Not Getting Enough Web Traffic?

Not getting enough website visitors / traffic is one of the main concerns of Webmasters. No traffic equals no enquiries equals no sales for many businesses. Getting the ‘wrong kind’ of traffic is also as bad as getting no traffic at all. This is because regardless of how many visitors a web page gets, if the goal is to encourage visitors to contact you / download something / submit details / buy something, visitors who are uninterested in the content of your page are unlikely to ‘convert’. Accepting the idea then that traffic and conversion are both important in terms of having an effective web presence, what are the reasons for not getting enough visitors?

Some reasons for not getting enough visitors

Pages lack relevance and / or importance:
Making pages highly relevant to the right key phrases so that they rank highly in the search engines owes a lot to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Including lots of useful value adding content which incorporates key phrases which are known to be searched for in reasonable numbers, and which take the competition into account is important. Including these key phrases in web pages and URLs in the right way can help, as can regularly updating the pages. The importance and good reputation of web pages can also be established by ensuring that pages have plenty of high quality incoming links. This can result in a higher Google PageRank™, higher positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS) thus increasing the likelihood of greater amounts of relevant traffic i.e. the right kind of traffic / visitors.

No Pay per Click Advertising:
PPC can be useful way of driving relevant traffic to your web pages whether or not the pages are already in the natural search engine listings. There is however an inevitable cost involved with this, and the prospect that if you cease PPC activity you website (landing page) traffic will also cease if your web pages aren’t already ranking well in the natural search engine listings.

Search engines not listing your web pages:
You may have very new web pages, therefore you may have registered them with the search engines, but they are not yet being listed in the search engines. It is normal to expect an amount of time to pass, perhaps as long as 2 or 3 months in some cases, from registration with search engines until websites are listed. Search engines such as Google find out about web pages / websites if the URLs are registered, or if links into those pages are discovered and followed. Although search engines such as Google are unlikely to list / drive lots of visitors to all of your pages, some things which can help include adding site maps, adding more updates and value adding content, and increasing the number of high quality incoming links. In some more unusual circumstances, pages may even be removed from search engine listings (or drop far down the SERPS) page if they have breached search engine guidelines by a large enough degree.

Finding a Balance

Often when it appears that pages aren’t getting enough traffic the reality can be that it’s the conversion that’s at fault. Having and regularly checking and monitoring a good web stats package can help you to understand a lot about what’s happening with your web pages, and the relationship between traffic and conversion, and how getting the balance between the two right can bring a more profitable and stable web business. The balance between effective search engine optimisation and the conversion aspects of the pages should be managed to such a degree that pages rank well for important pages as well as and because thy provide lots of useful, relevant information and give a positive and rewarding experience to human visitors.