Thanks to Brian G for this question.
Good question, do all websites struggle for traffic initially.
My answer to this – is that in terms of organic search engine trafficĂ‚Â – YES – all websites do struggle to begin with for search engine traffic, at least to some degree.
The reason for this is that :
1) The website needs to get indexed on Google, and the other search engines.
2)Even once they’re indexed, brand new website don’t have site age in their favour (this is often known as domain age, but I refer to it as site age, because I don’t believe that it matters how long the domain has been registered, but what I believe matters is how long there has been a website on the domain). So websites will struggle initially, particularly for competitive search terms, until it’s been around for a bit longer.
3)As the site is brand new – there will be little word of mouth / viral traffic at this stage – unless you’ve worked on a pre-launch of course.
First of all – it’s important to understand that all websites are new at some point, even the biggest most successful sites were just idea’s only a few years ago, so don’t let it put you off if you’ve just created a new website & you’re not getting much traffic yet.
Ways to shorten the initial lack of search engine traffic:
1) Make sure your website includes an important search term, or terms. This will usually bring traffic to your site quicker than if the site were on a domain which wasn’t keyword rich.
2)Get your website indexed on Google ASAP (don’t pay for expensive “premium google submission services” and so on – just drop me an email, I’ll do this for you for a few quid!
3)If you’ve not got your new website yet – consider looking for an existing website to buy, one which has been established for a while & is indexed on Google but which hasn’t been marketed properly, can often be a good investment – as long as it’s on a good domain, and as long as you’re not completely changing the theme of the website (if you are, you may lose the site age Google are attributing to the site).
4)Consider investing some money into Pay Per Click, Google Adwords. Be careful, be wary of broad & phrase match terms, I’d initially recommend going for exact match only, and use this to test how well your website is converting traffic into sales. At least this way you’ll find out if your website isn’t doing a good job of converting traffic – it’s very frustrating to spend a lot of time, effort & cash to get lots of organic search engine traffic, to then find out that your site doesn’t work well to convert traffic into enquiries / sales.
I hope this helps.
It’s good to see an interesting post written about design every once in a while. Thanks!