Every business owners’ dream is for their website to have as much search engine traffic as I-45 in north Houston at quitting time, FM 1960 at any time of the day, or Fannin Street after a Texans’ game. But why isn’t your site getting that kind of traffic? Older sites, like worn out old roads, will start to see less traffic over time and slide on search engine results (SERPS).
Here’s some advice from iTVibes, Website Design and Marketing Company, in the north Houston/The Woodlands area, on how to get your website’s search engine traffic flowing again:
Outdated Content
Outdated content is the biggest problem with older websites. In most cases, websites haven’t been updated since they were first created. That shows your potential clients, customers, and users that you either don’t care or you are too lazy to make weekly, monthly or yearly updates. Google is watching, too. They will punish websites that are stale and they’ll route your traffic somewhere else.
You don’t have to constantly revise your entire website’s content, photos, or design, but you should update your core pages as much as possible. Re-write some of the content and include new keywords. You need to update your blog and current event pages weekly. The best way to keep a constant flow of fresh content is to have a blog page added to your website. Try to post a new blog at least once a week. Optimal days to post blogs are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays. Users and search engines like to see new blogs posted on a regular basis.
Confusing Design
Complex is out. Simple is in. Users don’t want to see multiple menus and navigation bars confusing them, tons of buttons and icons jumping at them, and banners scaring them off. In recent years users have made their voices heard and they don’t want a bunch of junk cluttering up their favorite websites. They don’t have time to navigate for hours, read unnecessary text, and try to locate items they need to purchase right away. The want things simple and easy to find.
It’s okay if you don’t have the budget for a complete face-lift of your website. However, you should at least rethink your menu navigation to make sure it’s user friendly and all of the links still work. Once you completed that you can begin looking at the overall design and improve over-time what you can afford. Try to use fewer but larger high-quality images and graphics, update font types, and eventually add a video.
Lacking SEO
What’s SEO? Search Engine Optimization. Still confused? Don’t worry, most people are. Search Engine Land defines it as, “the process of getting traffic from the ‘free,’ ‘organic,’ ‘editorial’ or ‘natural’ listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.”
Okay. What does this mean for your website? Well, it depends, but if this process hasn’t been done properly or at all on your website, things can get bad. Like no search engine traffic…AT ALL. If you haven’t looked at the SEO for your website in a while or if you didn’t do the original SEO, this is a must! Good news is this can all be fixed with hiring the team at iTVibes.