marketing, website, salesSo I’m starting a business this summer (actually, already started: http://www.standout.video/ ). I’m basically being paid to make intros, outros, and edited videos. But like I said, I already kind of started this business. It’s been up for about a month now, and things have been pretty slow. I only had 1 customer throughout the course of one month and it was a relative.
I even:
Yet, despite my efforts, it still had bare minimum traffic. So that’s why I’m here, does anyone have any advice on how I could earn more customers and make more profit?
Unfortunately I don't know exactly why you haven't been getting the website traffic you want, but I've been through the same experience and learned a lot from these search engine optimization tips:
Install Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a must-have for any website, providing information on traffic, visitor information, as well as SEO standings.
- Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools: The two tools help you keep track of high your content is ranking on the respective search engine.
- Google Analytics Plugin & YoastSEO: The Google Analytics plugin integrates with WordPress, showing you information on your rankings right in the WordPress dashboard. YoastSEO, on the other hand, is a must-have for optimizing new pages. It acts as a checklist for the best-practices you need to keep in mind for optimizing your new pages.
- Sitemaps and Robots: A Sitemp.xml helps the search engine crawlers index your website easier. While at a glance this might seem too technical, it’s not – all you have to do is visit xml-sitemaps.com and submit your website. Then, you go to Google Webmaster and add the sitemap. Or, if you’re using WordPress, you can just use YoastSEO as mentioned in the previous point. Robots are the “crawlers” that index your website. Robots.txt is an instruction file on your website, telling the crawler which parts of the website to index. As with Sitemaps, this isn’t hard nor technical at all. You can learn how to create a Robots.txt here.
Setup Social Media Pages & Social Shares: Whether or not social media affects ranking or not is up to debate. Whichever the case may be, setting up your social media profiles and adding social shares to your content never hurts. (General Audience: Facebook, Twitter / B2B: LinkedIn / Niche: Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube / Local: Yelp)
Check for Redirects and Broken Links: You can use Screaming Frog to check for any redirects or broken links on the website. Download the software, run it on your website, and fix any issues you might encounter.
Optimize Website Load Speed: One of the ranking factors for Google is the bounce rate. Meaning, how many people who open your link on search stick around or bounce off. If your website takes more than 4 seconds to load, there’s a good chance a lot of the users will bounce off. So, use the Google PageSpeed Insights to check the load time of your website and fix it accordingly.
Make the Website Mobile-Friendly: Over 80% of internet users browse from their smartphones. So, if your website is not mobile-friendly, those users won’t stick around, increasing your bounce rate and hurting your rankings. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to see how well your website fares with mobile users. Other than that, you need to make the website more responsive on mobile, which takes some tech know-how.
Optimize the Homepage for the Main Keywords: Whatever the purpose of the website, there’s usually a couple of main keywords you’d like to rank for. Use one H1 tag mentioning your main keyword and what the website or business is about. You can use the other keywords in regular paragraphs on the homepage. Then, you need to create a meta title and description. This is what pops up when someone finds your website on Google as the title or description.
Index the Website & Launch! This is arguably one of the most important parts of the SEO checklist: you installed all the tools, optimized the website, so now it’s time to “launch.” Go here, submit your website link, and give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back!
The page I linked to at the top goes into more detail, but hopefully this helps. Good luck!
As with Daniella Bursak's answer, I don't know specifically why your website isn't getting much traffic. However, I have two thoughts.
First, have you identified your target market? Do you know if there are enough customers who want a service like yours at the price you are charging? I've had issues with that in the past -- not enough potential customers!
Second, do you know how to reach those specific people? In your question, you mentioned trying 4 things. There are probably a dozen other things you can try to reach your target customers. Many of them are low cost or no cost. Read any of the Guerilla Marketing resources you can find (except for the Wikipedia page, which is woefully unhelpful in my opinion!). For example, this checklist lists 100 inexpensive or free marketing "weapons" you can use to reach potential customers. Develop a robust marketing plan that includes a marketing calendar, and follow it.
One last point: marketing isn't an event, it's a process. Plan to continue marketing for several months (or years). When people see the same marketing message over and over, they'll think of your service when they are finally ready to buy. Once they become customers, if they're happy they'll tell other people too. It takes time.
That’s very normal, there are others who cannot have a good traffic to their website even after a year, you have to understand two rules: A little time to give a great traffic= A large invest in ads and marketing Little invest in ads or marketing= long time to get a great traffic
I hope you can get some invest in branding your products, including Google Adwards, SNS CPC.
Other way: if you do not have a budget for investment, please use google keyword tools and make some keywords for your products, write some seo articles and submit to your website.With time goes by, you will get some traffic if the quality of your articles is good enough.
Theres more to getting customers then just placing ads and having a website. You have to know your target audience n what they like n that takes research on your end. After looking at your website i can tell u now the site is not mobile friendly at all so that is a huge problem n your rank in google is suffering from it alot.
My suggestion would be to focus on getting a mobile friendly site n making sure the seo is done correctly, any attempt to trick google with black hats seo tricks will hurt you alot more then they help trust me!! Find a reputable seo consultant to help you if your new to seo or try looking more into google adwords to help you start off there are pros n cons to adwords but i find it very helpful in getting started n getting your business name out there quickly. Also check out fiverr or upwork for some help u may be able to find someone to fix the website for you, do your seo (id be skeptical about seo services ), content writing and more. Also try doing some tutorials on youtube for wat you do cause me myself ive tried doing what u do n its hard but i love watching tutorials on it im currently teaching myself adobe illustrator from watching YouTube tutorials
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