Why Your Website Is Not Getting Traffic

Post Updated: 23 December 2023

There are many possible reasons why your website is not getting traffic. Let me explain the important ones below. #9 is often overlooked, but it could be the main culprit.

Businesses often want to create a website to display their services or products when establishing their online brand.

That’s all they care about.

What they often forget is that it is not enough to just create a website.

To make your website convert visitors into customers, you need to set up certain things.

But the website owners are not at fault.

It’s the web designer’s job to use tricks that will make visitors stop and check what you have to offer.

9 Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Getting Traffic

If you have a website that is not converting, then you need to pay attention to the yins and yangs below:

Brand Trust

Trust is the most important thing on the internet when it concerns making buying decisions. It used to be very easy some years back. But right now, people don’t trust the online market any more. 

And can you blame them? Many people have lost millions trying to purchase a service or product online due to fake advertisements and clickbaits.

But there’s a way to make your customers trust you and buy from you over and over again. The proper way to build your online brand is to give value to your customers first before trying to sell or pitch them anything.

Trying to sell first is where many brands get it wrong. They are accustomed to seeing TV ads and ad boards, thinking the same approach works online. 

When you tell your visitor to “buy now”, they will mostly do the opposite if they don’t trust you, yet.

A lot of things go through your visitor’s mind. They will ask questions like: Do I know you? Or how will I know this is legit?

When you visit YouTube, you’ll see many people using this approach to gain their visitors’ trust.

YouTubers often create content that teaches people something (Value) before pitching (Selling) them something.

Take, for example. Let’s say you are in the beauty niche, and the product you are trying to sell is a female wig.

To improve visitor conversion, consider making a video or article titled “Top 3 Reliable Websites for High-Quality Wigs”.

Isn’t it obvious that anyone interested in buying a wig would want to hear what you have to say?

This could be the time to gently pitch your website as one of the most “trusted” places online that sell quality wigs. Don’t push it, however.

If a visitor wants to buy something from you, they will when the trust is earned. And the only way they’ll ever trust you is if you’ve added value to their lives.

Watch the video below to understand this concept of marketing better.

If you offer services online, you can also direct your visitors to your case studies. It will prove to your visitors that some people out there trust you and that you have enough experience in your niche.

Poor SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the butter to any website’s bread. Brands that understand how to do proper SEO achieve success faster.

SEO is “key” if you want to be super successful online. But the SEO game has become very challenging over the years, and it’ll keep getting harder, I’m afraid.

In the past, ranking for a keyword was simple. You just needed to create a 600-word content, repeat your keyword many times in the post, and that’s it! You hit Google’s first page in a few weeks.

Fast-forward to today: creating a 2000-word article isn’t enough to rank you for your desired keyword any more. Although the trend is now reversing, and you can now rank sites in 2024 with a 500-word article..

When trying to rank for a keyword on search engines, there are two things you must pay attention to — On-page and Off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is the art of tweaking your website to conform with search engine standards. Your site will look like jargon in the eyes of search engine spiders if your on-page SEO is not properly done.

To make sure your on-page SEO is “perfect”. Certain things must be put into place. You have to link your articles to one another, add image Alt attributes, meta description, and so on.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is what search engines think other people think about your website. That is, how many people are talking about your content and how are they engaging with it. 

On-page SEO is important and can be challenging, despite being straightforward.

Google wants to serve only the best content to its users. So they use the quality of backlinks and engagements from other websites in your niche as a major ranking factor.

If many people share and link back to your article, Google is likely to rank it on the first page.

So when you create great content that gives value, don’t be afraid to ask your audience or people in your niche to share and link back to your article.

No Call-to-Action (CTA)

Some people complain that they have a decent number of visitors coming to their website every month. Still, they are not converting into customers.

After educating your audience about a subject, make sure to recommend your product or service in a stylish way.

Many people create content without encouraging visitors to take action. You might think it’s obvious to the visitor that you want them to act now, but most of the time, they miss the point. 

People are just too busy with their own lives, and our attention span is similar to that of a goldfish. Not telling your visitors to take action could also be the reason your website is not converting.

Remember, don’t be afraid to ask your visitors to take action, but make sure you’ve given value to them first. VALUE should always come first!

Too Many Distractions

We, as a website design company, often hear clients asking for things that we know won’t benefit them or their audience.

We often hear clients say; “I want animations here and there” or “I want this to pop up.” 

A lot of website owners focus on what they think is right instead of what their audience would love.

Having too many animations on your website, for example, distracts many of your visitors. There’s a principle we always follow when designing websites for clients. 

We only want to K.I.S.S you! That is, we want to KEEP IT SHORT AND SIMPLE for you.

A clean and simple website is more effective at attracting visitors than one with lots of images.

So when next you want to create a new website or redesign your old one, always have it at the back of your mind that it’s always better to KISS!

No SSL Certificate

Many people are now starting to understand how websites work and how to protect themselves better online.

One way to make sure your privacy is not compromised is to only visit sites that have the padlock sign in front of their domain name. Why?

Well… You risk getting your account hacked or your credit card details stolen by hackers if that padlock symbol is missing.

To make sure you get the sales you want, install an SSL certificate on your website. If you are low on budget, you can always use free ones from Cloudflare or Let’s Encrypt.

Your customers must feel safe before they buy from you. If you don’t have that padlock sign or “https://” in front of your domain, your sales will likely drop. 

Even Google won’t give you the traffic boost you deserve if you don’t have SSL certificates installed on your site.

Poor Website Design

We’ve all been to that website that looks horrible. The website that has too many colours, and many texts that don’t blend with images. You know now; that website with the same desktop layout on the phones.

These are the worst kind of websites, and you don’t want to fall into that category.

According to Search Engine Land, more than 60% of searches now come from mobile phones. That means we should focus on making our website as mobile-friendly as possible, right?

But many websites out there still have poor website layouts. Yet, they complain that their website isn’t getting enough traffic from Google. You wan steal am?

If you want to increase your online sales, you need to make sure your website looks great both on a PC and mobile. 

Your Niche is Too Broad

There’s a famous saying that the “jack of all trades is a master of none”. 

Before creating your online store or website, it’s important to consider who your audience is and what they want.

Finding the right answer to those questions is what guarantees your success online.

Many business owners get this wrong by creating a store that has different products in various niches. Come on. You are not Jumia abi Amazon!

Competition from other e-commerce giants is a negative signal for your business, despite the possibility of making some money.

You’d agree with me that it makes sense to sell to an audience you know, understand how they think, and exactly what they want. 

Finding information about a specific audience is easier than targeting a general audience.

Choosing to target a general audience could be the reason why your website is not getting customers too. It’s always better to focus on a niche you understand well.

Poor Marketing

Using the wrong marketing strategy is not just a problem you find online, it is quite common offline too. Many businesses don’t focus on marketing any more. Yet, they somehow expect a miracle to happen with their sales. 

Coca-Cola spends around 20% of its entire profit on marketing alone. Yet, we wonder why Coca-Cola is everywhere!

If you want to grow your business, you need to focus on marketing, and Coca-Cola understands that.

Doing SEO is one way to market your service or product to people searching for it online. 

Doing SEO requires a significant amount of discipline, time, and money. This is especially true if you choose to hire an SEO agency like us to handle it for you.

Another way to generate traffic for your website is to use paid advertising. It is by far the fastest way to generate sales for your business.

There are many options out there, such as social media marketing, native, push advertising, and so on.

So, if you want to make money online, you should consider paying for adverts for your business.

Slow Website Speed

A good website speed is critical if you want to make money online as a Nigerian. The average user waits about 5 seconds or less for a website to load before exiting the page. 

If your website takes more than that to load entirely, then it’s one of the reasons why your website is not getting customers.

You should know that people are very busy in their lives, and they don’t have the extra time for your website to load.

To know your website’s speed, you can use services like GTmetrix or Pingdom. I strongly urge you to try Gtmetrix. 

Both tools determine why your website is slow, but Gtmetrix gives additional tips to improve your score, especially for WordPress users.

You should know that there might be other reasons your website is slow.

While most of the time it’s due to poor website optimizations, your web hosting company can be a huge factor when it comes to the matter of speed. This is why we always recommend HostTolet as the best option in Nigeria.

Conclusion

I hope my suggestions will help you get traffic on your website or blog.

And I strongly believe you will start implementing some tips described here to help boost your online sales soon. 

To make things simpler for you, here are the common reasons why your website is not getting traffic:

• Brand trust issues
• Slow website speed
• Poor marketing
• Lack of CTA buttons
• Poor website design

If you need help tackling any of the problems above for your business, you can always reach out to us to fix it for you.