Why is my website not getting enough traffic and sales?

Lots of clients ask me this really critical question.

How do I get more leads and sales from my website?

I think it is safe to say we all want that.

But before I answer how they might do that, I always ask them a question.

Do you know the traffic that you are getting from your website, right now? 

Interestingly enough, many of them don’t really know the answer as often they have never looked at what is actually happening or rely on other people to send them a report that they do not read. 

It is a bit like wanting to know how much money you can spend, without knowing what is in your bank account.

Knowledge is power and understanding your website traffic metrics unlocks a lot of power. Today I wanted to talk about some of the key pieces of information you need to understand first before you tackle how to get more leads and sales from your website.

Review your website traffic, regularly

A lot of the clients that I start working with are not necessarily reviewing their traffic. The problem with not diving in and looking at those numbers regularly is that we're not getting our hands on the information that we need to know. We can’t make informed decisions about how we might need to change our messaging or how we might want to market further into the future with our business.

Understanding your traffic is so important. I see people struggling with business growth, struggling to generate leads for their business, wanting to generate more sales through their website and yet they don't actually know how many people are going to their website in the first place. They also don’t understand how many of those visitors are actually converting.

So you need to understand your traffic and you need to understand how many people are buying from your website because you've got to make a decision or determine is it a traffic problem or is it a conversion problem. Knowing the answer to that question is going to help you determine what you need to do next in relation to selling more.

Many people think that they have a conversion issue when their actual issue is that they don't get enough people to their website in the first place. That is a separate conversation we're going to have around conversions and I'm going to blog about that next week to help you understand what the conversion is likely to be for your industry. I will also talk about understanding how to determine what it is for your actual website and then figuring out okay, if I know that a hundred people come to my website, and 50 of those visitors or 20 of those visitors buy from me and I can see that consistently over time that's the conversion rate. I double my traffic I am likely to get another 20 sales a month for example. That's why understanding your website traffic is so so important.

You need to be diving in there regularly and checking on what is actually happening. Make sure that you or someone on your team is regularly checking into Google Analytics - drop that into a weekly or fortnightly task for them or you.

If you don’t have Google Analytics embedded into your site - this blog post of mine will help you. If you're not actually diving in and having a look, set yourself a regimen every Monday every Friday every whatever day it is of the week you're going to go in and review

What are people reading on your website?

Do you actually know which pages on your website people are actually visiting?

To find this out, dive into the Behaviour area of Google Analytics and have a look at your top 20 at your top 50 (look at this over a period of time, not just look for the last week or the last month). The reason that we need to know what are our best-performing pages are is that those pages are performing best organically. Whatever we're doing to those pages from an SEO perspective it's working and that's how people are coming into our site. The bigger question is, are these pages actually the most important pages for you in your business, are you attracting the right people into your into your world? As far as Google's concerned these are important pages, so what happens when people land on them. Do people then get led where you want them to go?

Look at your key pages and make sure you've got a call to action on those key pages that send people where you'd like them to go. If you want them to sign up to a newsletter, if you want to bring them into a sales funnel, if you want to send them somewhere else on your website then this is a great opportunity for you to do. These pages are your open doors & windows to the Internet world. Make sure you are welcome and attracting the right people.

If however, those pages are not the right pages for you, if you can't see how you can put an appropriate call-to-action on them and lead them into the rest of your website, you need to revisit your other pages on your website. You need to focus on why people are not visiting your key pages.

You need to be looking at what people are not visiting and determine why that is.

Let's just say that I had a page on my site that was all red shoes and I had a page on my website that if you signed up to get my newsletters, I was going to give you a 15% discount on your first purchase of red shoes. I could see that nobody was going to my red shoe page, they were going somewhere else on my website. I could see that it was a higher trafficked page that had a summary of fashion from last season but my new range, where I was talking about my great red shoes, nobody was going to.

Obviously, there is an issue here that I need to figure out

Why is it that everyone's still going over there but they're not coming to my red shoe page?

We need to be looking at our data so we can ask those kinds of questions see the issue and fix that problem. We need to understand the disconnect between where people are going and where you want them to actually go.

Where are people coming from when they visit my website?

Do you know where your traffic is coming from?

Dive into the Acquisition area of Google Analytics. Look to see how your people coming to your website, organically as well as the other pathways into your website.

Organic results tell let you know that people typed something into search to then select you from the search results. They might be typing in red shoes, they might be typing in chocolate cake, they might be typing in you know how do I sleep better. When you are looking to improve your search results, we need to think first about what are the questions people are asking. People coming to your website organically are typing in a question and your page is in the mix ofr answering that question. You then might have direct acquisitions ( ie typing in your domain name directly or from an email campaign), this is often a good indicator of brand awareness and knowledge your domain name.

The next option will be social. So it will display Facebook, Instagram, Instagram stories, LinkedIn Twitter and also Pinterest. In my book Pinterest isn't really a social channel but this is where Google Analytics drops it. This is a really important are for you to pay attention to, especially if you spend a lot of time inside social and yet it does not drive much traffic to your website. You need to ask yourself the question are my social activities working for me in the way I want.

If you have been running Google Ads, then you will be interested in the Paid section of the Acquisition report and finally the other key section will be referrals. Referrals are really important because these are other people's websites that are sending people to you. It's interesting to have a look to see who in your space who is sending traffic your way. It's particularly important to see who are the people sending traffic your way as you may want to build a better relationship with them and look for other opportunities to grow your traffic in a similar way.

Look for those referrals that are in alignment with you as a business. This potentially will give you ideas about how you may get more people to refer to your website, your blog article or your product through their own networks. You can read more about this kind of link here - These links are as backlinks and whilst not easy to get, are Google Gold.  

How are people searching for your website?

Back in the day, Google used to tell us what keywords people used when searching to find your site. You can’t see this unless you now use the Google search console or what was known as Google Webmaster Tools. This is likely to be something that you web developer would have set up for you when they built your site. Ask them if you are not sure you to give your access or you can set this up for yourself. I have some instructions here top help you set up or access the Google Search Console  This is a key part of the search element of your Digital Ecosystem.

The Google Search Console provides a range of insights in relation to how Google sees your site, in particular, make sure you note how people are finding you inside via the Search Traffic Section. It lets you see some of the search words that people are using right now, to find your business. Often this is a real eye-opener for people as what we want to be found inside Google may not always match up with reality.

If you want to be known for red shoes yet nobody searching for red shoes is finding you then you need to investigate what the issue might be. 

• Perhaps you aren't mentioning red shoes enough in your website copy.
• Maybe you don’t have page titles that reflect red shoes
• Maybe you don't have page headings on the page that talk about red shoes
• Perhaps. you don't have images that are labelled read shoes
   

This is what we need to know when writing website content, what are our customers are actually searching for?

This simple point is the key action in relation to search engine optimization that people believe mistakenly believe is incredibly complex. At the heart of good SEO or good search engine optimization is to answer the question: What questions are your clients are actually asking online? When they type in a question or when they go ‘ok Google’ what do they say?

Yes, there are some technical things that we need to do in our website administration area but at the heart of it is understanding, understanding what our customers are asking for and answering them. Addressing their pain point and being helpful.

Are all keywords created equal?

There is no point ranking on page one for a search engine result when only 5 people search for that each month. If we are going to focus our attention on worthwhile keywords, then we need to what those worthwhile keywords actually are. It makes no sense to put a lot of time and effort into creating blog post on a topic that no-one in my market cares about. It's also not a great use of my time if I am trying to position my content in an area where there are about a million results and I would appear on page 100.

This is where we need to get clear on the volume of searches and how competitive those searches might be.

I have recently discovered a great free tool via Neil Patel called ubersuggest that tells you exactly the number of searches for a particular keyword or phrase and how competitive that keyword might prove to be. Plus it also very helpfully shows you some alternative words that might work better for you. 

You literally just type in your keyword and a list of SEO gold will display in front of you. I urge you to give it a try.

SEO is not necessarily rocketscience, but understanding how it works coupled with understanding what your clients are searching for is how you are going to grow your website consistently over time.  Until you know what it is actually doing, you can never focus on what you need to do to improve it.