MBA1400 Q&A Wednesday: Why is my website not getting any traffic?

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If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar100,mba.net Today's question is from Russ and Russ asks. I've launched my website for about seven months now, but it's getting little to no traffic. I publish a blog post once a week, but I'm getting less than 1,000 visitors a month. Can you help? Thanks for the question Russ. Yes, I can help. I'm gonna give you some small and quick tips you can do immediately to help your traffic numbers. I first wanna say that the silver lining is that you are getting some traffic, okay? You have a thousand people coming to your website every month or a little under that. So people can't access your site. It just might be hard or they're not finding it Easily. We'll talk about that in a moment. There's a lot of things you can do to instantly improve your search engine optimization so you can be found easily and get more traffic on your website. And we're gonna get through some of these today to help Russ out and for everybody else who's listening. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Russ asked the question, why is his site not getting any traffic? He's getting less than a thousand visitors a month. He's not so happy about that. He's been doing this for seven months now, been blogging every week, looking for some advice. So I wanna start today's lesson, today's answer to Russ's question with a little bit of a reminder, a reality check, so to speak. There are millions upon millions of websites on the Internet. In fact, internetlivestats.com estimates 1.5 billion websites. So you could say it's a crowded place. How will you stand out from the 1.5 billion other websites? It's a real question. How will you get people to come to your website? What are ways you can make it easier? What are ways for you to increase that traffic? Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about what our goal should be. Our goal should be a upward trend. We need to see traffic increasing over time. So let's say you have a thousand visitors this month. Your goal should maybe be 2,000 next month, 3,000, 4,000, 10,000 by the end of the year, something like that. Okay, you want to have some goals, some milestones for yourself, so at least you see an upward trend. Like Peter Drucker says, what doesn't get measured doesn't get managed. So make sure that you have some sort of measurement, some sort of goals or milestones for you to track and to hit. There are many tools to track your traffic. The free and easy one is Google Analytics. You should have Google Analytics, the code installed on your website. That way you can track traffic and see which pages are getting the most traffic, which ones are not, and so you can track these trends. Okay, there's a few things you can do today that will help your traffic, your search engine optimization, and be more Google friendly. That is simple to do. Okay, the first thing is to get an SSL certificate. And this is a certificate you can get on your domain that allows your domain to be HTTPs and not just HTTP. Google has outright stated that they will prefer, they will preference, they will send more traffic for SEO to sites that are HTTPs, they're more secure now. I don't know, Russ, what you're using for your website, whether you're hosting it on Squarespace or you're hosting it on your own server, or you're using a WordPress site, or you're doing something, something entirely different. Contact your web host. Find out if they offer SSL certificates. Sometimes it's free. You know, the host provides it for free with your plan. Sometimes you have to pay and it's like 10 or 15 bucks a year. But it's well worth it. This means that, you know, if you ever noticed on the browser, when you go to a website that's ht. For example, if you want to go to Webinar Ninja, just go to webinarninja.com and you'll see that in the browser bar it says HTTPs and you'll see a little lock as an icon. This means it's a more secure site and not just HTTP. This is a small thing you can do in a few minutes by contacting your host and it's going to help your site tremendously. Google will not rank you as high if you're not HTTP, so make sure you do that. The next thing is that you need to make sure that you're indexed with Google. Some people think this is automatic. It is pretty much automatic. You've been around for about seven always best to register your site with Google. So you can index the site, you can just go to Google Site Manager and you can just basically sign up. It's free and you can tell Google, hey, here's my site, and I would do this after your HTTPs and it will say, thanks. Now we can index that site and you can easily find yourself on Google. Third, your website speed and page loading is incredibly important to your search engine optimization and getting traffic. This includes, you know, people searching you on Google and being ranked high. But it also includes people just going to a website and having a bad experience and never coming back and not referring your website to other people. You gotta make sure that your pages load as quickly as possible. Also, Google offers this service for free. It's called Page Speed Insights. You can Google that and you can just put your domain name in there and you'll see how long it takes for your site to load or any page on your site to loads. You could just put the page URL right there on the page. Site Insights. So what this does is it gives you a score and it also tells you where your site is slowing down. What are some things that are bogging your Site down. It could be the sizes of the images that are on your site. Maybe you can make them smaller. We're talking about the actual size of the memory it's taking, not the actual dimensions. You can have a image that's a thousand by a thousand pixels, that's five megabytes and the same exact image is 200 kilobytes. So you could definitely help your speed of your pages by lowering the sizes of your images or some other things that it will tell you to correct that you can easily do this all can be done today, you know, you can just easily do this, change some things around on your website so your pages load faster. The next thing you can do to really help you get found on Google and people find your blog posts that you've been writing every week, which is fantastic, is you got to do some on page SEO. This is basically best practices to be able to be found on search engines. And you can Google this term on page SEO techniques and you can find tons of guides. I know Ahrefs guide is very good and it tells you what you need to do. Every time you write a blog post to easily be found, what you should do in terms of your titles, your headings, how to write your description, so you're shown up in the description in Google for those key terms. If you're using something like WordPress, you should have some way to put in your SEO keywords and descriptions like a plugin, like Yoast. If you're using another service, then that service should have some way to be able to do some on page SEO as well as some metadata. This is gonna take some time. You're gonna have to kind of go back to all your blog posts and kind of refactor them, redo them and make them more search engine friendly. If you go to any of these guides on your Google, search for on page SEO like the HRF one I mentioned and just walk through the steps. It's pretty self explanatory, but there are some things you need to do. They're like best practices so that your blog posts actually get found. When people search the key terms of your blog posts, they find them on Google. This will give you more traffic. My next piece of advice is something that you probably heard of but really haven't done much with. Okay. And that's to have a marketing plan for your content. It's not just important for you to write great content and to publish on a regular basis like you're doing, but you have to have a plan to market your content. People have to find out about the great content you're writing. A lot of people are worried about writing blog posts after blog post and they're not sharing the blog posts that they're actually writing. So do you have a marketing share these great pieces of content, whether it's on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all that kind of stuff, or what about a newsletter? Get your people to check out the blog post and share with others. Run a contest. You can run ads so you can boost posts off social. You can cross promote, you can guest post. There's a lot of things you can do, but you have to have some sort of marketing plan to market the content that's on your website. You got to be able to market your business, which is your website. Okay? It's not enough for me just to open a physical store. I have to put up flyers, I have to do some advertising. I gotta, you know, advertise. I have to find a way to get people through the door. A lot of people forget that part when it comes to content and traffic. So market the content you have and continue to produce. Have a plan in place.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's episode, Russ, great question about traffic. I'm proud that you're publishing regularly, but take on the tips I gave you today. These are small, simple things that you can do along with having a marketing plan with all the content. You got to amplify that message. You got to get it out there and let people know to come to this store, come to this site, come to this blog. I got good stuff here. You got to sell them on the content. This should get you going. This should boost your site and start tracking your trends. Start seeing that progression, set some goals, and do everything you can to hit those marks. Thank you so much for listening. And if you're listening right now and you have a question in your head about your business, email me over@omar00mba.net I'll make sure I answer your question right here on Q and A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Understand your market as well. Understand what kind of traffic you should be expecting if you're in a very, very niche market. If your site is all about dads who love to iron very niche, right? Then understand what is the maximum traffic? What is the size of that market that I'm actually going after? You might find that if you hit 300,000 visitors a month, that's like 20% of the whole market. So understand the market you're in, the niche you're in, and what's the potential of your traffic. This will align your expectations with the reality of your actual marketplace. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.