Have other UK sites suffered a fall, or is it just me? I did receive a great increase in traffic with the new shopping cart, but I really need to get more uK customers to find us.
I have listings in UK shopping malls and don't rank badly on uk search engines (except for Google where it goes up and down like a yo you still!).
Thanks.
If you are selling 'theater tickets' you won't get that many UK hits, because we will use 'theatre tickets' as the search term.
<<<Is your spelling in proper english or that US variant? >>>
Having been out of the UK since 15 yrs ..I would ( on the basis of what I hear everywhere except radio 4 )say that very very few English can now speak their own language ....
I learned mine in The UK but can honestly say I prefer to listen to Americans , Australians , Indians ...virtually anyone one except Brits under the age of 40 who all sound like sp*ce g*rls or their husband wannabees ......
( seriously off topic ..but things are slow today : )
[edited by: Leosghost at 11:08 am (utc) on April 28, 2004]
If it's the site in your profile, it looks good but there's nothing obviously that grabs a visitor (whether human or engine) to suggest you are based in the UK. Only those really keen would find the address suggesting Northants. I still don't know where that is and I'm in the UK :)
Maybe obviously suggesting Northants, United Kingdom, UK, or England on the homepage might help UK search engines identify you as a British company?
Also I don't know if suggesting location in meta tags helps at all.. for instance ICBM co-ordinates.
<meta name="ICBM" content="52.?, 0.?" />
Also look to see whether you've made any changes to the site over the past few months could cause the decrease. Simple things like removing an image of a uk flag symbol / page layout can have an effect.
Also check to make sure that there is a decrease - perhaps your site simply is getting more and more american visitors, which would cause the uk figure to drop to 5% - but would still mean that your getting the same volume of uk traffic. Stats are tricky at best - measuring sales is usually a better method.
To get more traffic you need to look into pay per click marketing (quite expensive), offline advertising, promoting your website more using current resources (on a shop front, on invoices, any newspaper ads you do etc) and consider looking into affiliate programs. Getting your sites high on search engines can be quite difficult. Webmasterworld has lots of resources on all these things.
I'd also recommend having a feedback page were users can enter stuff. Whenever I've used this I get lots of good criticism which allows me to improve the site.
'course you can get links from other pages but finding these directories and getting links is maybe less painless than asking joe webmaster for links.
I would argue that your ip is more important than your domain code for some traffic sources, that is if you are comparing .co.uk > .com for influencing the origin of traffic.
And in addition I would agree with the above posts, get the fact that you are a UK site into your meta and relevant about, index pages etc, many directories still do human additions so that will help your cause with reviewers.
I think the main thing to realise is that an awful lot of us in the UK are getting .com (and other) domains from our ISPs, and so your stats are probably not a particularly accurate reflection where you are receiving hits from.
<snip>
[edited by: IanTurner at 2:14 pm (utc) on April 29, 2004]
[edit reason] Commercial request [/edit]
Sorry guys but if you will give out straight line feeds ...... : )))
You say your UK visitors have dropped. Exactly how are you advertising? I mean do you have any advertising set up at the moment?
Most of the web makes little money, cos ad space is too expensive for small sites, plus people use the wrong form of advertising.
I was going to suggest collecting email addresses and start doing it by newsletter - kind of thing. But you might be doing that already.
The conversion rate will be small, but at least you can get your message 'out there' and start building a useful contact list.
I use this method a lot, and it's quite effective when it's done right, I mean have you ever considered giving services away for free, to start off with?
But please ensure that you give away quality! Giving away stuff that is not worth anything, is unlikely to impress potential lifetime clients.
Hope that helps you out a bit.
regards
Chris
