Most businesses have a website. Nowadays the website is often the first thing people do when starting a business. However business owners are often frustrated because their website doesn’t seem to send them any business. Here we will try to explain some possible scenarios to help you figure out what’s going on.
Is your website getting traffic?
The best, highest converting website can’t work if no one visits it. To determine how much traffic you’re receiving you should use Google Analytics which is free. Learn more and sign up here. If you’re not a techy person you may need some help adding the tracking code to your site, more on there here.
This is really the best place to start because you will need the insights from Google Analytics to determine the success rate for all of your website marketing efforts. By carefully reviewing this data you can hone your skills and focus your time and effort on the things that get you the best result.
Bear in mind that your goal here isn’t just to get traffic, but to get leads, customers, and ultimately orders.
Does your website have compelling content?
Your website is an amazing opportunity to vividly share your story with photos and videos to everyone on the internet. If your website is just a boring online brochure you’re not getting the full value. One of the best ways to keep your website fresh is to post regularly on a blog (it looks bad if your last post was 5 years ago…) and/or add a social feed to your website.
Your goal here should be to find a way to get regular daily or weekly content on the front page of your website where new customers are likely to see and interact with it. One way to accomplish this is with something like Walls.io which essentially aggregates your social media posts on a wall. This way you easily take pictures of interesting things and customer projects, tag people and places in them, add some hashtags, and post them on your business Instagram account. The great thing is you may already be doing some of this but is it being shown on your website?
Are you promoting the site?
A website is a wonderfully flexible electronic brochure of sorts but as with printed brochures it has to be delivered. If you don’t promote it then only people that are already aware of your business will find it. You want new potential customers to find your business when searching for relevant products or services online. With SEO research and properly configured online ads your site can start popping up in searches, and with properly configured retargeting ads your ads can even pop up in social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
There are a number of tools and marketing companies (including us) out there that can help you with promoting your website. Running ads on Google and Facebook is relatively easy however getting the right ad copy and keywords that result in new customers and orders can take significant time and trial and error.
Are you asking for reviews?
Even if everything else above is top notch you can still have trouble if your business doesn’t have enough reviews online. People that find your business in an ad or via search engine query will many times look up your business on other sites to read the reviews other customers have left. If you’re not actively asking your best customers to post their reviews then you may have predominantly negative reviews or no reviews at all. Customers that have a good or as expected experience are less likely to think about leaving a review, which is why it’s important to ask for them.
Negative reviews aren’t as bad as you might think, you can respond to negative reviews and your response is as valuable, if not more so, than the review itself. After all, even great businesses have bad days and customers know this but responding to a negative review and offering a remedy shows how great your business truly is.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
The key here is to stick with it, keep generating and posting useful content and consistently run ad campaigns to promote your website and products but also be sure to ask for reviews, follows, and shares along the way.
