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What’s Wrong When Your Web Site is Ineffective?

By Virginia Lawrence

Sometimes a Web site seems to evoke little response. When that happens, it’s important to research all aspects of the visitors and their experience.

1. How many people are searching on your chosen keywords?

This is an extremely important question. When a Web site is optimized, it’s optimized for selected keyword phrases. If only three people are searching on your chosen keywords each month, you’d be doing very well to get two of those people to visit your site. However, having only two visitors per month will not make your site successful.

Do the research. Find out how people are searching when they are looking for what you offer. Then optimize the Web site for those keywords.

2. How many people are visiting the site, and what keywords did they search on to get there?

When you know how many people are searching on your favored keywords, and you know how many of those people arrived at your site, you have a good idea of the effectiveness of your online marketing. If 10,000 people search on your keywords each month, but only 20 of those people arrive at your Web site, you know that it’s time to ramp up the online marketing.

A lack of visitors for a set of popular keywords can be due to:

• Minimal search engine optimization done on the Web site.
• Lackluster descriptions appearing in the search engine listings.
• No pay-per-click ads, or badly-written pay-per-click ads.

3. How many of the people who visit the site actually respond to the offer?

When response from site visitors is extremely low, that can be due to:

1. Having the wrong offer for the people who are visiting the site. Here’s where you can see the need to keep your target market in mind at all times. You must aim your marketing to attract your target market. Then you must structure your offer specifically for that target market.
2. Having no call to action. Web site visitors aren’t good at guessing. You must tell them what to do. Tell them to buy now or to call you now for more information, whichever response you prefer.

When you have little response to your Web site, unearthing the reasons for the dearth of visitors takes time and effort. But only when you know why the response has been minimal can you take steps to increase the response and make your Web site successful.

–© 2004 Virginia Lawrence, Ph.D. SPAWN's Webmaster and Technology Editor, Virginia is a professional Web Developer and Online Marketing Consultant. She routinely places client sites on the first page of a Google search. Contact her at virginia@spawn.org or visit her Web site at http://www.cognitext.com.

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