3 Possible Reasons All Those Clicks Aren’t Converting

You work your tail off putting together the best SEO campaign you can. You do everything you know to do, and then some. Yet after six months and more sweat equity than you can measure, you realize something is wrong. You are getting a lot of clicks, so that’s good, but those clicks aren’t converting.

SEO in the modern world doesn’t end with increased traffic. More traffic does a business very little good if it doesn’t equal increased sales. Therefore, driving traffic is just the first half of the equation. The second half is converting that traffic into paying customers.

If you are getting a lot of traffic but not conversions, the most likely culprit is something onsite. It could be a combination of onsite problems. Either way, the task now ahead of you is to dig deep and find out what is going on with the site. Start by looking at the following three possibilities:

1. Long Load Time

More than a decade ago, Google made it clear that they would begin ranking page speed. Back in 2010, the company recognized that web users were beginning to lose patience with sites that took too long to load. So page load times became a ranking factor with their next update. Google reconfirmed that decision in a 2018 update that made load times relevant for mobile searches.

Google considers load times because these matter to people. How does this apply to your situation? It is all well and good to drive traffic to your website, but if visitors get there only to find a site that takes too long to load, the chances of them sticking around aren’t very high. You will get all the clicks your SEO campaign were designed to produce without any extra conversions.

2. Poor Web Design

Your site could be suffering from a lack of conversions due to poor design. Note that there are far too many design flaws to talk about in a single post this size. Here is what you need to know in one broad stroke: web users cannot stand sites that are difficult to navigate. They can’t stand having to dig through multiple layers to find information they believe ought to be easy to find.

A website should offer a journey that visitors can follow to a logical end. It shouldn’t be so cluttered that it’s hard for visitors to make heads or tails of what they are seeing. Websites should not have those annoying popups with no clear means of closing them, as visitors are smart enough to know you’re just trying to trap them into clicking a link and redirecting their browsers.

3. Low Quality and Irrelevant Content

Among hundreds of factors Google ranks for, none is more important than content itself. According to the experts at Webtek Digital Marketing in Salt Lake City, UT, Google is obsessed with high quality, relevant content for the same reason they rank for page speed: web users demand it.

All your increased traffic will go right out the window if site visitors discover content they don’t like. They will click no further if a landing page offers content completely irrelevant to the link that brought them to the site. And even when content is relevant, low quality in terms of writing, grammar, spelling etc., will turn people away.

Increasing traffic may be the main thrust of SEO, but it is not the whole ballgame. Increased traffic is useless if it doesn’t lead to more conversions. If your site is struggling with conversion, take a good look at the three things described in this post.