A report has revealed that traffic figures for English websites dropped during the country’s World Cup fixtures. Obviously fans were abandoning the internet in favour of the TV!

According to the survey by Adtech, traffic dropped by 20% during England matches. The traffic drops were far less significant for other fixtures.

An hour before the two England games, visitor numbers to UK websites dropped by 10%. Once the matches got underway, Adtech’s servers recorded just 80% of the usual ad impressions.

But the good news is that as soon as the England matches were over, delivery performance for banner ads increased by up to 10% above normal traffic for the next hour.
Here are few more World Cup on-line stats:

*         During the week ending June 19 there were five times as many searches for “vuvuzela” than for “wayne rooney”, the England team’s most searched for player.

* In one week during the world cup, 1 in every 88 internet search in the UK was World cup related last week.

Many on-line companies will be keen to get back to business as usual after the World Cup!

To increase online traffic to your website, why not speak to WebCreationUK about our advanced SEO services.

Social media, on-line communities and blogs are all great ways to engage visitors and to increase traffic and, therefore, potential customers to your website. But a new study has found that many companies have still not cottoned on to this potential business advantage.

The Engaged Web Study by Episerver looked at 10 companies from various industries and then scored the on a range of engagement criteria.

Here are some of the findings:

•    Just 34% of the companies studied featured a community on their site.
•    Only 44% of companies with a community actually initiated a conversation with visitors (although more did respond to queries).
•    While 40% of the sites had a blog few updated these often enough.
•    Only 34% of the blogs studied were updated on a regular basis
•    Just 19% of brands advertise the blog across the rest of their website.
•    Only 19% of the sites display a link on their home page to their Facebook.
•    Just 15% advertise their Twitter presence
•    34% of sites provide links that allow a visitor to “share” content on a social network, but only 16% allow the visitor to rate and tag content.

In a competitive marketplace, few companies will want to miss a trick. Why not speak to WebCreationUK about updating your site to include a community feature, blog and sharing icons?

So your website is gaining traffic (potential customers) but now you need to get these visitors to buy your products. Here we bring you some tips on converting e-commerce traffic to sales.

Safe and secure: Surveys have shown that people need to trust a site before they will be encouraged to buy from it. In the simplest form, ensure that your e-commerce site provides buying security, via systems such as PayPal. Also, provide customers with various ways to buy from you, so you could offer them on-line purchases, telephone purchases and postal.

Trust: Customers want to know that your website is safe to buy from, but they will also want clear information about your returns policy. Offer a telephone number for people to contact, too, in case they need to answer questions. Many internet users still like to know that there are real people operating e-commerce sites. Once customers trust in your service they will be more likely to return for further purchases.

Advice and information: Offering information, advice and friendly tips helps to create a relationship between your website and potential customers. For example, you could offer a regular blog with friendly advice and information relevant to your business. If you build confidence in your knowledge-base and professionalism this is more likely to lead to sales in the long-term.

Good navigation: Once you have engaged with a visitor you want to ensure that your website offers easy navigation for potential sales. Encourage customers to head on to your products pages or ask them to “get I touch”. Don’t make this process difficult because they will simply leave and find another website that is easier to navigate.

Be analytical: Make sure you keep an eye on Google Analytics, or the like. This will offer an insight into traffic and can show you what customers are responding to. Try adding informative blogs and then watching Google Analytics or offer a voucher/promotion.

Google has made even more progress on it search specifics as its added support for microdata for use in rich snippets. Rich snippets can relate to bits of content such as reviews, people profiles or events, making search results look more interesting and also more informative.

You’ll need to get your web designer to do a bit of HTML coding for this to work but it should be fairly straightforward. As a post on the Webmaster Central Blog states: “It’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item).”

And: “Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.”

So if you’re a business that is interested in boosting its traffic potential (aren’t we all) then you are advised to find the time to get the rich snippets coding sorted.