There can be many reasons why you are not getting visitors to your website or to the blog.
On SEO forums you see many people asking:
- “I am wondering why my blog is not getting traffic?”
- “Why isn’t my website getting traffic?”
These are probably the most frequently asked questions.
Fortunately, these questions can be answered. It may not be a simple answer but nonetheless a clarification of why some blogs and websites are unable to drive traffic.
The following factors are of great importance:
- The popularity of the writer
- Social media strategies
- Age of the domain
- Relevance of the content
- Quality of references (backlinks)
But, for a regular website, the issue could arise due to other reasons.
Below you can read about five different aspects that are easily overlooked by those who have a website. Most of the time, it is because they do not realize how important they are or don’t know how to deal with them.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, keep in mind that it often takes a few months (and sometimes even longer) before you notice any positive or negative effects of making changes to your site. So, you have to be patient and give it enough time before you conclude if you have succeeded with your changes or not.
Why You Are Not Getting Visitors To Your Website
1. You Use Keywords With High Competition
This is unfortunately very common and one of the main causes why a website doesn’t get enough traffic from the search engines.
Here are two factors to consider:
- For each keyword, there are just 10 spots available on the 1st page of Google search results. The search engines try to display pages from trustworthy sites that follow their ranking factors. If you published a new web page or even an older page that is less trustworthy than the others, your page will not end up on any of the first results (if you both target similar keywords).
- The competition is fierce for the most popular keywords. Therefore, if you only focus on popular keywords, you will find it difficult to rank well.
But if competitive keywords cannot be used, then how do I get visitors to my website?
The solution is to do it in a different way. When using Google’s keyword planner to analyze your keywords, you should target long-tail keywords with low competition.
For instance:
Let’s say you write about fitness. One of the most sought-after search phrases in this area is “how to get six-pack abs”.
If you write an article with the title “How to get six pack abs” and post it on your site, it is highly likely that you will never get any organic traffic. This is because there are plenty of other posts with the exact title and from established sources.
Instead, you could choose keywords with less competition like “how to get a six-pack without the gym”. The title can be slightly modified to “How to get a six-pack without the gym in a month”. This would give you a better chance of ranking on the 1st page, provided you are promoting the content well.
The increase in traffic will be less in comparison to highly competitive keywords but ranking for multiple keywords (with lower competition) is a nice way to boost trust in your website.
2. The Content Isn’t High Quality
Amazingly enough, search engines like Google are able to decide whether a piece of content is good or not. So, if the content isn’t high quality and your website isn’t good enough, the chances of getting visitors and ranking higher in the search results are slim, to say the least.
In the past, you could “simply” fool the algorithms by sending some backlinks to the articles and ranking higher, but that doesn’t work anymore. In addition to search engines, we must not ignore the indirect impact of social media on traffic and rankings.
Content that isn’t of good enough quality simply won’t do very well on different social media platforms.
What is considered good quality and what kind of content attracts visitors?
Content that brings visitors is characterized by the following:
- It has been posted on a site with a number of high-quality pages (indexed). If your site is new, it is not easy to rank higher on the search engines. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s still difficult. This is especially the case if there are larger and older websites (with indexed pages) covering the same topic.
- It follows the best practices for SEO proven to be effective after the Panda Penguin and Hummingbird updates.
- It’s new. Users like to read current and updated content and so do social media and search engines.
- It is well-researched and unbiased. If you are always writing positively about a particular service, method, or product, or if you only publish old, reworked content, it is a waste of time and effort. Good quality content needs to be original and cover things from different angles.
3. You Have Been Affected By A Google Update
The average blogger or website owner may not know about Google updates like Penguin or Panda and how their changing algorithms impact the ranking and traffic that their website can get from Google.
When it comes to traffic – if you’ve been hit by Penguin, Panda, or other algorithm updates, you’ll notice a drastic drop in the number of visitors on a particular day.
You can go to your report in Google Analytics and see when the number of visitors changed and compare it to the dates when Google made updates to its ranking algorithms. If the date matches, and based on the type of changes, you might have to do a lot of work on your website to get back the traffic.
It wasn’t Penguin or Panda, but I am still not getting enough visitors, why?
If your website has not managed to attract enough visitors, it may be because:
- You have very little content
- The page is still new (less than six months)
- You only focus on driving traffic from google and other search engines without utilizing alternative ways to attract visitors
- You are not picking the right keywords
- You do not promote your page on social media
4. You Are Working With An Inexperienced SEO Company
Unfortunately, this is quite common. Various SEO companies promise to get you to the front page of Google, while their techniques and methods usually destroy every little chance your website receives organic traffic.
What is the best way to find a reliable SEO company?
There are some best practices on how to hire someone to handle your SEO without costing you a fortune. However, as a general guideline, don’t believe everything you read online until you’ve verified the results.
5. You Have A Slow Website
It is a matter of fact that the speed of a page is critical to how well it ranks. Research has shown that visitors tend to return to pages that load quickly.
The converse is also true: visitors are likely to leave a page if it doesn’t load in 3-5 seconds.
So, your site may be receiving organic traffic or referrals from social media platforms. However, when users come across a page that loads slowly, they leave before they even get to see the page.
What if I make the page load faster?
We know from experience that if you increase the speed of a page that is already getting traffic, the traffic will grow because the page will rank better.
If your site is slow and not ranking for any keywords on the first page, fixing the speed of the page can improve the chances of one or more pages showing up in the top ten results.
Conclusion
The goal of every site is to drive visitors from search engines, referrals, social media, etc. If this doesn’t happen, it may feel like you’re losing time by doing online marketing.
There are millions of web users in different parts of the world. As you are reading this guide, there are several people browsing information or spending time on social media. If nobody gets to your site (or only very few) – then you are clearly not doing something right.
And this may very well be related to any of the five reasons mentioned above.
If you’ve read this far, hopefully, you’ve gotten a better sense of what you’re doing wrong in getting visitors to your blog or website. And hopefully, you’ve got some ideas on what you can do to turn the situation around.