a clear, quantifiable and achievable objective. Each page of the Website must attempt to achieve the set objective.
• Identify the Target Audience: Knowing all about your selected audience is essential. You don't want to attract visitors who will not be interested in your product or service. The Target Audience can be people of a certain age group, gender, marital status, country, etc. Each page of the website must be directed exclusively to the selected Target Audience. Without this knowledge, the marketing effort of a company can only be misdirected.
• Attract the Target Audience: The Website must appeal to the interests of the Target Audience - it must use appropriate language, style, idioms and phraseology. If not, they will either not visit the Website or else they will soon depart.
• Focus your efforts on organic SEO: Read and implement all the suggestions that you can find on SEO.
• Keywords: To get quality visitors, concentrate on Keywords that the Targeted Audience will use, not on just popular Keywords. Ask friends, neighbours and family for their ideas on how they would find your Website. Use Google Sets and the biggest thesaurus that you can find. Concentrate on Long-Tail Keyword Phrases.
• Make sure that all Titles and ALT tags are Keyword rich.
• Research the Websites of the competition: Add pages on features and information that the competition lacks. Improve on what they do have.
• Ensure consistency: People want the same look and feel on every Web page - use Master pages and CSS to achieve this.
• Keep the Website up-to-date: Remove or update old content and images. Make sure that there are no dead Links.
• Ensure fast Website download times: The time to impress visitors is limited to a few seconds. Slow pages, lengthy text or forms and confusing navigation will lose potential customers.
• Create original quality content: Being found by visitors is very much related to the number of pages of content in your website. And the content of a website must be determined by the Target Audience. Be inventive; add related subjects that will be of interest to the Target Audience.
• Create Backlinks by submitting articles of original content to website publishers.
• Submit your Website to the free Web directories, especially Alexa and dmoz, and to all the local directories.
The Next Steps
• You need statistics on the type of visitor that finds your website, and how they found your website. These statistics are essential to quantify the effect of any changes made to the website. You can use the simple approach of Statcounter or the more in-depth Google Analytics.
• You need to keep track of your Ranking for selected Keywords, which visitors are more likely to use to find your website.
You will now have the ability to quantify the problem of low visitor numbers.
And then...
Wait a while, and check the Rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). See if visitor numbers improve. Check which are the most popular landing pages. SEO is not a one-off event, but an ongoing process. Start from the beginning, and repeat the whole exercise. If something works - great! If it does not, try another approach. But keep trying - keep modifying and adding to the Website.
I am sure that your rankings with all the search engines will improve, slowly but surely. The cloud of despair will go - there will be happier, more optimistic days ahead. Promise!
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