It took a lot of time, effort, and money to build your site. It’s been live for some time but there’s not much traffic. What is the problem? Why is your site not getting visitors?
There are several reasons your website may not be attracting traffic. In this article, we’ll take a look at those issues and how to fix them. Let’s get started.
1). Your Website is Very New
If your site has just recently launched, it can take as long as four weeks for it to start showing up in the search engine results.
This can be frustrating, but it’s just how things work and there’s not much you can do. So, just wait and read more about the other issues that may be keeping your site from gaining traffic.
2). Website Not Optimised for Search Engine Crawling
After submitting your site to the search engines, they send out a spider to crawl the site for content. The spiders scan the site for meta content, content that’s relevant, keywords, and more.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to consider what search engines are seeing when they visit your website and its pages.
3). Your Site Has No Backlinks
The more backlinks a website has, the more useful Google believes the site is. The higher the number of backlinks, the more authority the site will have, ranking it higher in the search engines.
While this is true, you need to be careful of the type of backlinks the website receives. The quality of the links back to the site are important. If they appear to be spammy, then your site will be penalised by showing up lower in the search rankings. Google and other search engines want to ensure all links to a website are useful and high quality. They also only want the best sites to rank at the top of the search engines. So, the quality of your site’s backlinks can make a huge difference as to where you come up in the search results.
Another problem is when a new site has few backlinks. Then the search engines aren’t sure whether or not the content on the site is useful or not.
Here’s a warning. Because you can hire someone on a freelance platform, such as Fiverr, to create backlinks for a website, many people are tempted to go this route. Usually the gig may offer several thousand high quality backlinks for $5.
Stay away from these gigs or anyone offering this type of service. The reason is because these backlinks are usually created with low-quality web 2.0 properties such as Blogger or HubPages. Another reason to avoid this type of back-linking strategy is because a high link velocity will cause Google to penalise your site. Google and other search engines understand that high quality backlinks are not created quickly but grow naturally over time.
Instead, use the right methods to naturally grow backlinks. These methods include:
- Guest posting
- Social media marketing
- Collaborate with influencers in your market/industry
- Pinterest marketing
- Use Q&A sites (search for questions related to your service or product and answer them)
These are a few of the legitimate methods to apply when looking for high quality backlinks, which can help your site gain visibility and traffic.
4). Targeting the Wrong Keywords
If your site has low traffic, then it could mean there’s a problem with your keywords. Keyword research isn’t easy. It takes time to consider who your target audience is and the right keywords to bring them to your site. You may notice low or no traffic to the website, low search rankings, and a high bounce rate.
It may be necessary to reconsider your keyword and content strategies. When you have the right keywords and content, then the target audience will find your site.
5). Poor On-Page Optimisation
Another issue that can cause no or low traffic is not using keywords effectively in tags including:
- Title tags
- Description tags
- Alt tags
When the on-page optimisation is correct, the search engines can gain a clear understanding of what your site’s all about. So, it’s really important to learn how to properly use keywords in the tags to help search engines see what the website is about. Then you’ll rank higher and gain more traffic.
6). High Bounce Rate
The bounce rate measures the rate at which site visitors leave a webpage without reading, clicking links, and more. So, if you’re seeing high bounce rates, then there you may have one of these issues:
- Page content doesn’t meet expectations
- Design is not attractive
- User interface is not user-friendly
- Site is difficult to navigate
Fixing these issues will help lower the bounce rate.
7). Lack of Content or Poorly Written Content
These are two major issues that can keep you from ranking in the searching engines, along with no one visiting the website.
If your site doesn’t have content, then why do you even care about having site visitors? There’s no information for them to learn more about your products and services.
If you do have content, but it’s poorly written, then this makes people quickly leave the site. These are issues that can make a website look spammy, untrustworthy, and more.
Here’s what your content needs to do:
- Provide value: content needs to provide the information site visitors need and want
- Targeted: content should be targeted and relevant to the visitors you hope to attract, which is your target audience
- Diversity: content needs to cover topics that are pain points for site visitors
- Include plenty of content: your site needs to have a lot of content to keep and earn new traffic
8). Poor Off-Site Optimisation
Have you given a thought to what needs to be done off-site to bring in traffic? If not, then you probably have poor off-page optimisation issues.
Off-page optimisation is all about link building, content marketing, and proper use of social marketing. Improving these aspects will increase traffic to your website.
Summing It Up
As you can see, many aspects of your website work together to bring in traffic. When these pieces don’t work well together, your site suffers. Not only will it not rank in the search results, but people won’t find your site, either.
Follow these steps to make sure everything on your site is working together properly. Once this is done, you’ll have a much better chance of increasing traffic, which increases your company’s bottom line.
