No Buyers – Why your online business is slow

You don’t have to be a webmaster to know when online sales are bad. Poor daily conversions can be alarming, especially on previously consistent numbers, then suddenly no buyers.
The effects of regular Google “quality” updates can result in position loss in the search engine results pages (SERP’s). It’s not always a disaster, but it should have you examining  site and server to be sure you’re not suffering from a hardware, software or even a content performance issue. Here are a few reasons why sales conversions may be dropping and possible corrective actions to take…

Causes of traffic and sales conversion loss.

1. Poor Organic Traffic – Google is in constantly in flux. Your content determines if you are a star or wind up on page 10.
2. Site Speed – Either your web hosting or site configuration is slowing down page load times, visitors hate to wait.
3. Content – Write original content for users or suffer the wrath of poor rankings.
4. Configuration – If you run WordPress, your site may be is running slower due to web bot attacks or simply too many plugins.
5. Scraper’s  – stealing your image content and diluting your rankings.
6. Evolving competition – it’s been happened for eons. Look at the wild west…same story. Pure capitalism.
7. Seasonal changes – severe weather, traffic patterns subject to change annually.

Other problems can affecting the web and traffic flow. It seems when things get stale, traffic slows.
“Fresh meat” is the order of the day to get traffic rockin’ again.

Here are a few steps to juice up your site traffic.

1. Start by refreshing your local work environment, reboot your PC, router and modem. It should fix any local bottlenecks.
2. Be sure your site is using https:// secure protocol.
3. Update any server side software or plugins.
4. Reboot your hosting server. – I do this all the time, just to shake any possible gremlins.
5. Refresh your permalinks, clear your cache.
6. Look for broken links.
7. Check your Webmaster Tools data for messages or trends.
8. Fetch your sitemap in Google webmaster tools for good measure.
9. Double check your SEO settings…
10. Complete all your alt image and title attribute tags
11. Post some new content, then post it to social media
12. Create a new product or brand.
13. PPC advertising – pay per click advertising as a last resort

Reboot the local system

Sometimes it seems everything is delayed, your PC is hung and it’s at that time than you should just shut everything down and reboot. Power cycle everything from your modem on up. Turn everything off and then starting with your modem, power back up. The FBI had recently warned home and office users to reboot their routers and update their firmware. Be sure all your virus software is up to date.

If you run WordPress, take a few easy precautions. Install the “limit login attempts” plugin as well as W3 Total Cache. The LLA plugin will likely prevent the BFA from breaching your site (also change your admin account to something OTHER than admin). The W3TC plugin will take the load off your server and is recommended by most hosting companies.

Update:

Five years later in 2018, showing light recovery as Google exceeds 30 billion per quarter. As the internet evolves, traffic becomes more socio-centric, and at times resembles a murmuration of birds or a school of fish.
The latest “core update” has left many at webmaster world scratching their heads again.

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