The Problem with Your Web Site May Not be a Lack of Search Engine Traffic

Web site owners call me up and ask me to help them get more traffic to their site. But here's the thing. You can generate all the traffic in the world to your site and, if nobody buys, then what good does it do?

• They come.
• They look.
• They say yech!
• They hit the back button.

Unless what you're peddling is so compelling, unique or of such incredible value, people will leave, and quickly; within 8 seconds if some of the gurus I read are to be believed.

Shop.org reports that the average conversion rate for a commerce web site is 2% or less. Think about it... If 98 out of 100 people walked into a Burger King, a grocery store or Old Navy and left without buying or even browsing don't you think that alarms would be sounding from here to Poughkeepsie? Don't you think that hordes of merchandisers, marketers, corporate bigwigs and product managers would be pulling out their hair looking for a solution to stop the bleeding?

Yet on the web it seems to be accepted as the nature of the beast. That the solution is more traffic or that the problem is that they aren't getting the right kind of traffic. But the real issue, I'm convinced, is that fundamentally their sites are flawed. They don't invite, compel, persuade visitors to transact with them. In fact, they do just the opposite. They confound, confuse and frustrate those ready, willing and able to buy.

The other day, for example, I looked at a site. The owner wants more traffic yet on the home page there was only one tiny picture of a seasonal product displayed, a garble of text composed solely of every possible keyword or phrase they could think of, and a link to an off site eshop with something I've never seen before -- a closed sign. Below the closed sign was an email link that you could click if you wanted "immediate" assistance. No thanks. I'll just click the back button.

The thing of it is that I'm pretty sure if I walked into his bricks & mortar operation I'd find a well-lit, nicely merchandised operation with an attentive staff ready to meet my every need. Why would he think that the web would require anything less?

My advice, fix your site first. Make it welcoming, compelling, inviting, friendly ... an easy and desireable place to do business and then worry about traffic. Here's a quick quiz ... find 5 competing sites on the web and rank them according to their appeal to you as a consumer; then assign your site a ranking against those 5. If you haven't given yourself a 1 or maybe a 2 then you have work to do because trying harder may work for Avis but it's unlikely it will work for you.

The old riddle asks, "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there, does it make a sound?" Rephrased for the web the question is, "If a shopper, or 10 thousand, visits my site and does not buy does anybody care?"

Thanks for reading...

tom.gray@gemsolv.com
GeMSolv.com