How do I get more website visitors?

There’s a few simple things to remember:

Don’t get hung up on pretty pictures and leading-edge graphic design. The search engines can’t read pictures, and unless your colour scheme is awful, you’d have to cause some serious grief to put off a potential customer.

If you can’t clearly define what your website is for, how could you expect a visitor to know? Too much information – and too many ‘look at me’ messages – just crowds out your real message. It also dilutes down the impact of any of your keywords that are important for search engines to rank your website.

It’s not about quantity, but quality. Would you prefer 1000 visitors resulting in 1 sale, or 100 visitors resulting in 2 sales? Attracting website visitors costs you money (even if it’s only your time). It’s easier to double your conversion rate than it is to double your visitors. In fact, many of your visitors bounce straight back out of your website becuase it didn’t contain the information they were looking for.

I recently had a conversation with a jeweller. They wanted photos of their jewellery, instead of text. Fortunately, they understood that visitors must first find their website, and when they do, they will be looking for information – usually an answer to a question. If the jeweller’s website answers their questions, they’ve just taken the first step to building trust, and hopefully, the anonymous website visitor will pick up the phone and call the jeweller, or better still, walk through the front door of their shop. That’s when the REAL service can begin.