It doesn’t do you much good to have a website if no one is visiting it. A website that languishes on the scrapheap of irrelevance isn’t that much different from a brick-and-mortar business located far back in an alley where no one can see it. If your website is not getting any traffic, your most important priority is to find out and adjust accordingly.
There are lots of things that can affect traffic. By far, the most significant is weak search engine performance. If your website doesn’t show up on the first page or two of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) traffic will suffer. With that in mind, the experts at Salt Lake City’s Webtek Digital Marketing say that nearly every cause of limited traffic is in some way related to SERPs.
If your website isn’t getting the traffic you want, Webtek says one or more the following five issues could be in play:
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1. Your Content Lacks Appeal
A website is an electronic container for content. Common sense dictates that people will not be interested in your content if it has no appeal to them. This plays out into practical ways. First, unappealing content is content people are not searching for.
You may have a bunch of posts on your site discussing an arcane topic that only a small minority of people are interested in. That information is not going to generate traffic because the audience is so small. That leads to the second issue: Google not recognizing its relevance.
Relevance is particularly important to Google algorithms. A lack of interest in your content tells Google your content is irrelevant to a lot of people. Your site will not be ranked very high.
2. Your Site Isn’t SEO Optimized
Although content rules the web, search engine algorithms rely on SEO principles to understand and rank websites. If your site has not been optimized for SEO, it is not going to rank very highly on SERPs. And if that’s the case, your traffic will suffer.
SEO optimization is a multi-step process with a lot of moving parts. If you don’t know how to do it, you’re better off paying for professional SEO services.
3. You’re Not Using the Right Keywords
Keywords remain the number one tool for determining what a piece of content is about. Search engines rely heavily on them for relevance and ranking. Therefore, your page not ranking well could be a matter of using the wrong keywords. That is why SEO experts put so much time and effort into keyword research.
4. Your Website Isn’t Responsive
Google recognized the emerging mobile trend years ago. As a result, they began ranking websites based on how responsive they were to different screen sizes. Here’s the bottom line: a website that isn’t responsive is one that is not going to get a lot of traffic. Google gives preference to responsive sites first.
5. Your Website Is Too Slow
Finally, Google also recognizes the need for speed in the mobile era. The company has made no bones about ranking for speed. They have been doing so a number of years now. If your website takes more than two or three seconds to load, that’s not fast enough for Google. Your rankings will suffer and so will your traffic.
Websites that don’t get traffic almost always fail to perform well on the major search engines. And when that’s the case, the five things discussed in this post may very well be at the core. If your site isn’t getting the traffic you think it should, seriously consider all of them.
