Troubleshooting To Get Results From Your Search Engine Traffic

"I did what you said and I'm getting 100 visitors a day from Google. But they still aren't buying my product."

​Never mind that some small businesses would be deliriously happy with 3000 additional visitors a month - what do you do when the plan you had to increase your search engine traffic doesn't give you the results you want?

You re-evaluate your plan.

Did you target the right keyword? Are your pages ready to convert? What's your lead capture system? Do you even have one?

You'll need to ask yourself all these questions, and more, but before you even get to that, here's the thing that doesn't seem obvious, the thing you have to resolve before you can move forward.

There's some outside chance - way, way outside - that an increase in search engine traffic just isn't the right way to solve your traffic problem.

What's more likely is that you have made one of the following mistakes or oversights. Make sure that the reason your search engine traffic isn't converting is for one of the following reasons before you abandon all efforts.

​1. You're trying to generate more traffic than a particular keyword can provide.
There might not be ten thousand people online looking for how to make ropes out of cheese every day. If your area is obscure, find out how much of a traffic yield you can expect from search engines, get as much of it as you can, then move on.

2. Lack of content optimization and searchability.
For every plan, you'll have to work on optimizing both your content and how it is found. 

There's just no two ways about it. Depending on your site and how it delivers its information, how frequently it does so, how many sites are linking to it, and a host of other factors, whether you'll have to lean more on updating content or links, will vary.

There's no cookie cutter solution, so take all the suggested steps for traffic success.

​3. You don't have a plan.
You know what they say about a failure to plan. If you don't, trust me, it ain't good. Have a goal. If you don't know what to set it on, base it on an increase in revenue. Think backwards from the increase in buyers you would need to make the kind of money you'd like.

4. You're using the wrong plan.
Not every traffic generation method you can leverage for search engine traffic is good for every site or business.

While it's true that the proper blog configuration can turn your site into a search engine magnet, that isn't the only reason to blog, and it doesn't mean that just any platform is suited to your site.

By all means, don't stop blogging because no one is reading your blog - find out why and address that problem.  It could be that they can't find it.

​5- You bought into a sales pitch as a search engine traffic plan.
I'm not going to tell you that article marketing won't help your search engine traffic if executed correctly. I will, however, tell you that most people don't set it up to get the most benefit out of the process, and that it's not a search engine strategy in and of itself.

6. You're not paying attention to analytics, so you have no idea what changed and when.
Getting 100 visitors a day to a site that was getting none is a triumph. Getting 100 more visitors a day from search engines to a site that used to get 1000 search engine visitors a day? Not so much.

You need, at bare minimum, a starting place to compare to, or else how do you know you've gotten anywhere?

7 - The traffic plan is fine. Your conversion plan isn't so hot.
If Google sends you a million visitors and they land on a page full of huge banners, they'll just leave. Give every page a clear purpose, and make sure each one has the ability to get your visitors to buy, subscribe, join, or whatever you'd like them to do, right then or on another day.

​These are the seven most common ways that search engine traffic can leak back out of your site. Even if one of those doesn't solve your search engine traffic problem, if you take action on each applicable point, it will at least help you get more out of your existing traffic.

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