Get Web Visitors from Search

Your site is hungry...hungry for visitors. It's just sitting there all day, waiting for someone to request pages. If you've been paying close attention to your site, you'll convert a lot of visitors into customers and that's what your site is there for. But what if people aren't finding your site? How can you get more traffic?

The simple answer is you can get more traffic to your site by spending time and money on Search Engine Optimization and Google AdWords. This is worth doing because the best people you can market to are those already on their computer looking for you. It's pretty straight forward stuff for the avid DIYer, but you might want some help. If so, feel free to contact us.

Take Tyrone, the owner of The Plow King, for example. Tyrone sells, installs and services used snow plows out of Smithfield, RI. This winter, he was getting around 40 visitors per day on his site. When it snowed, he would get 80 visitors per day. However, he was ranked #42 on google for the search "used snow plows". We spent some time figuring how to optimize the site so that he would get better ranking for the search "used snow plows" and in 2 weeks, he is at #11 on Google and getting 200+ visitors per day when it snows.  We want to get him in the top ten for that search so that he is on the first page of results. That will take some analysis of the competition and further site edits.

In the meantime, Tyrone was able to purchase a sponsored link for the search "used snow plows" from Google Adwords and his link shows up in a sponsored section, according to the terms that he selected in his adwords campaign. It's worth it and it only happens within spending limits that Tyrone had specified.

UPDATE: The Plow King is now #1 on google for the search phrase "Used Snow Plows"

If you want to have a successful website, you can achieve it with 2 simple directives:

• your web content needs to be relevant to what people are searching for
• your website needs to be usable to a visitor within 5 seconds of them finding your site or they will bounce

An Example of Relevance

A few years ago, I started hosting a website for a local stone distributor A-Stone, Inc. After accomplishing some of the initial web-redesign goals, I approached the owners about an opportunity to draw traffic to the site by having really good DIY articles about stone work. At the same time, I wanted to build a patio in my yard, so I mentioned that we could take pictures during the process and write a relevant, well written article about how to build a patio and publish it to their site. One year later, the article is the most popular page on their website (as recorded by Google Analytics).

Consider why this happens from the perspective a single web user named Rob. Rob will look for what he needs by using searches on Google. If he finds a site that is relevant to his query on the first page of search results, he will look at that page and move on. If not, he will either rephrase his query or review search results on pages 2, 3, and 4.

In the case of A-Stone's website, they get more traffic to a good DIY article because that is a topic which is relevant to a large audience.

About Usability

On the web, we don't think of usability as a thing that will be rated in terms of yes or no. As we look at web pages, we want to ask ourselves, how usable is the site? Is it easy to find content and navigation or are those elements hidden? The other day, I was looking at a beautiful website. It had animation, music and beautiful photography with text over the photographs. In the middle of reading the first piece of text, the animation switched the photo and text and I was unable to finish reading that paragraph. This example is not catastrophic, but it illustrates that rotating text with images is not as usable as just having text in a paragraph.