11 minute read
What the tech? 8 reasons why your website is not getting traffic
What if you threw a party and nobody came?
8 reasons why your website is not getting traffic
by Tommy Le for Manta
Lordsse Design on Pixabay
There is nothing more frustrating than working on your website only to see minuscule volumes
of traffic trickle in from time to time. What’s the point of having a website if there’s no traffic being directed to it? Whether you created your business’ website or hired a professional firm, you spent time (and money) bringing it to life. So, why isn’t your website getting traffic? Figuring out the problem can be as simple as a systematic run through a checklist of potential problems that all contribute to a competitive ranking.
In this article, we will discuss eight potential reasons on why your website might not be getting traffic and how your business can fix it. Let’s get started!
1.
Your SEO efforts are half hearted
Search engine optimization, SEO for short, is the first place you should look into when your website is not getting traffic. Take a look at your site and see how it measures up in these areas to improve your seo strategy: 4 If your SEO keywords are overly competitive, or just don’t match your specific products or services, it won’t attract many customers to your site. 4 Searches on Google and Bing are increasingly locally focused. Add the name of your city or neighborhood to your webpages to help improve your local search. 4 Make sure the writing on your website is searchable by search engines’ web crawlers. For instance, text in a photo file can’t be crawled by Google—same for any content in Flash. 4 Websites without fresh blog posts or recent updates often rank lower in search engine results. Be sure to post new, engaging web content that uses your keywords.
2.
Lack of on-site optimization
Going along with your SEO efforts, it’s very important to check your on-site optimization. What are the most important pages on your website? Are they visible and obvious to visitors? Are they visible and obvious to search engines? Your on-site optimization can be determined by the page hierarchy, interlinking strategy, and the volume of content supporting the keyword topic in which you’re optimizing. A quick check on these items will shed some light as to what your site is and how your site has been optimized.
Include links to the most important pages near the top of your homepage. This is primarily accomplished by including those pages in the navigation bar. The fact that every page on your site will carry a link to those pages in the navigation bar signals to users and search engines that those are the most important pages on your site.
Having an internal link strategy will point to the most important pages on your site. Use varied anchor text within pages and posts to link to you the pages of high importance. This tactic is widely used by SEO consultants and experts to optimize pages within a site.
3. Thin content Articles with a high word count are not necessarily high-quality content; however, the two can sometimes go hand-in-hand. The word count of a page that ranks highly can serve as a benchmark for how much information you need to come up with for your keyword topic. If you have written 300 words, you can’t expect it to outrank a 3000-word page. It’s not likely to happen because the 3000-word page will have so many more topics and subtopics included, which creates a more comprehensive solution to the search query.
Pages are ranked according to how they satisfy search intent. Search engines expect certain inclusions on a page when they rank a site for a specific search query.
For example, if the search query uses long-tail keywords and phrases such as, “What is the best laptop to buy?” Then the pages that would best answer that question would be expected to have a few of the top brands listed as options (Apple, Dell, IBM, Acer, etc.). In addition to the brands, it would be expected that there would be multiple subtopics such as battery life, screen size, warranty, etc. If a page has one title and only talks about one laptop, it would be obvious the page is promotional or severely lacking the information necessary to adequately answer the question posed in the search. These types of pages are not ranked very well based on their content.
Keyword research has been a prominent practice in creating content that is focused and inclusive of relevant subtopics. By searching your keyword, and researching the content that ranks and the related questions that surface, you can assess whether there is a gap in the content you’ve created. You can also assess whether you need to improve the level of detail on your page. Along with these factors, it’s also important to know the user’s intent when writing the most effective content.
4. Load times are slow, especially on mobile Ever left a site you really wanted to visit because it took too long to load? Consumers don’t have time to wait for slow websites, especially on mobile devices. In
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fact, according to Google, nearly 53% of visitors will leave a mobile website if the page doesn’t load within three seconds.
There are a lot of free web tools that let you test the load time of your website. Test your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Google’s site tester. Google’s site tester will tell you how mobile-friendly your site is and provide a free report on how to fix it.
You can also reduce image sizes, leverage caching, and minimize CSS and javascript to improve your page speed. While this may seem like a tall order, you can use free tools to help with all of it. The W3 Cache plugin is also a widely used tool that will speed up your site just by installing and activating. Google will rank your site lower in search results if your site doesn’t work well on smartphones and tablets. Lower search ranking means less traffic to your website when customers search for your products or services. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized site, it’s time to make it mobile friendly!
5. Having an unresponsive website
Most sites are made responsive or mobilefriendly. In fact, the first version of your site that is indexed is the mobile version. This is because most searches are performed from mobile devices.
Google has been clear about the importance of user experience which can be seen from the list of positive ranking factors that have to do with UX. A desktop version of a website on a mobile device is a pain to navigate. It could also be a reason your site isn’t getting as much traffic as it should be.
If your site isn’t made to fit mobile screens it isn’t up to the industry standard and will suffer search visibility. Responsive websites will resize images and text boxes in order to make the delivery of your content more seamless.
6.
Weak backlink profile
Are you aware of what your backlink profile looks like? Do you know what links you’ve acquired and who has linked to your site? You can check your backlinks through tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush. The link profile of your website will contribute to a large portion of the ranking factors that determine your placement in the search results. Every keyword presents a different level of competition, so there are no set amount of backlinks that a website needs to rank for a specific term. There are other factors that come into play; it becomes a combination of those elements that will get your website moving up in the search engine result pages. Adding more domain authority (DA) will ultimately make your website move up in the rankings. If your website has low domain authority, you will need to add more backlinks from relevant websites in order to get the needle moving. Guest posting is an effective method for acquiring highauthority, related backlinks to your site. Guest post to blog sites related to your industry or keyword. Submit to the sites who accept articles. Make sure the sites are reputable, related to your industry, and have enough DA to have a positive impact on your own sites authority.
7. You’ve been penalized There are a variety of penalties that can result in your website showing up near the end of the search results and prevent it from moving closer to the top. Penalties are algorithmic, but they can also be handed through manual actions. You can check whether your site has been penalized with a manual action by logging into Google Search Console. There is a tab that is labeled, “Security and Manual Actions.” Click on “Manual Actions”. If Google has penalized your site manually (which is the most severe), you will have a message informing you of the reason. You can also check for algorithmic penalties through duplicate content and poor backlinking strategies. For duplicate content, you can run your URL through sites like Copyscape. They check any other pages that might have identical text. If your site is running on WordPress, keep in mind that posts are canonical. If you have post snippets on your homepage that’s showing as duplicate, it’s not really an issue. WordPress will label the original post as the source which allows you to post content without penalty to your homepage.
Penalties can be triggered from linking strategies by acquiring links in any way that isn’t natural. This means all sites that offer paid links are off limits. Any “link scheme” (and there are a number of them) will trigger a penalty when Google catches on to the tactic.
Write notes of the dates you acquire links to create a timeline that can be traced back to any drops in ranking. This way you can quickly identify the links and remove them if necessary. It’s also a good practice to monitor your link profile regularly for spammy or unnatural link patterns. (For example, high volumes of links coming from one website.)
8.
You haven’t invited people to visit your website
You might have the best website in the world, but you won’t get traffic unless you promote it. Search or display ads are one way to pay to promote your site. But we recommend starting by making sure your website and its best, freshest content are visible in a number of places online.
Here are a few additional ways in which you can promote your website:
Claim and create your business listings on online directories and review sites.
4 4 4 4 4 4
Add your website to all your social media profiles. Post links to your blog posts, news, or new product pages to attract customers to your website. Find ways to generate links from other websites to yours. You could try: Being quoted as a source in an article (request a link to your site). Offering to write a guest post on influential blogs in your industry Asking partners and like-minded businesses to add a link to your website, where appropriate, on their site or on social media.
This article was originally published at manta.com. Manta is one of the largest online resources dedicated to small business. We deliver products, services and educational opportunities that are effective, easy to understand and geared to help business owners become more competitive in their respective industries. Learn more at manta.com.
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