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My new business website is attracting the wrong geographic.

waloshin

waloshin

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 9, 2008
3,560
394
I am running a Canadian business, but 95% of my traffic is coming from the states. I have a .CA domain, but I guess that doesn't help. Any suggestions?

The site is: www.digitalarchiving.ca
 
waloshin said:
Where is that?
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On your home page in three places,

1. "Would you want to loose your photos or documents in a house or building fire?"
2. "Don’t loose your Wedding photos, life long memories and more."
3. "Get them digitized before you loose your precious memories."
 
AlliFlowers said:
Make sure when you do your keywords and SEO that you add in Canada, Canadian, Saskatchewan, and all the cities/towns you hope to get business from.
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Great thanks. I have used a seo plugin for this, but I might have to try a new one.
 
Also, use the Google webmaster tools to influence your search targets : you can specify which country your website is for somewhere under search traffice : international targeting.
 
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And consider relative populations: the U.S. has about 10X more people than Canada. Americans desire that kind of service too. As a new business, you're probably showing high in search engine results (that probably won't last). However, for now, perhaps you should consider some pricing & shipping options for American customers and enjoying business from wherever you get it.

Lots of businesses start thinking they know their target market. But they guess wrong. Maybe much more of your market exists outside of Canada. Don't fault buyers wanting to buy. Instead, embrace the surprise and enjoy the revenues.
 
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HobeSoundDarryl said:
And consider relative populations: the U.S. has about 10X more people than Canada. Americans desire that kind of service too. As a new business, you're probably showing high in search engine results (that probably won't last). However, for now, perhaps you should consider some pricing & shipping options for American customers and enjoying business from wherever you get it.

Lots of businesses start thinking they know their target market. But they guess wrong. Maybe much more of your market exists outside of Canada. Don't fault buyers wanting to buy. Instead, embrace the surprise and enjoy the revenues.
Click to expand...

Good advice thank you.
 
You have hundreds of competitors offering a very similar service. Engage in objective competitive analysis to recognize superior approaches on competitor sites. Then make them your own. If you can't be objective, get friends, relatives or hire a marketing consultant to do the competitive analysis work for you and provide a list of recommendations.

Add a suggestion box feature to your site where you put this same question to your users. Make it easy to see, easy to use and let their input drive evolutionary changes toward making it more customer friendly.
 
You are using a Wordpress theme, but I get the feeling most of your content has grown organically. By that I mean that you have added or changed content when needed. The result now seems to me not clear.

You need to sit down with pen and paper and make a customer journey that comprises at the minimum two things:

1/ what do you want to tell your customer (if different messages then also how it links from one to the other)
2/ how your business can help this customer (perhaps even more important than the above)

Some remarks. Feel free to do with them as you wish.
  • Your background is all white. I would expect to see the header in a different (darker?) color to better separate the content that changes on the page against the menu that is (should) always be the same.
  • Your menu does not have a home link. Add that to the menu.
  • You could make the menu more distinct when hovering over it
  • Try another template for wordpress. This might be a quick fix to better show your header and footer, contact form etc. You can buy professionally-made templates cheaply from envato theme forest for example for a little as 40 dollars.
  • On the home page : the 'home' title does not do anything - you could replace that with what I think is your most important message to the client :
    Stop deterioration of photos including fading, loss of detail, colour shifting.
    Currently this is the second title below 'why digitise your your photos or documents ?' - it seems to me that you have question and answer inverted :
    Stop deterioration of photos including fading, loss of detail, colour shifting. (= client problem)
    The solution : let us digitise your your photos and/or documents ! (= solution)​
  • Again on the home page : put the price somewhere else, either on the right text bar or separately in the menu. But not at the top of your page - you still need to convince the customer that he wants to use your services.
  • Lose the 'click here' links. Rewrite them like you did in the menu for 'outside of canada?' so that you supply info on what you are linking to. For the order form, instead of 'click here' you can say : 'Fill in this form', or 'Download the pdf'. Also add an explantation of what to do with this order form. It might be clear for you, it wasn't for me.
  • Use Contact7 plugin for example to recreate your contact form to get people to send a message to you.
  • Add your contact details to your footer as well.
  • Meet Us : change to about us. Add a picture of your house /company / yourself. Explain WHY you are doing this, not just why the name is like that !
  • Our location : is not complete and just 2 sentences, one which does not make sense. Add an image of your location on google maps. You also add a sentence about pickup that does not make sense + is not appropriate for 'our location'. This sentence belongs to 'how we work' / the process. You could draw a circle on the google maps to show how far you are willing to go and pickup yourself.
  • Explain your work process in 3 or 4 simple steps : 1/ use our order form to print out and fill it in. 2/ together with your pictures, send them to ... or come and meet us 3/ we do the work 4/ we send you back.... and how much time it will take.
You did ask :)
 
I have made the suggested suggestions. Than you.

blaster_boy said:
You are using a Wordpress theme, but I get the feeling most of your content has grown organically. By that I mean that you have added or changed content when needed. The result now seems to me not clear.
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We are a new business. We are having a hard time securing customers though. So we are thinking of offering Try us for Free. Bring down 10 Photos or Documents and have us digitize them for you. This way we can get customers in the door to tell them about our services while hopefully getting repeat customers.
 
I think it's a good idea, at the very least worth a try. If nobody comes, you haven't lost anything. If they do come, you get to know your customers.

I'm on the other side of the world, so I don't exactly have any views on how this goes in Canada, but did you do some market research ? How many people actually require this service ? Or businesses ? Have you checked other sites such as http://www.scanmyphotos.com for example on how they do this and their prices ? Are you competitive to them ? If not, can you offer other advantages ?

Make certain to use the right keywords : when I look at Google trends, you can see that certain words are much higher than others :

https://www.google.com/trends/explo...an negatives, scan photos&cmpt=q&tz=Etc/GMT-2

I repeat I don't know anything about this business, but my first impression is that this is a niche business. Not everybody needs this. Unless you are very well known, this does not seem something that will immediately generate you steady income.

Don't just depend on your website to make yourself known. Try walking into some local businesses and explain to them what you offer. Show them the advantages of digitizing their receipts / old documents. Drop some flyers in shops around town(s) advertising your shop.

Your website : it's definitely better, but it's still not what I would charitably call "good enough". Keep working on it though, it's already much more logical.
 
No offence but your website has not a good design and can scare some costumers away due to poor design. But maybe there is a cultural difference and it works in Canada. Im danish and that design would never work in Denmark...due to almost non existence of design..
 
i think you need to improve your SEO. i have expert team of SEO Toronto in Canada. if you want to improve your web site ranking and want to improve your business growth than here we are standing up with you for working hard for your web site.
 
cudest said:
i think you need to improve your SEO. i have expert team of SEO Toronto in Canada. if you want to improve your web site ranking and want to improve your business growth than here we are standing up with you for working hard for your web site.
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What nationality are you? Your spelling and sentence structure is questionable. (" than here we are standing up with you for working hard for your web site.")?
 
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canuckRus said:
What nationality are you? Your spelling and sentence structure is questionable. (" than here we are standing up with you for working hard for your web site.")?
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I have had a lot of emails coming from East India claiming to get my site on to top of Google etc.
 
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Was offered an enormous government contract today.

We are just a startup with a low capacity. We were offered a job will a deadline of 3 months. Though to complete the work within the deadline we would need to rent expensive equipment, hire on at least 6 people. And work 24/7 to complete the job. I have a partime retail job I work on the side as well.

So either we will have to sub contract a competitor in our area which might not be a good idea. Or I will have to find a away to politely decline the contract.
 
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