Posted on April 28, 2022 / by Webmaster / in IT knowledge base

Why your website is not getting traffic? Follow these 4 steps to fix it.

If you ask a little boy why a motor car is not moving. You would probably get one of these answers from him: it’s because there is no driver, the engine of the car is broken, could possibly be due to a flat tyre, or the car is running out of fuel (ok, or electricity. We get it.). This is exactly what happened to a website when it is not getting the desired traffic.

Indeed to get traffic to a website is liked driving a car:

“No matter how beautiful or fancy a car is on the outside, it does not move on its own. To start moving a car, the driver has to check its engine is working, put fuel in it, and then press down on the accelerator to cause the car to pick up speed.

If you know how to drive a motor car, you will have no problem in driving traffic to your website.

Believe it or not. It is that simple.

No, wait! How are they related?

Let’s replace the metaphorically ‘drive a motor car’ scenario with the following substitutions for driving traffics to a website. It will give you a very lucid perspective.

Driver —> website/ business owner
Move a car —> make a website visible
Engine —> web vital
Fuel —> website content
Pressing down on the accelerator —> promoting the website
Speed —> traffic

Here we go:

“No matter how beautiful or fancy the design of a website (car) is, no visitor/ traffic would come without knowing its existence (the car is idle and so its speed is zero). To bring traffic (speed) to a website (car), we have to first check its web vitals (engine) are healthy, tune it, add contents (fuel), promote the website (put pressure on the accelerate pedal) to make it visible (move), then traffic (speed) will come.

Following these 4 simple steps outlined below you will be able to increase the traffic of your website. But remember marketing your website/ business is a long game. It won’t happen overnight. Here we are proposing sustainable website traffic growth. Certain patience is needed.

Step 1: While a driver must know the purpose and destination of his journey, your website is created to help move your business forward. You need to set a clear goal for your website.

You might have already employed a very high pay designer to work on your custom website design. But we are sorry to tell you. Pretty isn’t a website goal.

Having a pretty and clean website is far from enough. Your website can’t merely be a beautifully designed online business card or product brochure. You need to set a clear goal for your website. Without goals the website won’t move the needle very far. As if you were driving a car without a direction, it won’t get you anywhere. Your website has to be made for selling products, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, improving customer service, or all of the above.

Website Goal

Website goals are set up to accomplish the bigger business goal. So business goals come first. They are the fundamental element of establishing priorities and planning actionable items.

We are not going to explain too much about website goal in this article. We’d rather walkthrough one example to give you some ideas what it is about.

Let’s use our company as the case study and say, our business goal is to increase HKD 1 million in revenue from website development services next year. Now we have our business goal defined, the next thing we need to do is to find out how we are going to make it happen.

In order to meet this goal, we figure we’d probably need 80 new website projects. To sign up more new projects, we might not have adequate leads. With this in mind, one obvious goal for our website would be to increase the number of leads generated from it.

Website Objectives

To generate more leads from our website, we need to increase our website’s exposure to get more impressions, and/ or at the same time, improve our Conversion Rate and Click Through Rate. These action items are website objectives that are derived to help accomplish the website goal. They are specific, measurable, results-focused and time-bound.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

By reviewing the current website metrics and applying them to the following formulas, we can work backward to calculate our target impressions for website development services:

Traffic comes from clicks: Impressions × Click Through Rate = Traffic

Traffic is not a lead until it is converted: Traffic × Conversion Rate × Hit Rate = New Sales Case

To calculate how much impressions we need in order to grow our website development business: Target Impressions = New Sales Case ÷ Hit Rate ÷ Conversion Rate ÷ Click Through Rate

If our Hit Rate is 50%, both the Conversion Rate and the Click Through Rate is 1%,

then the Target Impressions is equal to 80 ÷ 50% ÷ 1% ÷ 1%

The answer to our target impressions for website development services is 1.6 million.

Marketing Wave/ Campaign

These impressions can come from both organic marketing and paid advertising. We will cover more about promoting your website in step 4 below.

In either case we can subdivide the task of increasing website impression into individual marketing wave/ campaign. With each underlying wave/ campaign it has its own objectives and set of KPI’s to pursue and meet.

Along with the website goal, you could see it didn’t take us too long to work out our website objectives and KPI’s that we can use to track our progress. Of course the real world case contains more variables. It is a little bit more complex than that. But after all it is not rocket science. You will get there.

We have to emphasize again your website is supposed a very valuable digital asset. Let it work as a propulsion force for your business. Starting by knowing your audience (better), setting up goals and KPI’s, constantly tracking and adjusting them when and where appropriate.

Step 2: Check and make sure the engine is working. Tune it to its peak performance.

This image is a snapshot of wavyos.com gtmetrix performance report run on Apr-29-2022 — Tips of the day: If you are not sure about your website’s performance. You can go to https://gtmetrix.com/ to run a preliminary analysis. GTmetrix is a tool developed for website owner to easily test the performance of their webpages. The basic report is free. To run the report, open their home page, enter the URL of your website and hit Analyze. In a few seconds, the website will return you with an overall Grading (from A to F) with metrics broken down into Performance, Structure and Web Vitals.

Literally all car engines are working when they come out of the factory. Unfortunately this is not the case for many websites. What’s in the codes can be very different from what we see on the web pages.

Many websites are just working on the surface. But they might not be as secured as they have to be. If we don’t open the hood or even dismantle the engine to inspect, we don’t see at their core the layout and data might not be properly organized and structured. Other commonly overlook issues include missing meta description, broken links, 404 page not found, slow loading speed, outdated OS and so on. The problem will be getting worse when the website grows bigger with new pages and contents. Many website owners wouldn’t do anything until one day the website is not functioning entirely.

You shouldn’t wait until the engine is down.

When you are making a new website, you must ask your developer about its Web Vitals, as you would check the spec of the engine when you are buying a new car. Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

For websites that have been up and running. As with car owners would carry out regular preventive maintenance by changing engine oil and coolant before there is a warning. Website owners should proactively do a site audit to check their website and see whether there is any room that they can improve to harness its full potential. While new web technologies are ever evolving, sometimes a small twist can make a big difference without costing a dime.

Step 3: No car can run without fuel. So don’t expect your website can attract visitors without content.

The plain truth about website content is no one would be interested in useless and non-entertaining information. Such information won’t bring you any website traffic. And in this social era shareable is crucial too.

Rich and quality website content will not just pull in and build a broader following and drive more traffic. It will get your website a boost in search engine ranking. Who does not want their website to rank #1 in Google? And more importantly, your customers will be able find the information they need to make informed decisions easier. Once your customers know your website is a valuable, reliable source of information, they’ll keep coming back with their credit card ready to swipe.

Step 4: You’ve got a destination, a good car and a full tank. It’s time to ignite and press down on the accelerator: promote your website.

Sometimes promoting a website could lead to frustration. Particularly for newbies and solo entrepreneurs whom might not know where to start. However, it is a must-do to acquire website traffic. It doesn’t matter if your budget is huge or tiny. But without getting the name out, your website is not going to make an impact. All works that we’ve previously done will go down the drain.

Organic versus Paid Advertising

You might have heard from some marketing experts whom suggest businesses should exhaust all organic options before considering paid advertising. We do not totally agree. The smartest thing to do is to put all options on the table. Some of them will prove to be more effective for your website and business than others. You need to test run and figure out which of the platforms/ combination will suit you best, and that together they could bring the biggest potential and benefits.

Online and Offline Marketing

To market your website online, it would always be safe and easier to start with some of the most proven platforms or approaches. To name a few, these include Google Ads, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social channels, social ads, email marketing, digital PR, media buying and reaching out to bloggers/ influencers for their help. But don’t forget your options are not limited to online media. Offline activities can be very powerful to market your website and generate traffics for it too. Naturally you would put your company web address on your business card, direct mail and print advertising. You would be networking with people, attending or speaking at conferences. Take any opportunity to turn more offline interactions into ways to promote your online presence.

Wrapping It Up

You are possibly competing with thousands of other businesses in the marketplace. The internet world is a fierce battlefield. It’s never too late to start taking action if you haven’t. Turn your website from a cost into a tool that propels your business forward and make it a winner.