Is Your Website Getting Enough Traffic?

rush-hour-pedestrians

A website or blog may not be receiving enough traffic for a variety of reasons. There is an explanation for why some websites struggle to get visitors.

The age of the domain, the author’s standing, the quantity and nature of references (incoming links), the use of social media, and the frequency of the content are all important factors.

In this article, you’ll learn about tasks that website owners frequently overlook because they either don’t realize how important they are or don’t know how to handle them.

Be patient before you decide if something worked or not after making a change because it might take a few months (or longer) before you see any positive or negative results.

Note: This post may contain affiliate product links. I will receive a commission for any purchases made through these links. You will not be charged anything by clicking on those links. For more information, read the Affiliate Disclosure.

Why Your Website Isn’t Getting Enough Traffic

There could be a few reasons why you aren’t getting enough traffic to your website, and all are fixable. Here are some of those reasons why your website isn’t getting enough traffic.

1. Your Writing is Not Up to the Expected Standard

Contrary to popular belief, Google has improved at identifying quality content.

Therefore, the likelihood of ranking highly in the SERPs and attracting traffic is reduced if your content is inadequate and your website is of low quality.

In the past, it was possible to trick search engines into giving your content high rankings by sending a few backlinks to it, but this is no longer the case.

Not to be overlooked, social media also has a subtly negative impact on rankings and traffic. Poor-quality content has a very slim chance of succeeding on any of the social media platforms.

What makes for good content and, more importantly, what kinds of content can drive traffic?

These qualities describe content that drives website visitors:

  • It complies with every SEO content recommendation that has been shown to be effective following Panda and Penguin.
  • It is published on a website that already has a significant number of high-quality (indexed) pages. Even if you have the best content, if your website is new it may be challenging to rank highly, especially if there are older and larger websites on the same topic.
  • It is objective and thoroughly researched. You are wasting your time if you only publish rewritten text or write exclusively in support of a certain method, product, or service.
  • It is new. Users, search engines, and social media all want to read current, fresh content.

2. You are Aiming for Keywords with a Lot of Competition

Aiming for Competitive keywords is an extremely common error.  Not using better keywords is one of the main causes of a website’s lack of enough traffic, at least from the search engine perspective.

Consider these 2 things:

1. For each keyword, there are only 10 spots available on the first page of the SERPs. Search engines try to show pages from reputable websites that satisfy their ranking criteria.

2. It will be extremely challenging to achieve a high ranking if you only target popular keywords due to the intense competition for all of these keywords. So how can you get traffic if using well-known keywords is not an option?

One option is that you search for long-tail, low-competition keywords when using the Google keyword tool to create your keyword list.

Here is an example to show you what I mean:

Let’s assume that your article is about burning belly fat. “How to burn belly fat quickly” is the most searched-for keyword in this niche.

If you write a post titled “How to burn belly fat quickly” and publish it on your website, it’s highly unlikely that it will ever bring in organic traffic because there are already thousands of other articles with the same title from more reliable websites.

On the other hand, if you target low-competition, long-tail keywords like “How to lose pounds” and you change the title a little to “How to lose 5 pounds quickly,” then your chances of ranking on the first page are higher, provided that you correctly promote your blog post.

3. Your Website Loads Slowly

If your website loads slowly, you can run a Website Assessment Tool to find out what is causing the slowdown. Page speed is unquestionably a ranking factor, and numerous studies have demonstrated that users are more likely to leave a website if it takes longer than 3-5 seconds to load.

Even though your website may be listed and receiving traffic from search engines or social media referrals, as soon as users arrive on a page that loads slowly, they leave the site without visiting again.

What will happen if you speed up your website’s loading time?

According to my observations, if you shorten the time it takes for a website to load, you’ll see an increase in traffic as a result of better rankings.

If your website is slow but does not currently appear on the first page of search results, fixing the page speed issue will increase your chances of having a page or pages in the top ten positions.

4. Panda or Penguin Updates Impacted You

The typical webmaster or blogger might not be aware of Google’s Panda or Penguin algorithms and how their updates affect a website’s Google ranking position and traffic.

If you’ve never heard of these terms before, I recommend reading Panda and Penguin, two short articles from Wikipedia.

Getting enough traffic

If you were affected by Panda, Penguin, or any other algorithmic changes, you would notice a sharp decline in traffic from one day to the next.

You can compare the actual date that traffic changed by opening your Google Analytics report, which will show you when Google changed its ranking algorithm.

You might also need to take steps to recover your traffic if the dates match and the changes have occurred.

Why do I still not get enough traffic when it wasn’t affected by either the panda or penguin algorithms?

If your website hasn’t been able to attract a sizable number of visitors, then perhaps it’s because:

  • It’s less than 6 months old (it is still in its infancy)
  • There isn’t a lot of content
  • Your niche is too broad
  • Using competitive keywords
  • You don’t advertise your website on social media

You Picked the Wrong SEO Agency for Your Project

The internet is flooded with “SEO companies” that promise first-page rankings, however, their methods and techniques aren’t so special that your website will suddenly appear on the first page of any major search engine page (Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo).

SEO tags

Instead, take time to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and how it helps your website to get noticed from all of the other websites online. Once you have a better understanding, you can decide whether you need to use the services of an SEO Agency.

Getting traffic from search engines, social media platforms, direct visits, etc. is the goal of every website. It’s easy to get discouraged when you aren’t getting much traffic. Give your website a chance to grow, keep adding quality content, promote your website on your social media, or add a link to your email signature to reach out organically.

6. You Have a Poor Backlink Profile

In order to rank well in searches, backlinks are important. High-quality links pointing browsers to pages that are among the top three ranking sites or so are essential.

Their domain has a ton of authority, which means that their link profile is made up of countless backlinks from the top companies in their particular industry.

It’s likely that you don’t have many backlinks if you haven’t already linked with other websites. And if that’s the case, that could be a huge factor in your lack of Google traffic.

Blog comments are the ideal way to start. Most blogs provide their commenters with no-follow links because no-follow links rarely help your search rankings. Good ratios of no-follow and do-follow links are present in the best link profiles.

Here are a few quick steps to help you improve your blog commenting skills:

  • Visit one of the best blogs in your niche or industry.
  • Select an article from a blog that interests you, and then read it completely.
  • Scroll down to the comments section, complete the form, and post a thoughtful comment.

However, as I previously mentioned, links from blog comments won’t exactly help you rank on page one. You must improve upon that.

Writing a guest post is one of the best strategies for getting do-follow links. Most blogs give visiting authors one or two links. Usually, you should include one in the content and one in your author bio.

Utilizing resource pages is another link-building tactic I suggest. Link pages can be thought of as resource pages. Numerous links pointing to high-quality content are typically high-quality.

7. Your Content is Unworthy

The main draw for readers to your blog is the content you provide. Visitors to your blog won’t stay long if you only produce mediocre blog posts. Your traffic flow will suffer regardless of how effective your marketing strategies are if your content is poor.

No one will stay longer than a hot minute, even if you pay for your traffic.

Driving traffic to your blog is one thing. Another is to convince them to stay. The trick is doing it repeatedly; that is the real challenge. It all begins with writing excellent content that will enlighten your readers with information that they have not seen anywhere else.

Your goal is to write worthy content to post on your blog, which in turn, will provide you with a growing list of followers.

Here is a list to help you:

  • Use brief sentences
  • Ensure there’s no filler or jargon
  • To emphasize a point, use bold and italics
  • Include images and videos
  • Incorporate actual data
  • Give evidence for your claims by citing sources and links.

Making web content that is readable is important too. If you write on Microsoft Word documents, you can check the readability levels.

So choose the appropriate topics. To find highly searched phrases, use keyword tools. Utilize Google’s autocomplete and associated searches. To find questions being asked in your niche, search Quora and other online communities.

8. You Spend More Time on Creation than Promotion

It’s true, writing content for your blog is vital to your website getting found in an internet search. But if you spend more time adding content, and not promoting your content, well, all you will have is a pretty website that nobody will see.

There’s a decent chance you’ll produce a nice flow of organic traffic if you consistently write a blog post every day.And in the world of blogging, nothing is guaranteed – particularly when it comes to attracting potential readers to your content.

I first learned the proverb, “Publish and pray,” from Brian Dean of Backlinko.

In essence, it refers to a blogger with little to no authority who consistently publishes blog posts without doing any promotion in the hopes of attracting traffic from mysterious sources.

You press the “Publish” button, hoping that someone will read it, but you have no idea how they might find your blog post.

However, no matter how amazing your content is, no one will find it in a search engine or news feed if your brand or website lacks authority.

That is why it is important to actively promote your content.

The 80/20 rule, which is well known, also applies to content marketing. 20% of your budget should go toward creation, and 80% should go toward promotion.

There are various approaches to promoting your content, and it involves more than just posting about it on social media. Influencer marketing is the best way to spread the word about your content.

Influencer marketing is the practice of using the audience or reach of an industry influencer to promote your work. Therefore, it’s ideal for promoting content.,

9. Your Headlines Are Not Engaging Visitors

There’s a good chance you won’t get much traffic if your headlines are not engaging – no matter how high you appear in search results or how frequently you appear in news feeds on social media.

Headlines are the first thing internet users see before deciding whether or not to visit your site. It’s your job to convince them otherwise. 

Here’s a journalism tip:

When you think about the headline of a story, you want to shout out to the reader and make them take notice. Once you get their attention, your next content needs to tell the story of the headline, and the reason why you used that particular title.

Think about this every time you write a story, and come up with different variations on the title before deciding which one you will use. Write the content to match the title. You will find that your readers are more interested in what you have to say when you can back it up with some experience or knowledge about the topic.

10. Your SEO Strategy is Not Working

If your website gets indexed and found by Google bots, and yet your website is not appearing on the first page of ANY search engine browser, chances are your SEO strategy is not working for you.

Your content must be of the highest caliber to be seen as authoritative and worthy enough for the front page.

But a number of other elements are also in play, such as setting up an XML sitemap, putting an SEO plugin in place, optimizing your content for keyword searches, and more.

Your chances of appearing high in search engine results will improve by using any or all of these tools.

It takes several steps and can be challenging to use WordPress SEO plugin at first. Yet, with some practice, it’s possible to make it automatically work for you.

Rank Math SEO is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins. It does the job and is simple to use. Install the plugin to get started, and then use the wizard for configuration to guide you through the setup.

Install an XML sitemap, Google Analytics, and Search Console.

There are the usual tools used by most website owners,  who are aware of the value provided by Google Analytics, Search Console, and an XML sitemap.

  • You can TRACK the overall traffic to your site using Google Analytics
  • Monitor your online presence using the Search Console. The Google bots can read your website thanks to XML sitemaps

Once you have gained some experience by using Rank Math SEO plugin, you will begin to see the power you have at your fingertips when it comes to creating content that will draw viewers to your website.

Conclusion

Finding the right keywords for your topics will help you attract more readers. Without readers, you lose out on any possibility of earning any amount of income.

You need to focus more on attracting visitors from search engines than looking for additional traffic sources. Once you have acquired more visitors, then you can look for other methods to gain traffic.

As Always, if you have any questions, go ahead and leave a comment below.

Join the Website
Fixer Guy Club!

Get exclusive access to my blogs tips and product reviews on how to keep your website in top shape!

Leave a Comment