There are many reasons as to why a website or blog may not be getting enough traffic. Things like the age of
the domain, the reputation of the author, number and type of references (incoming links), social media strategy and content freshness play their role but for the average website the problem may lie in other areas.
What you will read below are 5 areas that are often neglected by website owners either because they don’t understand their importance or because they are not sure how to handle them. Along with each area I will also suggest ways to improve the situation. Don’t forget though that when you make a change it may take a couple of months (or more) before you see any positive or negative result so you need to have patience before you decide if something worked or not.
1. Your content is not good enough
Believe it or not search engines and especially Google have become very efficient in recognizing good content. So if the content is not good enough and your website is not of high quality, the chances of ranking high in the SERPs and getting traffic are minimized.
Back in the old days you could ‘easily’ trick search engines by sending a few back links to your content and get rankings but this is no longer the case.
Besides search engines let’s not forget about the influence of social media on rankings and traffic. Content that is not of great quality is very unlikely to do well in the various social media channels.
What is good content and more importantly what type of content can get you traffic?
Content that attracts website visitors has the following characteristics:
- It satisfies all SEO Copywriting tips that are known to work after Panda and Penguin.
- It is published on a website with an existing number of quality (indexed) pages. If your website is new, even if you have the best content it is difficult to rank high especially if there are older and bigger (in terms of indexed pages) websites on the same subject.
- It is unbiased and well researched. If you always write in favour of a particular product, method or service or if you just publish re-written text, you are losing your time. Good content is original and describes both sides of the story.
- It is fresh. Users want to read fresh up-to date content and so do the search engines and social media.
Why Your Content Isn’t Good Enough
We’re sorry to be the ones to have to tell you the cold, hard, unvarnished truth, but truth it is: your content just isn’t good enough. You may be writing your heart out every single day. You may have found your brand’s ideal voice – whether it’s witty, professional, warm, sarcastic, or something else entirely. You may be researching topics late into the night, and then spending hours crafting the perfect headlines to grab people’s attention. Heck, you may even have taken a course or two on how to write blogs, learning all the nitty-gritty about how to structure your sentences to make them more effective. But even after all that, we’re here to tell you. Your content still isn’t good enough. Why’s that, you may ask? Well, let’s take a step back for a moment. What’s the purpose of content? Of course, everyone knows the answer to that, right? To inform, to help, to build trust and credibility and authority, to convert….right? Nope. The main purpose of content is to be read. OK, now you’re rolling your eyes, but it’s true, isn’t it? If your content is never read, it’ll never have a chance to inform, or build authority, or convert. So now that we’ve established that, let’s go back to the original question – why isn’t your content good enough? Because if you write it and then do nothing to promote it, no one will ever read it. It’s not that your content isn’t good enough, it’s simply that content alone isn’t good enough to achieve all the lofty goals we set for it. You have to help it along. And how can you do that? Here’s how to make your content work for you:1. Make it naturally engaging. This is where all those blog-writing classes and hours spent researching topics come in handy. You do need to focus attention on making your content engaging. Why? Because steps 2, 3, and 4 won’t work unless it is! You’ve got to ensure that the topic you choose is interesting, relevant, and useful for your audience in order to have any hope of motivating them to read it themselves and then share it with others. And unless your post is read and shared, it’s useless. Make it easy to share, too, by adding social share buttons to your blog.
2. Share it via social. Once you’ve written that stellar content, you’ve simply got to promote it on social media. Facebook likes links to content better than memes now anyway, so you might as well take advantage of it. Push those posts out over every social platform you have a presence on, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or any of the myriad others. And don’t just post a link without comment, or even preface it with a tired “here’s our new blog post.” Add an intriguing comment or question, or an excerpt from the blog – anything to catch people’s interest and get them to click.
3. Email it to your subscribers. The single best way to get a blog post in front of readers is to email it to them. People can forget about a website; they can miss a social post; but if it’s in their personal email inbox, they’re sure to see it. Your job is to make sure they open that email, by using the right subject line. And while you’re at it, go ahead and ask them outright to forward the blog post to others, or to share it on social media. You’d be surprised at what people will do if you just ask them nicely.
4. Share it with other industry experts. Finally, broaden your content’s audience by contacting other industry experts to see if they’d like to share your content with their own audiences. We’re not talking guest blogging in this instance – just shoot a friendly email to a few authorities in your field asking them if they’d like to see your blog post, since you think it might interest their audience. (It’s best not to include a link or attachment if you’ve never emailed them before.) If they say yes, go ahead and send them the link, and ask them to share it on their own social media channels, or even link to it in their own blog. A recommendation like that from an established authority will go a long way towards garnering interest in your content. Producing content in an isolated bubble isn’t good enough. Producing content and then actively sharing and promoting it is the secret to making your content accomplish its intended tasks. So…let’s practice what we preach. Would you please share this post with anyone you think might find it interesting? Thank you!
2. Your website is slow
So, your website may be ranking and getting traffic from search engines or referrals from social media but as soon as the users land on a slow loading page, they leave without entering.
What will happen when I make my website to load faster?
From my experience if you improve the loading time of a website that already has some rankings, traffic will increase because rankings will improve. If your website is slow but does not have any first page rankings, by fixing the page speed problem you increase your chances of having a page or pages in the first 10 positions.
More than half of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, according to new research. A report from online optimization specialist rad ware has found that 57% of users will give up on a website that takes more than three seconds to load. It means that many websites are failing the most basic test of usability: load time.
"Three seconds doesn't sound like much, but 57% of users will abandon a site that takes any longer," said Kent Alstad, vp of acceleration at Rad ware. "That means lost sales and lost advertising revenue. Yet many site owners fail to optimise images, scripts, and HTML - even as these elements increase in number - leading to sluggish load times, site abandonment, and brand damage. These are prime opportunities for improving performance and attracting and retaining customers."
Radware's survey focused on the top 50 websites across four sectors - news, ecommerce, travel and sport. It found that loading times vary widely:
- 80% of top travel sites take more than three seconds to load on a desktop;
- 78% of top news sites exceed the three-second window;
- All but three of the top sports websites take more than three seconds to load;
- However, nearly half of the top shopping sites load in three seconds or less.
Despite the rising popularity of mobile devices, desktops are still widely used to view websites and they also have a higher average ecommerce conversion rate according to Radware. Its research shows that, with an average ecommerce conversion rate of 2.71%, desktop sites outperform both tablets (2.51%) and smartphones (0.96%).
3. You aim for high competition keywords
This is a very common mistake and one of the most important reasons why a web site is not getting enough traffic (at least from search engines). Consider these 2 factors:- There are only 10 places available in the first page of the SERPs for every keyword. Search engines are trying to display in those places pages from trusted websites that meet their ranking criteria. If you have a new website or even a mature website but it is less trusted than others, then your pages will not be shown in the first pages (if you are both targeting the same keywords).
- The competition for all popular keywords is very high so if you are targeting popular keywords only, it will be very difficult to achieve a good ranking.
The answer is in the long trail. When you use the Google keyword tool to make your keyword research, you should aim for low competition, long trail keywords. For example:
Let’s assume that you are writing about weight loss. The most popular keyword in this niche is “how to lose weight fast”. If you write a post with title “How to lose weight fast” and publish it on your website then most likely that particular post will never drive organic traffic to your website since there are already thousands of other articles with the same title and from more trusted sites.
If on the other hand you go after low competition, long trail keywords like “How to lose pounds” and you change the title a bit to “How to lose 5 pounds quickly” then your chances of ranking in the first page, provided that you promote your blog post correctly are higher. The traffic gains are less compared to high competition keywords but ranking for several terms (even if they are of low competition) is a great way to increase web site trust.
You can also read how to choose blog post titles for a step-by-step example on how to use the Google keyword tool to find low competition, long trail keywords.
4. You hired the wrong SEO firm
Unfortunately this happens very often as well. The web is full of ‘SEO companies’ promising first page rankings but in reality what happens is that their methods and techniques destroy every opportunity your website has for getting organic traffic.How to choose a reliable SEO firm?
I have summarized some general guidelines on what to look for when hiring a SEO firm and how to outsource SEO with spending a fortune but as a general rule of thumb don’t believe anything you read on the web before double checking their claims.
Getting what you want takes hard work, and you can’t shortcut success. In all aspects of life you have those who are willing to put in the work to achieve their goals and those that are not. Shortcuts and cheating lead to failure and sadly it happens all the time. When contracting out with an SEO company you would like to trust that they have your company’s best interests in mind, but that’s not always the case. Whether its laziness, a lack of ethics, or just trying to cheat the system, here are nine red flags to let you know your SEO company is doing things wrong.
- Where’s the Beef?
- Give and Take
Coinciding with asking the business owner for information, the SEO company should also be giving you recommendations to improve your site and presence on the web. These suggestions could be anything ranging from improving your website’s content, to starting several social media accounts, to creating a blog. Again, they may not make a lot of recommendations, but there has to be something your business can improve onto boost your online presence.
- Plagiarized Content
- Real or Fake?
- Fall From Grace
- Use of Spun Content
- Questionable Backlinks and Interlinking
Another similar tactic used by unethical SEO companies is interlinking. Similar to backlinking, interlinking creates several backlinks to a large group of websites usually controlled by the same person or company. If the websites being interlinked have content in common or are related to each other then everything is fine. However, if the sites are unrelated and are linked together for the sole purpose of strengthening the link profile, Google will notice and will take the necessary steps to penalize the parties involved. If your profile has questionable links or is part of an interlinking scheme your SEO company could be doing things wrong.
- Whose keywords are these?
All eight of these red flags are good indicators that your SEO company is doing things wrong. When you enter a contract with an SEO company, don’t just forget about the online presence of your business and let them handle everything. Stay involved, ask questions, and know exactly what they are doing to help you rank higher and increase traffic.
Conclusion
The purpose of every website is to get traffic from search engines, social media sites, direct visits etc. When this is not happening you feel that you are losing your time and you lose faith in the Internet as a whole.There are billions of Internet users around the word and as you read this article, there are thousands of people searching for information or hanging out in social media platforms. The fact that none of them (or only a few) visit your website then this means that you are doing something wrong. In my opinion this could be due to one of the 5 reasons explained above.
Hopefully by reading this post up to this point you have a better idea of what you might be doing wrong and more importantly you have some thoughts on how to reverse the situation
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