Getting people onto site

The shop's open. Nobody's walking through the digital doorway.

You've built a lovely shop on a side street and forgotten to put a sign out. That's the online version of what's happening: the site exists, the products are great, and the people who'd love them have simply never heard of you.

The temptation is to be everywhere — Instagram, TikTok, Google, Amazon, a bit of everything — and to burn out by month three with nothing real to show for it. We'd rather work out where your customers already are, pick the one or two places worth your time and money, and run it as an experiment with a clear way of telling whether it's working. In the online space, it's often better to be the master of one thing, rather than the jack of all trades.

Sound familiar?

• You search for your own products and can't find yourself — or you're on page four (in the eCommerce world, we call this "being invisible").
• Someone's told you "you need to be on TikTok", and you've no idea whether that's true for what you sell.
• You've dabbled in ads — boosted a post, put fifty quid into Google — and couldn't say what you got for it.
• You'd like to sell on Amazon or Instagram and have no idea where to start.
• Nearly all your visitors come from one place — a friend's share, a single social account — and it feels a bit fragile.

What's usually going on

• Being found versus being chosen versus being bought. People searching for what you sell (search, local listings), people discovering you (social, marketplaces), and people you pay to reach (ads) are three different jobs with three different costs. Most small shops are accidentally doing one and wondering about the others.
• Too thin everywhere. A bit of everything and not enough of anything. A single channel done properly beats five done by Friday afternoon. Depending on what you sell, your audience may be everywhere or just in one place.
• The groundwork's missing. Local listings half-filled-in, no keywords anyone's thought about, a social profile that isn't set up to sell. Often the cheapest traffic is the stuff already sitting there, unclaimed.

How we'd tackle it

1. Find out where your customers already are. Who's searching for what you sell, what people are buying, and what your nearest competitors are doing that's visibly working.
2. Pick one or two channels, not seven. Based on your product, your budget and your customer — not on whatever's fashionable this quarter or what your nephew's schoolmate's cousin's best friend swears by.
3. Run it like an experiment. Small budget, one clear measure, a review date. Then we look at the numbers together and decide: more of this, less, or stop. Iteration and data help you find your sweet spot.

Where we'd start

First, we want to understand your business — what do you sell, who are your ideal customers, what's your USP? From there, we look at how to reach the right people; this depends on the channel, so we'll start with a conversation about which is best for you. Typical first steps: keyword research (what are people actually typing?), market analysis, setting up or tidying a social channel properly, or designing a first ad campaign for a single platform — Google, Meta or Amazon — rather than all three at once. If you're local, we'll also check how visible you are in your own area, which is often the quickest win going.

The honest bit

We'll sometimes tell you not to spend on ads yet — because the site needs a tweak first, or because the numbers don't add up. It's a less exciting answer and a cheaper one. And anybody who guarantees you page one of Google is selling digital snake oil; what we can promise is a clear plan, a sensible test, and an honest read of the results. We can't guarantee there is a one-shot ticket to success; but if there is, we'll help you find it.

Tell us what you sell and where you'd like to be found. Get in touch

Related challenges: Optimising a site · Turning site visitors into customers