By: Lazar Bošković, creative director, AgitPROP
You have a website, but you don’t have visitors on it? You assume that the content, design and programming of the website are made to the professional web standards? What’s wrong then?
Let us consider in which ways visitors find out about the address of your website, and then decide to come and visit it. There are a total of five possible channels through which visitors are coming to a site, and so they are seen by the Google Analytics:
1. Direct visits
Visit to a website in this way happens when a visitor directly types the address of the site (domain) or some of its web pages (URLs) in a web browser or has already had it bookmarked or stored in the browser history.
Responsible for this kind of visits are often your off-line promotional activities, because it is likely that the visitor learned your address through your print promotional materials or has seen or heard about you in the media or elsewhere on vehicles or billboards.
2. Organic Search
Yes, these are the so called free search results on one of the web browsers, where visitors, through keywords, are coming to your website. This is the positioning in search results for which you haven’t paid the required keywords.
However, this means that you have justifiably paid someone who did the SEO optimization of your website. Search engine optimization involves a variety of things, but in this case the most important part of the SEO refers to work on the content of the website. Professionally written text of the site, according to all the rules of SEO, is crucial for a successful organic search.
3. Social
Sharing of content through social media leads to a large number of visitors to the site. In this case it refers only to traffic from social networks that is not marked as paid ads, and these are what is called earned media – users voluntarily shared a link to your content or have simply clicked on what you yourself have shared.
In this case, the SMO optimization of the website is crucial, for easy sharing of content. Social Media Optimization is not merely the existence of buttons for sharing, but also a technical adaptation of the website so that it has appropriate headlines and brief descriptions of content and customized illustrations that are pulled when content is shared. Of course, the relevance of the content for the target group is of paramount importance.
4. Referrals
Traffic to the site coming from many sources, that is, websites that are not social networks, is recorded as a referral that points to your site. The more links to your site from other relevant sites – the larger the referral influx of visitors.
Of course, here as well the crucial element is the quality of content that you offer on your site, because it is one of the main reasons why someone else would put your link on their site.
5. Paid channels
Even if all the above ways of bringing visitors to the site have given good results, it is sometimes necessary to pay for online advertising. In fact, the same is true if the previous methods proved to be bad, although the question then is why promote a badly done website?
Options of online advertising are constantly being improved and include networks of multimedia advertising, paid search, e-mail advertising and other forms of advertising. If you opt for e-mail advertising, make sure it’s not spamming, or you risk falling into disrepute.
Conclusion
If you don’t have visitors on your website, you’re probably doing the content wrong, or you’re not communicating its existence properly to the world, because all five of the above-mentioned ways of bringing visitors come down to this. Actually, either what you offer doesn’t interest anyone (at least not in the way that you presented it) or no one knows or can’t find what you offer in a sea of websites.
And if you do have visitors, but you don’t have sales … well, that’s a completely different story …
