Did Your New Student Inquiries Suddenly Slow Down?

Posted 2018-08-28 by Dirk Johnson

I am seeing a lot of people post in the FB music lesson studio groups about slower sign-up rates and fewer inquiries. They did nothing different on their end, but suddenly there’s a lot less new business coming in the door.

What Happened?

There might be local reasons, like a factory closing in town, but beyond that, the one place you should definitely look is within your traffic stats for your website, and specifically, your search engine referral traffic.

If you went from getting a lot of traffic from Google and Bing and Yahoo to almost nothing for one of them (especially Google), then there’s a good chance that you’ve been bumped down in the rankings for some search terms that matter (a lot) to your business.

But I Didn’t Do Anything!

Exactly.  Search rankings follow the old adage that nature abhors a vacuum. If your site was not well optimized, it was vulnerable to being displaced in the search results by more determined, better-optimized competitors.

Maybe one of your local competitors finally got serious about their SEO, then read a good book about it here!, and got it done. Or maybe they hired an SEO consultant. Either way, they may have knocked you down the rankings, and worse, onto the second page where there is almost no traffic.

What’s more, your “competitors” don’t have to be local. There are more and more “lead generation” sites cropping up, and they are going after the search rankings for music lessons in every city and county in the land.

Every music studio has these lead generation competitors to deal with. They are out there, making headway on a daily basis, displacing locally-owned shops from the search results all the time.

Just maybe one or two of them started showing up in your local results, bumping you off the page.

What Now?

OK – the second hardest part of this (the loss of money is certainly the hardest part) is finally coming to realize that you were probably relying on a traffic source to your website that maybe you had not even given any consideration. You just got the traffic, and enjoyed it, and now it’s gone.

Search engine traffic is a POWERFUL revenue generator for businesses like music lesson studios.  It is quite likely that search traffic is the most powerful source of student prospect traffic out there, aside from your direct referrals.

As the old saying goes, we never miss the water ‘til the well runs dry, and it applies here in a big way. If you took your search traffic for granted, and it was providing you with substantial income, then we dearly miss it when it’s gone.

You Can Recover

The game is not over. In fact, you can recover from this and become stronger than ever, but only if you finally take your search engine optimization seriously.

Find out what it takes to do a thorough job. My guidebook will walk you through the process, step-by-step, from a studio owner’s perspective.  It’s a very small investment in restoring your cash flow. If you still can’t do it yourself, and want help, I can help you.

If you don’t want to buy the book, you can just research how optimize a website. Granted, that will be a bit confusing and time consuming, but it’s all free if you dig hard enough. 

Search Engines Rule

Unfortunately, in the modern marketplace, search engines rule. They drive the most business to people like us. We might not like that fact, but it is what it is.

The best thing to do is get on board and work with it. It’s not easy, nor is it fun. But it can be very financially rewarding.

I do wish more business owners understood all of this, but in certain ways, that makes things easier and more lucrative for those of us who do take our search traffic seriously.

You can make it work for you, too.

Here’s a place to start:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Private Music Teachers!

Thanks!