For any business operating a website as a sales channel you can certainly feel the pinch of this recession. If you are in the gift business or “non-essential” retail you are feeling it more than others. Times like these mean you need to take a look at where that website traffic is coming from, and more importantly, WHY they are coming and see if your traffic results can be re-focused to create more opportunities for sales.
When things are good it can be easy to leave your website as it is and not keep analyzing the details. When people are willing to spend money even bad websites can make sales. So what do you when you have visitors coming through the same old traffic sources, but far fewer are converting?
You have a couple of choices:
1) Find new, more targeted sources of traffic.
2) Create more incentives to reduce purchase anxiety.
The fact is you need a little of both. People expect to get more for their money now. So what can you give them? What are your guarantees? What kind of service will you give them after the sale? What will you give them if they refer a new user? These questions have serious implications during the sales process, even more so now.
If your traffic comes from PPC (pay per click) and it isn’t converting as well, then pause your campaign and dig into that keyword research again. Have the trends changed? What is your competition doing? What has the competition changed? Can you leapfrog their offer? Also, if your competitor keeps running the same ad for weeks at a time, here is a hint: It probably works.
If your traffic comes from organic search, make sure you aren’t relying heavily on research keywords as opposed to buying keywords. Investigate the amount of new competition (yes, even in this economy there is new competition) and see if you need to check out more long-tail keywords with buyer mindsets. Make sure you know where your competition is getting their links and traffic. Compete for that.
As always please feel free to email me any questions you have about this post. Good luck out there.
