As a small business, entrepreneur, or organization leader, you spend a lot of time sweating the details on your website. You agonize over each image selection and debate the relative benefit of words like “customer-driven” and “best-in-class”. You make sure that you have all of the relevant details in there, like how to contact you or where to buy your stuff. But you check your site stats every day and they are underwhelming at best.
Or you talk to people—potential customers or clients—who are in your key demographic and they say things like “oh, you have a website?” So frustrating for the digital thought leader that you are!
What is the remedy? Why, oh why, has no one seen your website?
Your URL is obscure.
So many people in this digital day and age assume that if someone is interested in your business, they will be able to guess what your URL is. And even if you tell people your site address, if it’s not something they can relate back to you, chances are they’re going to forget it. So if your business name (or personal name) is something that is very different from your site URL, it’s time to do some domain shopping. There are a lot of interesting domain generator tools out there that can provide suggestions.
You haven’t invited them.
How often do you tell people about your website? Is it on your business card, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook page, and your Yelp profile? Do you include it in all of your prolific skywriting messages? If not, you haven’t really invited your prospective client base to check out your site.
It’s not search-ready.
More and more people are relying on search engines, from Google to Yahoo to YouTube to Yelp, to navigate to the ideal digital destination. If you haven’t made your site search-ready, you might never show up in those searches. Make sure that your site has the search engine optimization (SEO) basics—strong keyword rich titles, text-based content that would make sense to a person and search engine bot alike, and nothing nefarious (like hidden links to other sites or pages with just keywords but no real, valuable content).
There’s no reason to be there.
Let’s say you set up your website at the dawn of Internet time (circa 2000) and you haven’t touched it since. Why would anyone visit your site? It looks and feels outdated, and much of the content is probably stale or irrelevant. If people do stumble upon it, they’re certainly not going to tell others about it. So update your site for design and content at least once a year—bonus points for rapid content refreshers.
Now that you have the tools to break free from your digital wallflower chains, stand back and watch your web traffic grow!
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Rochelle Sanchirico is the head of marketing and analytics for Webs, provider of an easy-to-use, reliable and cost effective marketing platform specifically designed for the small business. She is responsible for leading the marketing strategy and execution, ranging from branding to search engine marketing to email marketing and promotions and also oversees the analytics team, which strives to provide data-based insights and recommendations to the business.