Traffic on My Website is Going Down

The reasons that people visit websites are many and hard to control. But if you've noticed that your traffic has significantly decreased there is probably something you can do about it. Of course, the first thing you need to do is find out why you have a decrease in traffic.

At The Click Depot, we regularly get phone calls from people who are suffering from this very problem - a rapid drop in website traffic. It appears everything on their website was going fine, but then the bottom seemed to drop out. When we investigate a website problem like this, we evaluate the site and come up with a complete list of possibilities for the decreased traffic. And then, we separate the list into two parts.  One list would contain "normal" reasons that you could have expected. Things such as a seasonal drop, or a change in the popularity of a specific product. There are ways to address those types of problems, but they are usually outside of the control of the webmaster.  It's the other list we should be concerned about.

First, let's cover some of the normal reasons that you might see a drop in your website traffic.  One very common reason is the seasonality of the product. If someone operates a website that sells snow removal equipment, the traffic will experience a considerable drop-off in the summer. Other products experience seasonal drop-offs that aren't so obvious but still might be the reason for the problem. Another common reason for such a decline might be that a temporarily popular product has reached its peak and is now traveling down its natural downward slope in the marketplace - the other side of the bell curve. These kinds of issues might be legitimate reasons that your website traffic seems to be taking a nosedive. 

Then again, the reasons for these declines in visitors might be something totally outside of the control of a webmaster. It could be a change in a marketing campaign, and nobody thought to tell you. Or perhaps the marketing budget has been reduced for a particular product, and you didn't get the memo. We could come up with dozens of possibilities, but once we can determine if those issues exist, they might explain the drop-off of visitors. However, if you perform a thorough investigation and there are no issues outside of the "website venue," you will need to dig deeper. Sometimes you will even need to look outside of your organization for the answer.

But before you move your investigation off-campus, you need to review all the recent changes to the website. Has the site been moved to new servers? Has there been a redesign of the site structure that affected the responsiveness? Has the company changed ISPs? Major changes such as these are often the cause for a significant decline in web visitors. If that might be the case, you need to investigate from the backend for internal problems. Then you need to re-test the website for ease-of-use, broken links, and overall readiness. While doing your investigation, approach it from both an insider's perspective as well as from the perspective of a new visitor to your website. If your visitors are often from other countries, navigate your site virtually from their locations. 

And finally, one of the most alarming reasons you may have seen this decline in visitors is because you have inadvertently done something to offend the Google web crawler. This penalty from Google can occur if some of the changes you made to your website have crossed the somewhat fuzzy line that Google has drawn with its webmaster guidelines. Of course, if you discover that this is the reason, correct it. But continue your investigation even after the correction, because there may be more than one cause for the drop in visitors.

Webmasters regularly offend Google search crawlers without even knowing it. You can offend the crawler without making any changes to your website. These offenses are because Google is constantly changing its search algorithm, and that can cause you problems. Maybe your site was compliant with Google's rules until they changed their algorithm. Essentially, Google moved the goalpost. These abrupt changes can be extremely problematic if their new algorithm bumps you down the search results ranking. You might get moved from the first page down to page two. Like many people say, page two doesn't even exist for the average user.

It would be in your best interest to regularly consult industry experts to keep informed of the changes in Google's algorithm. It's not unusual for Google to announce changes in its algorithm; these industry experts perform a considerable amount of research and are not shy about getting the word out. It's very likely that if you become aware of the changes in the algorithm, you would be able to adjust your website to avoid the decline in visitors.  The issue might be something as simple as changing the file naming format. Or, on the other hand, it might be something substantial such as the change in focus Google put on mobile devices with their Mobile-First-Indexing policy. Surprisingly, the Mobile-First-Indexing change caught a lot of people by surprise even though Google had announced this huge change well in advance.

While there's nothing you can do about Google and its constantly changing secret algorithms, there are things that you can do to reduce the impact they could have on your website. One of the most effective strategies that companies use to insulate themselves from this kind of issue is to utilize multiple strategies https://tcd.tcddevelopment.com/lead-nurturing-campaigns.html to bring customers to their websites. 

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing provides a great addition to an SEO strategy. Social media marketing does not depend on SEO for its success. Quite the opposite, SEO is helped by a successful social media marketing campaign. With social media marketing, you get to use powerhouses such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter to drive customers to your website. And there are other advantages to social media marketing campaigns then detaching yourself from depending on SEO for all of your traffic. 

For instance, with Facebook, you have access to very deep targeting and powerful marketing tools for your marketing - and they reach out to the largest community in history. Not only that, Facebook knows about the users of its platform, more than any company has ever known about their customers. And Facebook makes this knowledge available to his advertisers so they can reach out and put ads in front of the people that are most likely to buy their product. And these are customers that they would probably never meet without using Facebook.

Instagram is the same way. Facebook owns Instagram and makes the same kind of information available to its advertisers. You can also use LinkedIn for business-to-business marketing. Microsoft is the owner of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest business-to-business platform in the world and is a great marketing venue for millions of companies. 

Regardless of what social media platform you use, if you grow your local SEO strategy with social media marketing, you will insulate yourself from the possibility of visitor drop-off due to Google search engine changes. 

Sometimes you will run into a website problem that is too big to tackle alone. There are times when you need to call in the experts to hunt down an issue quickly. Or if you see the benefit of growing your current SEO campaign with a social media marketing campaign but don't have the experience to move forward with it, contact The Click Depot. We are experts at social media marketing campaigns. And we have been solving website traffic issues for as long as there have been websites. 

Marketing on Steroids

Social media marketing is like traditional marketing, except on steroids. With social media marketing, all of your prospective customers are concentrated in a few social media platforms. A social media strategy will help you effectively engage these potential customers and turn them into real paying customers - and even future advocates for your business. 

But in order to do this effectively, you will need to do more than post a few things on Facebook or Instagram. You are going to need an effective social media strategy that combines different tried-and-true social media tactics. These tactics include strategies such as local SEO for your website, Facebook Ads with videos or slide shows, or LinkedIn how-to articles with specific targeted keywords. It might even include a Pinterest marketing program using effective pictures of your product or an Instagram advertising campaign with funny or silly posts that use "influencers" to pump up your product. Simply posting occasionally on Facebook or LinkedIn won't hurt your business, but it probably won't bring new customers either.

POWERFUL TOOLS AND STRATEGIES

In order to turn these unknown and unidentified people into enthusiastic customers and later, advocates for your company, you must have an effective, well planned social media strategy. Fortunately, the tools that are available to help us identify and reach your ideal customers are extremely powerful and provided by these platforms themselves. In fact, when you understand these tools and tactics fully, you will see that they are simply mind-blowing. And, over the last couple of decades of social media evolution, there have been certain marketing approaches that have risen above the others for different types of industries and marketing goals.  

DIFFERENT PLATFORMS, DIFFERENT STRATEGIES

The strategies for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn all radically differ from each other. For instance, with Facebook, the marketing approach needs to be leaning toward the entertainment side of things with videos, slide shows, and engaging personal stories. People who are on Facebook are there during their free time, and they are looking to be entertained. Creative social campaigns such as an emotional and entertaining approach with videos, funny or touching stories, or pictures is the key to success on Facebook. However, on LinkedIn, this approach would be disastrous. 

This is because people are on LinkedIn for a different reason than when they are on Facebook. They are there to do business. LinkedIn is a place to meet other business people or learn things about how to operate your business. Using pictures and videos of kittens and puppies on LinkedIn could actually hurt your brand and drive away customers. This is true even though you may be talking to the exact same person as you did on Facebook. And it's the same thing the other way around. On LinkedIn, instructional "How to" posts can be very effective, and the length of the article needs to be longer, not shorter. Statistics show that LinkedIn articles of 1,500 - 2,000 words are the most shared by a 2-1 margin. But posting an article of that length on Facebook would be a total failure. With a long article like that on Facebook, you wouldn't even get a second glance.

Because these different platforms cater to people that have different goals, the marketing strategies and approaches need to be appropriate for each platform. Fortunately, we can use the characteristics of the various platforms in coordination with each other. There are very effective strategies for using multiple platforms simultaneously in a digital marketing program. For example, we can identify your ideal customer on Facebook, and then "remarket" to them on LinkedIn. Or the other way around. Using approaches like this, we can leverage the strengths of each different platform for different parts of our campaign.

TAILORED-MADE PROGRAMS

We know that there are no two businesses that are exactly the same. Even businesses that offer the same products have different goals at different times. And so, it follows that no two social media marketing campaigns can be exactly the same. Fortunately, the variety and strength of the options that are available to us when using Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are incredible in their reach and mind-boggling in the detailed knowledge of their user base. 

Here at The Click Depot, we begin the process by consulting with your company to discover things such as - what marketing you've done in the past, who is your ideal customer, what is your current advertising ROI, as well as learn all about your products and services. We will also look at your current website and social media presence to understand your existing client base.

With this information, we will sit down with you to discuss what your strategy should be moving forward.  As previously stated, we have several strong social media platforms from which we can launch a great variety of campaigns. Some of these platforms could be of great benefit to your company, while others would simply be a waste of time and money. Armed with this information, we can create a digital marketing program that will increase your customer base with an excellent return on investment (ROI).

FREE AND PAID CONTENT

Another thing we would need to consider is that all successful social marketing campaigns utilize both free content and paid ads. On all these social media platforms, you can post content for free. As a matter of fact, most users of these platforms don't even consider paid postings, and those people are probably your future customers. These social media paid programs combined with free content, are what we use to deliver a very effective marketing punch.

Google was born in 1998 and started selling their AdWords in the year 2000. Over the last 20 years, the marketing strategy using Google's ads has developed at an extremely rapid pace. And it is also a similar story with Facebook. This company started in 2004 and is now the largest social network in the world. The existing marketing strategies using Facebook's ads have developed into very powerful and effective tools for today's companies.  It's hard to believe that all of this change happened over the last 15 years.

With over 2.3 million searches per second, Google's advertising dollars are at $40 Billion per quarter - the biggest in all of history. Why is it so successful? Because the world's biggest online advertising vendor has so much information about their user base - which includes just about anyone with a computer. And the Facebook platform isn't too far behind.  

For most people, Google and Facebook appear to offer all their products for free. Free search engine, free maps, free Gmail, free online storage from Google. And from Facebook, they provide us with free access to talk with our friends and join groups of people just like us (for instance, look up "miniature horse clubs" or "mommy groups"). All of this for free. But it is this free engagement that allows them to collect so much useful marketing information.

WEALTH OF INFORMATION

As advertisers, we can see the marketing power of having this wealth of information available for our campaigns. We use this information to precisely target our customers with the offers that they will enthusiastically engage with. Then we have the ability to pull them off the social media platform into our website through carefully designed marketing campaigns that include things such as landing pages, web forms, webinars, and downloadable content. 

MORE SOPHISTICATED PROGRAMS AND TECHNOLOGIES

If you were going to start running social media advertising programs ten years ago, it was a simple matter of placing ads and seeing results. Because the industry was new, most people in business didn't recognize the power that was available to them through these platforms. Also, the customers were new to social media as well. Fast forward to today, and we can see how very powerful these platforms have become. They also have become very sophisticated, and the customers have become more sophisticated as well. And not only have the platforms developed over time, but there are new platforms that have joined the game. These platforms include names such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram.  Each of these platforms are powerful in their own right. But using all these platforms in harmony can be extremely powerful.

At The Click Depot, we have years of experience designing and implementing social media marketing campaigns. We understand the strength of each platform, how to use them together, and which ones to avoid for particular industries.  Call us today and set up an appointment with one of our social media specialists to talk about our affordable social media marketing packages.  We will design a program that is tailored to your industry and your particular situation.

The Don’t of Content Marketing

The Possibilities In Digital Media Marketing Are Almost Endless.

As such, it’s probably why everyone has some sort of content marketing strategy in place – and by everyone we mean around 80 percent of all B2B marketers.

However, only 17% of all those marketers feel that their content marketing strategies have garnered a substantial amount of success within the past year. Shocking isn’t it, to know that only a small fraction of all the content marketers can claim any manner of success from all the very many who have a completely devised marketing plan.

Before you begin to wonder what these B2B marketers could be doing wrong to achieve such meager levels of success despite the endless amount of effort and money poured into digital marketing, we’ll tell you. Here’s the list of things most marketers do which means here is the list of things you, as a digital marketer, need to avoid. Presenting the don’ts of content marketing:

Don’t Dismiss Quality for Quantity

Quite a few people believe that quantity is everything when it comes to content marketing; that the more you write and publish, the more it will translate into traffic and sales. However, unfortunately though it may be, that’s just not true. Quality matter just as much as content quantity does, if not more. It doesn’t matter if you’re posting 10 blog posts in a day on your website, unless the posts themselves have something useful to offer to the niche audience, it’s not going to mean much to the audience.

Don’t Ignore the Audience and It’s Needs

The audience is a huge part of a content marketing strategy’s success. Whether or not your marketing approach leads to the generation of traffic or not depends solely on whether you’ve focused on your audience and its needs.

Content can be a very effective tool in converting your audience, the viewer, into a consumer, but only if it’s done right. When it’s not, it’s equally as effective in driving them away. What’s the point of offering makeup advice or DIY tips when you have a website dedicated to the latest findings in technology? Invest in and promote the content that is appealing and engaging to the very market you cater to.

Don’t Discount SEO

Don’t make the horrible mistake of separating SEO from content. Although they are two individual entities, they are also pretty much intertwined, with one having a considerable affect on the other. If you’re content marketing is up to snuff and SEO is completely horrible, you’re content marketing strategy will be nothing but a great disappointment to you. In fact, with poor SEO, there’s just no use spending so much time, effort and money into creating content without SEO because no one is going to be looking at it anyway. It’s a complimenting relationship that works synergistically with one another. Don’t discount one for the other.

The Top 10 Benefits of Email Marketing

Why has email marketing become such a trend? Offering benefits over other more traditional forms of marketing? If you are using one of the two most common offline direct marketing communications techniques; Print Postal Mail or Telesales Campaigns, think about the time and effort involved in structuring a direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business campaign involves. Then consider what an email marketing campaign can do for your business.

Reduced Time & Effort

Print Postal Mailings:

Telesales Campaigns:

Real-Time Messages

With email marketing, short time frames are your friend, not your enemy, a marketing email can be completed in just a few hours. An email can be sent out on the same day. This will help reduce stock and can assist in promoting a “limited time” special or “Flash Sale”. You can send unique real-time messages to customers that arrive on their birthdays or anniversaries.

Personalize Messages

It’s often difficult to speak directly to your consumer in a personalized way. However, email marketing presents many dynamic opportunities to do so. You can send personalized messages about your business and provide information about sales or even purchase history. Also, creating separate emails is significantly less challenging than creating separate postal mail, print mail or advertising campaigns. Allowing you to segment your customer list into smaller lists.

Segment User and Customer Database Information

You can send extremely targeted marketing campaigns, resulting in increased sales conversions. For example, if you sell flowers, you can find everybody in your database who ever bought daffodils and then send them an email in April when the first daffodil shipments come in. You’re then using your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of the customers who are most likely to respond to it, and that’s what good marketing is all about.

More Frequent Communications

Because email takes less time to create and send than other marketing and advertising channels do, you can communicate with your customers more frequently. Instead of only being able to send them a flyer or catalog once a month or once a quarter, you can easily send them offers once a week.

Test Marketing Messages

Good marketing always means being able to test things! It’s incredibly simple to send one version of an email to part of your customer list and a second version of an email to a different part of your email list. Then, through tracking tools you can figure out which marketing message worked better to convert sales or user actions.

Information Spreading

When was the last time that you saw a customer hand over a postal mailing that they’d received to a friend who might be interested? Or seen somebody clip an ad from a magazine and send it to a family member who may want that product or service? The times have changed and forwarding an email with an enticing or useful offer or piece of information only takes seconds. That means that your marketing effort has reached a wider network of who, by forwarding the email, are now acting as your brand advocates.

Reduce Overhead Costs

Email marketing can be done at little to no overhead cost! No need for employees, designers, or marketing analysts. You don’t need to pay for printing, postal mailing costs, phone lines, or advertising rates. An effective email marketing program only needs a great email marketing platform or service and a good marketer who knows how to put the right offers and the right copy and graphics in front of the right portion of your user or customer list.

Exponentially Better Ability to Track Sales and User Engagement

The precise and usable tracking information to help you figure out what’s successful and what’s not can be accomplished with email marketing. This allows you to see; how many people opened an email, how many people clicked a link in an email, which specific link within the email was clicked, how many people complained that an email was spam or unsubscribed and, of course, whether your email even made it into your recipient’s inbox. Combine that with a business’s ability to track sales back to a source and you can identity customer engagement and response through an entire cycle with clear, easy-to-understand metrics.

Save the Planet with Email Marketing!

It may seem minor part, but trying to be more environmentally friendly these days is possible. When you optimize email marketing as your primary customer communication and direct-to-consumer or direct business-to-business marketing method, you’ll help save the planet by reducing the number of trees used for print marketing pieces. We all want to help save the planet, and making a responsible decision about your marketing tools can help you to do just that while also improving your business’s success.