Believe it or not, this is an all too common scenario. You have created a website, true, but your Domain name may be causing you issues.

• It may not be relevant: Your domain name must be your company name, what you do, or a combination of the two. If your name does not match your content, people may not understand why, and go to another site.

• It may be too complex: If your domain name is hard to say, spell, or type into a browser, your Traffic might be headed to a site that is simpler.

• You may have abbreviated poorly: The Iowa Department on Aging soon discovered that their patrons did not want to type idoa.gov into their browser, so they changed both the domain and the name of the agency.

• Your website might have an unfortunate or inappropriate name: If you run words together to form your website, you might find that what they mean, and words created accidentally (like americanscrapmetal.com) spell something you really don’t want to be known for.

If you find you have an unfortunate domain name or one that is not working for you, you can change it and 301 redirect your old traffic to the new site.

Everyone is human and makes mistakes. You need to proofread your site, though, but not just you. Everything you post on your site, from home page content to landing pages and blog posts needs to be proofread by someone, preferably more than one person.

While some users will not notice grammar and spelling mistakes, many will, and it will cause them to think that your site is not professional. To many this translates to the rest of what you do as well.

At the least, use a program like Grammarly to look for common mistakes, and if someone points one out to you correct it right away.

You need to have a blog, for sure. This is the biggest key to content marketing, and getting Google to pay attention to your site, and rank you in relevant searches. Good content allows for good backlink building, another important element to your overall digital marketing strategy.

However, for them to be beneficial to you and your customers, your blog posts need to be well-written, professionally edited, and actually relevant to what you do. Recipes on your site may get you readers, but eventually it will kill your Web Traffic when readers realize they have nothing to do with your products or services.

Serious much? Your product or service probably does serve a very serious purpose in people’s lives, but it does not mean you can’t joke about some aspect of it, or at least show that you can laugh at yourself from time to time.

Humor is something that makes people comfortable with leaders and willing to interact with them, and it is the same with your company and your marketing. A great relationship builder is the ability to laugh together, and if you can establish this with your customer, your traffic will skyrocket rather than die off.

As good as smartphone cameras are, and as readily available as tools to take great photos are from sites like Amazon, you no longer have an excuse. Poor photos of your product taken on an office table or worse your desk just don’t cut it any more.

There are also classes you can take in your community and even at your local Apple store that will teach you how to take better photos and video with your phone. Take great photos of your product or your service in action, and if you can’t, hire someone to do so for you.

Your product descriptions need to have a great headline, and a great sub headline that compels a user to either buy them or read more. You should also have a great description that outlines the benefits of your product.

Under that you should have a description that is a little bit longer, one that outlines the features of your product including specifications, ingredients, and more.

Don’t confuse features and benefits. Benefits is how your product will help the customer address their needs and wants. The features of your product are the tools that enable the benefits. Presenting these in both the proper order and context is important.

Most often customers leave reviews if they have a negative experience unless someone asks them to leave a good one. This is a part of reputation management. If you have no reviews on your website, customers may wonder if anyone actually uses and likes your products. If the ones they find on other sites like Google and elsewhere are negative, they may never visit your site at all.

You need to go after good reviews and product endorsements, and include them on your website. This will keep people coming back for more, and keep them from bouncing away and looking for products or services like yours elsewhere.

Your menu should be easy to use, with clear categories and drop-down menus. Don’t make it hard for users to find things like your blog and your contact us page. Post frequently asked questions clearly, and make sure you have a robust search feature that works well. If a user can’t find what they want, they will quickly leave and not come back.

This is probably one of the most critical parts of your website, and making sure it is easy both for customers to buy items for you and check out is critical.

This can be challenging, because despite the need for speed you have an additional need for security. However, there are services that can help you balance these two things and if you need help, you should consult a professional ecommerce designer. This will prevent users from abandoning their shopping carts and going elsewhere.

It is hard enough to build good and reliable web traffic, so you don’t need to sabotage your own site. Avoid these nine mistakes to make sure that you aren’t killing your own web traffic.