So you’ve just launched a new website and are super excited about it. Everything is falling into place, and you’ve already written a few articles to get things rolling. However the site isn’t really bringing in much traffic at all, and none of your articles has any comments whatsoever. Your website has no traffic!
The lack of traffic is making you a bit nervous, but you decide to give it some time. After all, it’s a new site, so it probably just takes a little time to get the exposure right? Eventually, you finally realise, that after writing twenty articles and barely getting any traffic at all, something very wrong is going on.
One of the things we get asked all the time is how to increase the traffic to a website. The difficult thing about answering this question is there’s no quick fix that will instantly take your website to the next level. What you need to do is go back to basics and look at what’s not working for you. From there you can then find an expert who can put things in order for you.
To get things started we’ve put together the top 8 reasons why your website doesn’t get enough traffic. Take a look at them, think about them, and then get in touch. It’s that simple when you want to change your fortunes online.
Table of Contents
Unlock Your Website’s Potential with High-Quality Content
This might sound like common sense, but you’d be amazed at the number of businesses that never think to do it. You can spend as much money as you like on AdWords campaigns and hiring influencers, but if your content isn’t very good, no one is going to give you a second glance.
It may sound like we’re being a little harsh and direct here, but it’s something that really needs to be said on day one. The quality of your content is ultimately what will get people engaged with your site and visiting over and over again. Everything else involved in the promotion and visibility side of things is great, but quality content is the foundation on which every high-traffic site is built.
Hiring a copywriter is a great way to get started, and if you can find a full-service agency that will combine copywriting with web design you’ll really be onto something.
Transform Your Content from Good to Great
A few years ago, bloggers could get away with digital murder… Ok, I’m exaggerating but still. When it came to writing content for websites, the quality of content didn’t matter as much. If you could get a ton of backlinks to your site, you would rank no matter what.
Search engines are a lot smarter now. They know good content when they see it, and can smell bad content a mile away. If your blog is poorly written, doesn’t have enough content, or isn’t original, search engines will rank you lower for that.
Google is all about creating an amazing search experience for its users. They will only rank websites that offer actual value to readers. If you’re writing low-quality articles that no one is linking to, just to make a buck, don’t expect an influx of readers on your site.
Optimise Your Content for Improved Rankings
The more content you have, the better chances you have of ranking well. But this will only happen if that content is worth reading. You should be creating content because you have something you want to share, not solely for the purpose of boosting your SEO.
One way websites do this is by creating 50 web pages with almost nothing on them in an attempt to rank better. The other way is creating tons of content that is unengaging, plain, and repetitive.
Quality content will not only help you rank better but it’ll also help you create a more trusting relationship with your visitors.
It’s much better to have a few well-written pages than it is to have lots of poorly written-ones.
Craft Click-Worthy Headlines
This point really fits into the last one, but it’s so important that we wanted to take some time to emphasise it. In the age of continuous social media feeds, endless Google searches, and enticing clickbait, it’s never been more important to invest in headlines that catch the eye.
A copywriter and a content creation team are exactly what you need to master the art of creating enticing headlines. They need to be short, to the point, eye-catching, and informative. It’s no use using headlines that everyone clicks on if they then take people to content that’s nothing to do with what they’re looking for.
It’s crucial to gradually fine-tune your approach by testing multiple headlines over time.
It’ll allow you to maintain relevance whilst maximising traffic. Just what you need to do to take your web presence to new heights.
Unlock the Power of Keyword Research
If there’s one thing that every business is told it needs to focus on, it’s keywords. They are talked about as if they’re the magic bullets that will see you instantly skyrocket up the Google rankings and appear on the first page. Whilst this may have been the case 15 years ago when search engine optimisation was in its infancy, it isn’t that simple these days.
When you want to use keywords to increase traffic, you need to be realistic about the budget you can throw at the problem. It’s no use spending a couple of dollars a month and trying to target incredibly broad and overused keywords like ‘discount fashion’ and ‘designer labels.’ All this will do is waste your time and money.
Target highly focused, relevant keywords that have a high number of searches, and as little competition as possible.
Working with an expert team will allow you to sleep with the peace of mind that comes from knowing your keywords really are worth using. You’ll find that you start to leverage the power of long-tail keywords, keywords that include specific locations, and all sorts of other bright ideas you hadn’t thought about when you first launched your site.
Find and Target High-Impact Keywords
Having a popular blog isn’t about who can write the most articles. You could write one hundred articles and not see one ounce of traffic. One of the most important factors that determine whether or not people visit your site, is if you’re targeting the right keywords. What do we mean by this? You need to write articles based on what people are searching for.
When you know what keywords people are typing into search engines, only then will your site start getting more traffic. If people are searching for something like “buy cheap domain names”, but you write a post titled “save money on domains”, well while your article is still relevant to the topic at hand, they aren’t going to see your website in their search results for their keywords.
If however, you know that people are searching for “buy cheap domain names”, you can write the same exact article and simply use the title “Top three places to buy cheap domain names”, and your site will show up in the search results for those keywords. It’s as simple as that.
Using keyword research is vital in growing your audience. It can also mean the difference between no traffic, and a thriving website.
As a leading digital marketing agency, we’re ready to develop the strategies you need to scale your business.
We’ll give you no-nonsense marketing and SEO strategies that will bring you high-quality leads.
Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinking is something that everyone is told will make a real difference to the visibility of their site, but the truth is it will only generate results if it’s done the right way. There are so many different competing and contradictory schools of thought about the best way to do it that it can often feel impossible to know where to start.
As ever, the best approach is to work with an experienced full-service agency that will be in it for the long haul. Commenting on a couple of blogs and offering a guest post will make little appreciable difference to your online profile. But a concerted effort that consistently gets your name out there in a relevant, meaningful way will pay for itself from day one. It’s just another reason why it pays to invest in a long-term approach rather than hoping for an overnight fix.
Boost Your Website’s SEO Ethically
It can take a while for your website to get off the ground. Creating great content and doing everything right and still not seeing results can be frustrating which leads some people to buy links.
Sure, if you spend an immense amount of time researching various websites and buying links there, it has the potential to help your site but slip up just once and associate with a site that has been sandboxed by Google and you’ll be back to square one.
It’s much better to avoid buying links altogether. It may take a little longer for your website to take off but you’ll save money and time fixing the huge mess that buying links can create.
Elevate Your Website’s User Experience
Your user experience isn’t what gets people to your site in the first place, but it’s what keeps them there once they arrive. For this reason, it really has to be optimised, especially if you want to turn a first-time browser into a repeat visitor and loyal customer.
Webpages that are slow to load, poorly laid out, and don’t have the right visual elements on display will be instantly dismissed by the vast majority of visitors. Take the time to have a professional optimise and maintain your site at the same time as deploying keywords and promotional initiatives and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.
Optimise Navigation, Design, and Content
Having great content is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. If you’re able to provide great content on a regular basis and you’re targeting the right keywords, there’s no reason you can’t have lots of traffic.
Having all those things will put you on the path to success, however, if you’re doing everything right, but your site is slow, poorly designed, and complicated for users to navigate, all your efforts will be in vain.
Look at your website through the eyes of your target audience. Is it easy to navigate? Can you find what you’re looking for quickly? Look for those factors to help improve your site.
Strike a Balance with Advertising
There is nothing wrong with having ads on a website. Some bloggers create entire websites with the sole purpose of monetizing it via Google Adsense and affiliate marketing. Ads are a great way to generate a passive income and make some extra cash on the side. Some even make a living off of it.
However, more doesn’t always mean better. Ads are great when used appropriately, but when ads get in the way of a user finding what they are looking for, they are going to start looking elsewhere.
No one wants to be bombarded with ads all the time. Not only that, a lot of ads will slow down your websites if they are loaded from external sources.
Excessive ads lower the overall quality and perception of a website, causing potential viewers to head for the hills.
Unleash Your Website’s Promotional Potential
Promoting your website is all-important when you want to get your name out there. That’s what backlinking and social media are for, and there’s also a whole host of other ways you can do it.
What we really want to stress in this section is the importance of changing your mindset. Don’t sit there and assume the competitors you’re trying to emulate have some innate ability to attract visitors, or that they got lucky. The chances are they’re simply investing far more time, money, and effort in self-promotion than you are. But don’t worry, if you partner with the right team you can start addressing this today.
Accelerate Your SEO Success
We talked a little earlier about the importance of being realistic when it comes to your choice of keywords, but there’s actually a little more to it than that. You need to keep your keywords up to date because their relevance and popularity will change over time. You’re also going to want to ensure that your keywords translate into new markets. If you’re launching a product for a new audience, conduct new keyword research. And if you’re creating a foreign language site, start your keyword research from scratch.
Every audience is unique, so make sure your SEO efforts are too.
Use Keywords Strategically
Back in the day, Google placed a lot of importance on the density of keywords in your web content. If you wanted the home page of your website to rank for ‘medical supplies’ for example, you might make sure that phrase appeared 20 or more times in your content. Well, Google has gotten a lot smarter and we now know how unappealing that kind of content is to a reader.
While keywords still play a role in SEO, keyword stuffing is no longer effective and can actually harm your rankings. It’s important to focus on using keywords naturally and strategically throughout your content.
To ensure your content flows naturally and sounds engaging, a good idea is to read it aloud. You can also use a text-to-speech site to have your content read back to you, which can help you identify areas where the language or phrasing feels awkward or forced.
When you come across these areas, take the time to revise and rework the content until it sounds natural and engaging. Remember, the goal is to create content that readers will find valuable and engaging, and a natural-sounding tone and flow are key to achieving this goal.
Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
If you’ve created a website that seems to not be getting an ounce of traffic, well it could be that something is stopping search engines from being able to index your site. This has got to be one of the biggest yet most simple to fix issues for websites not getting any traffic. If search engines can’t see your site, well they can’t index it. As you might have guessed, if they can’t index it, then your site will not show up in search engine results pages (SERPs for short).
If your website is powered by WordPress, solving this issue is a piece of cake. WordPress comes built-in with an option to block search engines from indexing your site. Chances are, if search engines are having trouble indexing your site, it has to do with a misconfiguration of this option.
Log into WordPress, and navigate to the “Reading” section of your settings, you can enable search engine visibility to solve this issue.
Supercharge Your Social Media Strategy
Social media is the tool that’s defined the last decade, and it’s not going to go away anytime soon. Whether you love it or loathe it, you simply have to have a social media presence in today’s world.
Target relevant hashtags, build a following and link to new blogs and content on your site.
You could also run ads to reach a wider audience, but ensure you get the balance right. People are ultimately on social media to have fun and connect, so concentrate on striking the right balance between paid ads and free content that adds value.
What Happens Next?
There could be numerous reasons that a website is failing to bring in any traffic. We’ve simply tried to list for you the most common reasons why this typically happens. If you’re following all the above advice but still can’t seem to bring in traffic, it’s time to start working with a team that can fix things.
We’re a full-service agency that’s always ready and waiting to provide the expert input you’ve been waiting for, and it all starts with the click of a button, get started today.