An Interview with John JB Russell
Hidden website leaks refer to various inefficiencies and gaps within a website – your customer onboarding process that silently reduces your revenue and shrink profits.
Considering the very top of your sales funnel, these include poor website optimisation, the wrong type of website traffic and not enough of the right website traffic that converts into revenue.
All of these issues your business is fighting against are caused by ineffective and/or inadequate keyword research, leading to poorly implemented digital advertising and marketing strategies.
Don’t target the wrong traffic
Businesses routinely target the wrong traffic and, worse, optimise for the wrong traffic – which means they leak revenue every day, every hour and every minute that they don’t take action to improve their web traffic. Often businesses do not need a new website, just different implementation and content or navigation on their existing site.
These holes in your go-to marketing strategy often result in lower volume of organic traffic, higher bounce rates, less pages visited per session, less time on site, lower conversion rates and, ultimately, lost sales opportunities. When these individual issues are not addressed promptly, they significantly restrict and limit your business’s online ROI and growth potential.
We spoke to John Russell from Digital Groundwork Ltd about the consequences of businesses ignoring these issues.
“How soon could these hidden leaks actually begin to impact a company’s bottom line?”, we asked.
To which he responded: “The impact is pretty much always immediate. From the moment a website fails to have the visibility it needs, and the right type of traffic with intent to buy your products or services, you’re draining cash from your bank account.”
Not all web traffic is equal. If you’re going to attract and retain visitors effectively, nurture them and convert them into customers and turn them into loyal fans and advocates of your brand, product or service. You need the right type of traffic on your website to prevent your business losing potential customers.
John Russell, Digital Groundwork Ltd
“For instance,” John continued, “without extensive and exhaustive keyword research, a website will not appear in relevant search results for your products or services. Site owners are missing sales opportunities every day.”
“When a site is poorly implemented and not optimised for the traffic you want, you won’t have users on your site with intent to buy your products or services. Having a site that loads in the blink of an eye on all devices is now mission-critical.”
Load speeds are just one aspect of driving online sales, explained John, but the real secret sauce is keyword research.
Do keyword research
That means, he said, “that you’re getting more of the right traffic on your site in the first place that converts into revenue. Proper keyword research and strong, consistent implementation on your site is key to reducing bounce rates, increasing pages per visit, prospects spending longer on your site and converting in your cart, engaging with your content and registering interest.”
Marketing Aspects Magazine pushed John for additional insights, asking: “When your site is not competitive, how quickly does that frustrate visitors, increase your bounce rates and impact on sales?”
His surprising response was: “Immediately. You’re losing opportunities to harvest the right traffic. Google likes fresh, authoritative content and if you’re not targeting the right users with the right intent, there’s no point publishing your content – blog, video, images etc.”
“It’s not just me saying that,” he added. “Of the 3.7 billion pieces of content produced every day, 94.29% get ZERO traffic. This means that businesses waste substantial resources, time and effort, as well as seeing a negative impact on their revenue. This is a particularly crucial issue in e-commerce and high-value or high-volume products and services.”
