Traffic Has Come to a Grinding Halt? Here’s What You Need to Do
Traffic is the lifeblood of the average online business, so it can be a shock to the system when your online customer traffic grinds to a halt and you do not get nearly as many visitors to your online store or website.
Obviously, something has gone horribly wrong, but the good news is, you can fix it and avoid hemorrhaging customers forevermore. Here are just a handful of the most effective ways to do that.
Website Traffic Investigation
- Try to Find Out Why
Obviously, the first thing you should do if your traffic stops coming in like it once did is to try and work out why that may be, Luckily, this is much easier than you might think thanks to the wide variety of metrics that can now be tracked. Take a look at the data, do your best to pinpoint any issues, and then you can work on setting them right as best you can. If, after doing this, your traffic problem’s still a mystery to you, then getting in some SEO experts who can analyze things for you might be a really good idea.
- Check Your Relevance
Often, websites fall out of favour simply because they have stopped being relevant to the people who used to visit. This is bad news for your business because it could mean that sales stop coming in as your brand falls off the cliff of relevance.
The good news is, there are lots of simple things you can do to make your website relevant again such as looking at the core purpose of your company and cross-referencing that with the core thighs your target audience cares about. You can then start creating content that is highly relevant to both them and you, and this will often be enough to see interest return. You may have lost your way, but you can get back on track again.
- Step Up Your SEO Game
It’s totally fair to say that search engine optimization is the one thing that will make the biggest difference overall to how much traffic you see coming your way. The thing is, many business owners think that it’s a one-and-done thing. They bring in SEO exports, get them to tweak everything so it’s just right, and then think they can coast forevermore. It doesn’t quite work like that! SEO best practices, the best keywords, etc., all change rapidly, so your SEO strategy needs to change and evolve too. If your SEO has fallen out of date, then changing that sooner, rather than later, will help you to get all that lovely organic online customer traffic back, so your business can continue to boom.
- Use Affiliate Marketing
If you aren’t getting the amount of traffic you would like to get, then there is no denying that affiliate marketing can help you to get things back on track. There has long been a connection between SEO and affiliate marketing where one can feed the other. SEO can help to drive organic traffic to your site and also to the affiliates who promote it, and affiliate marketing can help you to reach people you otherwise might not be getting other bloggers and website owners to promote you to their own audiences. Yes, affiliate marketing means paying a commission to anyone who sends traffic your way, but as they say, sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate.
- It’s Too Slow
If it takes an age for your website, or any of the pages on your website, to load, then people are not going to stick around and wait because, chances are they can find the information, or the product, they need elsewhere, and that is exactly what they will do.
Take some time exploring your website, and if you get frustrated with how slow it is, then you are going to need to get someone in to help you optimize it and speed things up. A failure to do so could mean your traffic falls off a cliff never to return, and that would be disastrous for your business, right?
- Leverage Social Media
How much time are you spending on social media? If you, or someone acting on your behalf, is not spending a significant amount of time posting on social media and interacting with your followers, then it could affect your business website more than you might think.
Although websites are still important, it is fair to say that we are living in a social media age, and that means you need to use your social media presence to drive traffic to your website and if you do not, you might find that very few people bother to visit at all.
How do you do that? Create engaging, shareable content that resonates with your audience, and don’t shy away from a bit of paid advertising to extend your reach. And, always remember that social media is the party, and your website is the exclusive after-party. Make sure everyone’s invited.
- Email Marketing May Help
Many people think that email marketing is deader than Dracula, but like the world’s most famous vampire, it has a habit of coming back and enduring every advancement the modern world makes. So, if you have n noticed that your online customer traffic is not what it used to be, it might be worth reviving your email marketing efforts.
You don’t want to turn into a spammer, because that would be really bad for business, but if you are able to craft informative, useful content, and send it out to your mailing list, with a really good incentive for them to click through (special offers, the promise of egrets read) then you should see an increase in traffic before too long.
- Refresh Your Content
If your website were a magazine, would you read it cover to cover, or would it put you to sleep faster than a lecture on the history of watching paint dry? That’s a problem! Content is the heartbeat of your site, and if it’s not pulsating with life, vitality, and value, your visitors will flatline. So, you are absolutely going to want to update old blog posts, add vibrant images and videos, and ensure every piece of content serves a purpose. Be the editor-in-chief of a website that’s as compelling as a bestselling novel.
- Solve Search Engine Penalties
Did you know that search engines can actually penalize your website if you do something they don’t like? Well, they can, and it’s really easy to fall into the trap without having a clue that you are doing so. And if you don’t know you have done something you shouldn’t you won’t be able to fix it. So, of course, it’s always a good idea, when tour traffic grinds to a halt, to check for things like broken links which can put you down the rankings on Google and other search engines.
- Fix a Poor User Experience
Ever visited a website that was more confusing than trying to solve than the average escape room on a tipsy Friday night? It’s much more common than you might think, and as you will undoubtedly know, it’s not too long before you give up and click that X in the corner, right?
If your website is similarly difficult to navigate then you can bet that a lot of visitors will not bother coming back a second time and that could be really bad news for your business.
Get in a web designer who knows how to create clean, simple web pages and let them do their thing!
- Say Goodbye to Bad Branding
People who visit your website want to know who you are, what you do, and what you stand for, so it’s important to invest some time and effort in your website’s branding. Once you have done that, you are going to want to make sure that you stay on message and do not do anything that does not align with your brand values. If the message they get is inconsistent or unclear, your visitors may just stop clicking because they will never know where they are with you or what they might see.
- Deal with Reputational Issues
Have you ever Googled your business name? If not, then why not? It’s one of the most important things you can do to maintain a good reputation in the business world and keep people clicking your way.
It only takes one critical news story or one competitor talking smack about you for people to stop visiting your website because the way they feel about you has been changed. So, you need to know about any knocks to your reputation so you can address them or have a reputation management company deal with them for you.
- Put Your Heart Back in It
How much time do you spend on your website? How excited are you about it? If you have stopped giving a darn about it and if you are just coating along hoping for the best, visitors will desert you, so you need to find a way to get your heart back in the game!
Time to bring that online customer traffic speeding back!