If Your Web Traffic is Slow, Your Text May be to Blame.
Startups face a lot of competition from much larger companies in the business world. Those that have a standalone place of business can be quickly swallowed up by the competition if their marketing is not in order.
Online startups however tend to run a little differently. They rely on web traffic for their sales and therefore they have to ensure that traffic flows freely.
It is understandable that you want to have your website appear high in SERPs so that you have the maximum amount of potential for customers, but there are factors that can cause your website to have difficulty reaching the customers you seek.
See Also: 6 Key Factors That May Be Affecting Your Organic Traffic
The text of your website could be causing a lack of customer traffic to you site. Here is how.
1. Custom Fonts
The goal of a website is to stand out among the crowd. Web designers attempt to make the website stand out with the use of 3D effects as well as within the overall design features, but they also can accomplish this by offering custom text.
The custom text looks nice and allows the page to be unique from that of any other webpage, but it can also make it harder to integrate into the standard search engines because the text itself may be not web friendly at all.
Any font that does not fit within the parameters of the search engine algorithm will be kicked aside and replaced with a generic font. It is important that any custom font that you use within your website be web friendly so this does not happen.
The use of a generic font will not allow your website to stand out from the rest and may result in glitches with the design (for example hyphenated text or missing text), therefore all of your efforts into ensuring that a custom font is used will be completely wasted.
There are far too many fonts that are web friendly out there that can be used for your website. There is no reason to risk minimizing your chances of being seen by your customers by giving them generic fonts when those that you paid to have created are considered not web friendly and ultimately unused on the website when it goes live.
See Also: 24 Great Google Web Fonts for Web Designing
2. Keyword Saturation
Keywords for SEO purposes is good in a sense. It is necessary to have specific key words within your site that are able to be picked up by the search engine and lead potential customers to the site.
And while there are those that argue that keywords are a secondary though for web design, Keywords are still used for SEO purposes. The use of a few key words within the structure of your text (typically 1 to 3%) allows the search engine to understand that you are a legitimate business, but a full saturation of these keywords can and will get your site marked as spam.
Getting marked as spam means that the search engine will drop your ranking down to the bottom thereby keeping you from gaining access to the customers that you need.
3. The Layout
Your website should be built and maintained in a professional manner. Designs which simply group all the text together instead of spanning it out results in strain upon the eyes.
People, when they read, get bored when there is nothing there apart from the text. This is a fundamental part of user engagement and user interactivity within a site.
When text, even in a blog or an article layout, is done without at least an image or some transitions between the content, it appears as one long continuous block of text.
Think back to reading high school or college text. Even in the most mundane of text, there would be a picture, a reference note, a diagram, something to break up the content. Apply the same concept to your design.
In addition to the aesthetics which are presented from breaking up the layout, adding images and multimedia elements work with the content of the site for SERP purposes. Backlinking, image tags, video sharing, and such information is critical in establishing a place on the web.
Of Course it is All About Organics
Where formatting and laying out your text in a well thought out manner is essential to good web design and in gaining a flow of traffic to your site, without having organic content such as comments, likes, shares, pins, discussion boards, etc. the site is less apt to be shown high in the search engines.
As it pertains to Google, a site must couple properly placed text with a site that is mobile friendly. Sites which are not mobile friendly will not receive high rankings.
So take the time to layout your text, if custom text is mandated, embed them within the site rather than have the site call upon the text.
Break up your text so that it is engaging and encourages the viewer to explore the site, and above all present the site in a professional manner if you ever want to see the traffic of your site increase.