Business websites often fail to get traffic despite putting effort into design and functionalities. Not achieving a satisfactory ROI proves disheartening, especially after running SMM and PPC campaigns. But there’s a logical explanation for everything. Here’re five reasons that can lead to lesser website traffic.
- Lack of brand awareness
- Failing to focus on the target audience
- Ignoring technical on-page optimization
- Choosing the wrong keywords
- Low-quality content on various pages
1. Lack of brand awareness
Why would people visit the site if they don’t know that you provide a solution to their problem? Several businesses ignore this simple logic. They fail to implement appropriate inbound marketing campaigns to attract target audiences. Thus, their website traffic remains less despite being technically perfect.
Brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, Samsung, Maybelline, Mc Donald’s are well-known in all corners of the world. Every business may not be able to achieve such widespread awareness. However, firms must achieve a certain amount of brand awareness with inbound marketing tactics to ensure the target audience knows about their existence.
Using the best suitable inbound marketing channel can result in more prospects visiting your website and turning into customers.
Dedicating a significant budget for running brand awareness campaigns is crucial. Google Ads campaign, combined with social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO procedures, can play a critical role in increasing brand visibility.
Content marketing can also help in increasing brand awareness. Create text and video content that people will notice. Even funny videos can work; just ensure the content is worth sharing.
2. Failing to focus on the target audience
Target audiences are groups of people that a business needs to focus on while promoting their products or services. Surprisingly, several small firms do not know their target demographic and let their digital agency choose the target audience for various campaigns. They fail to get much traffic and conversion percentage. Failing to focus on target audiences may also result in website visitors who do not turn into customers.
Firms can choose their target audience based on consumption habits, location, social class, purchasing power, education background, gender, and age.
Analyzing the existing customer database can help understand where current customers come from and why they choose your products or services. Data retrieved from such research can assist in creating buyer personas and highlighting buyers’ journey. Shape your website accordingly to suit their needs. Doing the same can increase website visitors and conversions.
3. Ignoring technical on-page optimization
Websites offer great content and also run digital campaigns. But, they fail to get organic traffic due to problems related to on-page technical elements.
Errors in alt tags, HTML tags, URLs, Meta descriptions, page titles, heading tags, loading speed, mobile-friendliness, images, etc., are the main culprits.
When in proper order, these on-page SEO aspects convey details about your website’s content to search engines like Bing, Google, etc. Optimizing these factors can improve the site’s usability and value for the users. Visitors spend a longer time on the portal, and this ultimately results in better search engine visibility.
4. Choosing the wrong keywords
At times, websites fail to get a fair amount of search engine traffic despite taking care of all the technical aspects. Choosing high competition keywords can be one of the reasons.
New or recently launched sites do not get listings on the first page for high competition keywords. Only highly popular, trusted websites can meet the search engine ranking criteria for such keywords.
There are probably thousands of articles based on popular keywords. For example, if you write a post with the title “Capitol Hill Riots” and publish it on your site, it is less likely to get organic traffic from Google as there are thousands of similar reports on popular news portals.
Long-tail low competition keywords can help lesser-known or new sites in getting good rankings. Such keywords may offer lesser traffic gains but can result in an overall increase in website trust. So, find long tail keywords using the Google keyword tool and share the same with your bloggers.
5. Low-quality content on various pages
At one point, dumping keyword-stuffed text was a common practice primarily for website blogs. That’s history, and the trick does not work since the introduction of Google’s Panda update a decade ago. Unfortunately, even today, on-page content, as well as blogs, can end up limiting a website’s visitors due to low-quality content.
Technical (on-page optimization), keywords, and text content should be linked. If you are running a digital ads campaign, the landing pages’ content should be relevant to the ad text and keywords. The site’s bounce rate will be high if visitors leave quickly due to irrelevant content.
Some eCommerce sites often copy-paste product or service description text from elsewhere. Such practices hamper the portal’s search engine rankings. The product or description text should be plagiarism-free.
When it comes to blog posts, the material should be mainly about issues that people search on the internet. It should solve problems and answer most asked questions. Websites lose out on blogs’ benefits because they prefer releasing keyword woven content instead of exciting editorials. Focus on quality instead of the daily number of blogs published. Crucial factors, including Flesch-Kincaid reading score, should be in place.
At least a few of your blog posts should help potential customers in their buying journey or decision-making. Editorials written by inexperienced bloggers do not prove to be authoritative and trustworthy. Readers can quickly point out the difference in content written by an experienced writer and an intern.
Lastly, websites also lose traffic due to posting content that’s not evergreen. Remember, time-sensitive topics die off with time.
