‘How to get more hits or visitors to my website?’ is the question that many, many website owners ask themselves. 90% or more of websites receive very little in the way of traffic and therefore do not fulfill their prime function of giving an online presence to the person or business.
I have met with two businesses only yesterday with precisely this problem. I then looked at their web designers website – those guys who marketed themselves as SEO consultants and internet marketers.
The problem was clear.
The website designers were getting no visitors to their own website so how could they possibly do better for their clients?!
The way these website designers are marketing their services is to put up a flashy looking website and hoping that their clients will not ask the awkward question ‘Why am I getting no business from my website?’
The reason is simple – their clients are getting no hits, visitors, traffic – whatever you want to call it – to their website. No visitors = no leads or sales. The problem is simple to understand.
Yet when the business initially employs the web designer to build a website, they also assume that their website will be visible to potential clients.
That assumption is their big mistake. The web designer is disingenuously preying on their ignorance, hoping that the client will not ask this question until the bill is paid and they can move onto the next poor sap.
Of course, that makes the business owner cynical about employing internet marketing consultants with genuine skill and talent. The business owner now knows that they don’t know enough about internet marketing and SEO and they are naturally reluctant to part with more cash in case that too is wasted.
Business owners do have a problem. There are simply too few individuals with genuine knowledge to help them and, as a result, millions, if not billions of pounds, in investment on useless websites has taken place.
Business owners are also partly to blame. Their expectations are unrealistic. They expect to pay a little money for a website and then they hope the job is done – low and behold they miraculously have a thriving business online!
The truth is, to get results online requires investment in time and/or money and it requires constant maintenance.
The amount of investment depends on how competitive the keywords are that they want to rank for – highly competitive, high traffic keywords naturally attract a lot of competitors and therefore the businesses willing to invest more time and/or money competing for that keyword will generally win out.
Most of the time, businesses are better served by concentrating on ranking for less competitive keywords, getting results and then investing steadily in building their online presence over a protracted period of time.
The key to ultimate success, however, is to provide great content. If visitors are spending time on your website and linking to it as an authority source, then Google will gradually give your site more ranking.
If you are not prepared to make that investment in your website, then you have no choice but to pay for traffic by placing adverts. If you do that then you will be on the treadmill of paying for your traffic for ever – if you stop paying, you lose your traffic source.
Your dilemma as a business owner is that if you don’t invest in your online presence and your competitors do, you will increasingly struggle to compete in your target marketplace, Why? Because, as I said before, when researching products and services to buy, consumers and businesses are using the search engines. If your content does not appear when they search, then you have no chance to get their business.
So the choice is simple. If you are serious about building an online business, get professional guidance but be extremely circumspect about who you go to for that advice. Ask to see results achieved for other customers. One of the best ways to judge results is to look at the Alexa traffic ranking of the web designers site and those they have built for other people because no traffic = no sales.
How do you look at the Alexa traffic ranking? Simply go to Alexa.com, download their free toolbar and then every time you go onto someones website, the traffic rank for that website appears in your toolbar. You can then click on the toolbar for more information.
Here’s my traffic ranking on Alexa – my website ranks within the top 1% in the world and my site is less than 2 years old. Do you want the guidance of an expert or will you take the risk with someone else?
