The reason why most online start-ups don’t make it, is because their site traffic sucks. And when their traffic sucks, so does their online business.
There’s a huge gap between the expectations of a website owner and what’s needed for a website to work.
The truth is, that it can get pretty complicated, because so many skills are needed, but the majority of start-ups only contain one person, who is the owner. And it’s likely that the one person – the website owner – won’t have the knowledge needed to set up and sustain a website that generates loads of traffic.
Here’s why: your site traffic is determined by:
- The design of your website.
- Whether your website contains enough content.
- Whether or not your website contains search engine optimized content.
- Whether or not your website contains value-add information for the people visiting.
Is your website design SEO friendly?
Search engines don’t see websites as humans do. Moz gives an example of what a website looks like to humans (left), and how search engines see it (right):
What a website looks like to humans (left) and what search engines see (right)
This particular website does not have indexable content because of the way it’s been designed.
When search engines see your website as it does the one on the right side, it doesn’t know how to judge the relevancy of your site, and if it doesn’t know that, it can’t give you a high search ranking.
Because the mission of a search engine is to match user’s searches to the best content.
You wouldn’t think it, but not all website designers understand how search engines work. So when you have a multitude of “cheap website design” offers scattered on the Internet, and tons of WordPress themes to choose from, not all of them will be optimized for search engines to easily access.
To be search engine friendly, your website needs to:
- Have indexable content and crawlable link structure.
- Search engine friendly navigation.
- Contain enough content.
- Be designed to be viewed comfortably from all types of devices.
- Be coded properly.
- Load fast.
Are you providing value-adding information?
Get the content right, and you’ll fix most of your site traffic issues. Uploading search engine optimized content can get complex, but if you’re uploading content that provides value to your readers, half the battle is won.
Grab their attention with great quality content.
Providing value-add information is a common problem for start-ups, because it’s often the website owner who needs to write the content, and the content is often poor because the writer is well, not a writer.
But here’s how poor content affects your search engine score: when people land on your website and find sucky content, they simply click off and to another website. This is called “bounce rate”, and when your bounce rate is high, it signals to search engines that the content is not addressing user’s needs. The result is a poor ranking.
Are you uploading content regularly?
The majority of start-up websites have very thin content. Most don’t write a blog, and if they do, they either don’t blog regularly, or they add bad content, which we’ve covered.
Search engines use content to decipher relevancy, which determines search ranking. The more pages you have on your website, the higher your ranking will be.
Learn how fresh content impacts your search ranking.
Is your content search engine optimized?
Here’s where things get complex for most start-up website owners: optimizing content for search engines. It can all seem so daunting.
But, if you’re determined to improve your site traffic – and you have to if you want a successful online business, then you have to learn to master this stuff, remembering that even pros were once beginners.
Neil Patel says, “The real work of SEO is done by you, with your writing and blogging. SEO is more about creating kickass content then it is about jiggering little technical details.”
What makes content search engine optimized?
- Keywords that are used in the content, in title tags, headers, and the URL
- Post categories
- Length of content
- Links in the content
- SEO optimized images
In summary
Most start-up websites fail because of lack of site traffic.
To increase the amount of people who visit your website:
- Make sure your website design is search engine friendly
- Provide value-add content written for your target audience
- Blog regularly
- Search engine optimize your content
This is a guest post by Dvora Goldstein. She is a freelance writer residing in Tel Aviv, Israel with 5 years of internet marketing experience. She frequently writes about SEO, Social media and all-things blogging. Follow Dvora on @DvoraGoldstein.