Why Isn’t Anyone Coming to my Website?
In the great realm of the World Wide Web, the idea of “if you build it, they will come,” doesn’t always ring true. Sometimes you can build what seems like an amazing website, but no one comes to your site. To be honest, this can be baffling to even the smartest business owners and frustrating to all other parties involved. So, with an aim to reduce stress and hair-pulling, let’s quick dive into some common reasons why you’re not getting traffic to your website.
Let’s start with the basics…
UX is the Best Friend You Never Had
Remember those old websites from the 90’s that had every two-bit graphic in Microsoft’s clip art pasted to their homepage? Yeah, don’t do that.
User Experience or UX, simply means how the design (look and functionality) of a website is used to positively influence the user’s experience. This can mean anything from making your navigation tabs clear and easy to find and use. It could mean that the general color scheme of your site is eye-catching in all the right ways and help you find exactly the information you’re looking for.
In short, you want your UX to be clean, crisp and easy to understand and navigate. Look at Apple, for example. Its design is downright sexy. You also want it to be pointed and deliberate. It should answer problems, but only after guiding your visitor to your intended solution. In this sense, UX is perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects of website creation and design and can have a significant effect on your company’s bottom line.
Your UX Should Speak to Your Authority and Trust
Let’s imagine you have a website that sells garden tools to the agricultural industry. Your market demographic is educated, experienced, and has a high degree of knowledge regarding varying types of tools and their uses.
How do you build a site that caters to this demographic? How do you gain their trust that your company understands their concerns and needs while packaging this authority into a simple and easy to understand site?
Start with design. To build a sense of trust, you want your layout to be simple, easy to navigate, buttons with inviting colors and readable header tabs. If you have an entire section of your site dedicated to shovels, you don’t want that to be under “Yard Tools.” Include a search bar, host professional product pictures with user-generated reviews, prices, and filters to be able to categorize the size, shape, and even color of the shovels you sell.
It’s this level of mastery of your product and service that, if masterfully packaged and displayed, will bolster the confidence of your visitors.
Imagine Your Site as A Physical Store
When it comes to UX, it’s easy to forget that, in these modern times, an online site is just as—if not more important—than a physical store. There are literally BILLIONS of people in the digital market, and there are MILLIONS of storefronts to chose from. Some of which will have products or services that are identical to your own.
So, how do you stand out?
To start, you position your store to be as visible as possible. In the digital sense, this means to optimize your search engine visibility as much as possible. This means that when someone searches through websites like ‘Google’ or ‘Bing’ using keywords like “best gardening shovels,” your site is among the first to top the page. In this case, you accomplish this feat through continually making your site known for understanding what the best gardening shovels around actually are. You do this through building your site’s authority within its industry.
As I mentioned above, authority can come through a variety of means. First, your site should be designed well enough to facilitate engagement. This could mean that your pictures are beautiful and well described, your content is crisp and understandable, or you’ve got such a degree of expertise in your field that you’re the first stop when it comes to having a question answered.
This process takes time but like building a pyramid, every block laid serves to support every block that proceeds it. If you build your site beautifully with an eye for ease of navigation and building authority, you’ll become the most popular site on your block before you know it.
Considering updating your site so that it’s more user-friendly? We happen to be experts at that. Contact us to learn more.
