Got a great website, but no traffic?

As you may have realised, just having a website doesn’t guarantee that people will flock to see it. For a lot of small businesses, this can be intensely frustrating.

Many small business owners take it upon themselves to learn about search engine optimisation or accept offers from one of the many unsolicited emails that arrive daily, which tend to promise too much but deliver too little.

As a small business accounting firm in London, we hear this story often when working with smaller companies. We too have been through these issues and are happy to share our experiences pertaining to growing your business through digital channels such as websites, search engines and social media.

For most businesses, the website is often the focus of much time and effort, often spurred on by competitors’ websites in the market. But if the website fails to attract new visitors and convert them into customers, read on to find out what you can do about it.

Make it about them, not you

The vast majority of business websites fail because they speak about what the site owner does, not to what the visitor wants. In short, they make it all about how great they are, as opposed to addressing the problems the visitor may be looking to solve.

When a visitor arrives at a website, you have literally a second or two to present the visitor with something that addresses their need, whatever that may be. Website visitors, especially coming from search engines, are notoriously impatient, and will quickly go elsewhere if you do not prove immediately that you are up to the task. However, here lies the critical issue – you don’t really know what each visitor is searching for or what their specific problem is; so how can it be possible to provide an answer?

Think landing pages

A good website knows how to categorise your information into areas most likely to match user needs and expectations. This is achieved by thoroughly examining search patterns and trends in your particular business niche. At the heart of this strategy is the use of bespoke landing pages within the website to address the needs of individual aspects of your audience’s needs. The more you can relate to that specific need, the more you’re likely to convert that visitor.

Too many website owners believe that the main site home page is the main page of the website – it isn’t. Your goal should be in creating landing pages within the site that serve as individual home pages for the specific issues that searchers for the services you offer need answers too. Each landing page needs a strong call to action too.

If visitors like what they see on the landing page, they may then do one of three things:

  1. Get in touch, through either phone, email, or a form on your website.
  2. Visit your home page (which should be available via a link on the landing page).
  3. Visit your “about us” page, to see who they are dealing with.

If you are watching your site analytics, which of course you should be, then two statistics should be your primary concern: bounce rate and average time on site. The latter is self-explanatory but bounce rate is the number of people that enter a website and leave without clicking anything. Ideally, you want a low bounce rate and a high average time on site, as higher site engagement usually means higher chances of conversion. But, there are circumstances where a high bounce rate is okay – this is where a site visitor arrives at a landing page, gets what they need and then make the call or carry out the action you want them to – this may mean that the landing page is the only page they visit.

If you want to learn more, visit this page ‘How to grow your business: The importance of an online presence’ as it makes an interesting read.

In addition, if you’re interested in learning about using social media to grow your business, click to read this post titled ‘How to grow your business: Social media’.

When you adopt this approach you are accomplishing two things:

  1. You are creating informative content that addresses a specific need, and so will immediately get the attention of somebody facing the issue you solve. from then on, you have their attention and can lead them to take action. There are a few more things you can do to increase the chance of conversions, such as showing testimonials and accreditation, etc alongside any call to action.
  2. By creating niche content like this, you are demonstrating expertise in a particular area to Google. To rank in Google, you need to be creating authoritative and useful information, information people may want to share or link to. Google is excellent at spotting ‘fluff’ and ‘trivial’ content. You also need to make sure your pages have adequate content on them and are engaging. there’s no fixed rule for this, but most people cite between 300 and 500 words; the higher the better, but don’t lose sight of who your customer is – the visitor, not Google. Use imagery too, to make the pages look interesting visually too.

Tax Agility is a firm of accountants based in Putney and Richmond. We enjoy helping our clients grow. Why not give us a call to see how we can help your business and remove the burden of your everyday accounting demands.