Is Your Website Worth Visiting?

You’ve built your website and have taken it live. Its been submitted to search engines and directories. And you perhaps you have even been able to acquire high quality links from other websites. Even so, visitors are few and far in between. What could be wrong?

If your traffic is lower than you’d like or your sales are stagnant, then its probably a good idea to ask yourself "is your website is worth visiting?". To determine the answer, you should consider the following questions:

Is There A Market for Your Products Or Services?

To be successful, your website must offer something useful to its visitors. In other words, if your website provides a service that is not in demand, you will receive very few visitors. So when analyzing your website, be sure to identify your target market and create something that will appeal to them.

Will Your Visitors Have A Reason To Return?

Once you’ve verified that there is indeed an audience for your website, you’ll also need to provide useful content. The type of useful content that you will need depends on your website. But we’ve listed some guidelines below:

• Well researched and accurate content.
• Easily navigable. Be sure to provide a consistent and clear navigation scheme.
• Grammatically correct and free of spelling errors.
• Well written. 

Additionally, in order to encourage visitors to return to your website, it is important to give them a good incentive, such as fresh content. This fresh content can be in the form of new articles, poll and contest results, or user submitted content. It is also a good idea to build a mailing list. This way, you can personally remind users to revisit your website when something is new.

Do Your Titles and Descriptions Generate Clicks?

It is also a good idea to optimize your site for maximum click-throughs. For example, your website might have been optimized for keywords so that it can show up at the top of search engine results pages. Unfortunately, users do not use the same metrics as search engines. As a result, you will need to balance search engine optimization with having well written page titles and descriptions.

When viewed on search engine results pages, your titles and descriptions should inspire a web surfer to click. Titles should be descriptive and include a call to action. Similarly, descriptions should whet the surfers appetite. Perhaps, you can include a well-written abstract of a page. Be as descriptive as possible, while helping the surfer understand that they need to visit your website.

If the answer to any of the bolded questions above is ‘No’, then your website needs some work. Incorporating these suggestions into your website will go a long way towards increasing your website’s traffic and improving conversions and visitor loyalty.