Have you spent a lot of time, money, and effort creating a killer website? Does your site have a high bounce rate? Are you trying your best to attract visitors, but not seeing any results? Are you wondering why your website isn’t getting the traffic it deserves?
Some may think the answer is to buy more advertising.
But, many businesses don’t have the budget for that and want to utilize their organic search potential.
There are several reasons your website may not be driving large amounts of traffic. You are most likely making simple mistakes that have added up.
In this post, we will dive into the most common reasons you may not be getting site traffic. We will also share a few tips for maximizing your site.
Test Your Website’s Traffic: Use E-A-T
Your web design may be beautiful, but your content may not be what Google wants.
Start by analyzing your site’s content using E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and can have a big impact on Google’s algorithm.
While the depths of the Google algorithm for ranking sites are unknown, we do know their ranking system rewards sites with high expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, aka E-A-T. You must pay attention to these three categories when crafting content for your site.
Now, go evaluate the content on your site. Then, ask yourself the following questions.
Expertise: Does the author relay their topic well? Is the communication engaging? Do your authors have bios? Are you fact-checking your posts?
Authority: Are you a trusted expert? Do you have experience in your field? Does your content have high-quality backlinks? Are other people recommending your content?
Trustworthiness: Why should the user trust your site? Does your site load fast? Are there any typos? What are other websites saying about your site?
These may sound simple, but these three tenants form the foundation of SEO in 2021. If you aren’t satisfying these, your site is likely being penalized.
Here are a few more reasons why your site may not be attracting visitors.
Your website may not optimized
Google is a powerful search engine that desires to bring the best experience to its users. It wants to bring the searcher the best possible search result. If your site is not optimized for the user’s experience, it may not send traffic to your website.
If a potential client clicks on your site and your landing page takes forever to load, Google penalizes you. Google uses technology to measure site performance. It measures both desktop and mobile performances.
Google seems to weigh mobile performance more heavily than desktop. If your site is not optimized for the mobile user, this could be hurting your site.
Other things that may slow down your site performance include removing unnecessary or messy code, avoiding big fonts, and sizing images to the proper size.
Small steps like these will make your site look better to Google. In turn, the algorithm will then be more likely to drive visitors to your site.
Your website content may be of poor quality
Many B2B sites make this mistake. They assume their website ranking is low because they need SEO help. This is not always the case. There are many ways to increase your website traffic without SEO.
Poor quality content is often the culprit.
First, consider who is writing your content. Have you hired a professional content writer?
Often, your content may be too wordy, difficult to read, or over sales-y. This is a major reason many websites don’t get traffic – they aren’t appealing to the average reader.
If your writer is a real expert on a topic, they will be able to explain it in a way that is easy to understand and engaging. Your content must be concise and clear!
Keep in mind, the average reader is around a ninth-grade reading level. It is a good idea to keep your language simple, using limited adverbs and complex sentences.
To check this, there are several free apps you can use such as Grammarly for grammar, and Hemingway for content complexity. Copy and paste content from your site to see if it’s effective, too complex, or hiding typos.
You may need more content
But, you say, my site’s content is high quality. What do you I now?
Well, you may not have enough content on your site.
Are you producing new content every week, or at least every month? If your answer is no, you need to be producing content on a consistent schedule.
If you are struggling to come up with new content ideas, this is common. However, the content creation process doesn’t have to be daunting!
Start by taking out a pen and paper, or opening up excel to keep track of content ideas. Answer potential questions a client may ask about your product or service. Give examples of how to use your service. Offer useful content like cheat sheets or checklists for potential clients. These are all easy ways to curate more content.
Then, using your new content ideas, develop a consistent schedule. The frequency of your content schedule will depend on the specific business. But, a good rule of thumb is to create new content at least once a week. Then, test your content. Test which days of the week perform best. Maybe try out different types of content – some posts should be longer than others, for example.
Pushing out credible and consistent content will put your site in front of more eyes. It will help to establish your site as an authority in your respective industry.
If your business or start-up is new, building credibility is crucial for business. The more credibility you have, the more brand awareness there will be. As brand awareness increases, you will eventually generate more leads!
If you are regularly putting new, engaging, and high-quality content online, you are more likely to deliver to new customers.
Don’t sleep on the power of Inbound Marketing and optimizing your content marketing strategy. Are you creating blog posts? Have you considered email marketing? If you are stuck coming up with ideas or aren’t sure what Inbound Marketing is, check out this article.
Your digital marketing strategy may not be optimized
Last but not least, your SEO strategy may not be optimized. SEO is extremely important for increasing traffic to your site! Backlinks are often key to having a high domain authority.
However, the main issue many businesses run into is not that they aren’t using backlinks, but that they are using low-quality backlinks.
Stay away from sketchy means of attaining backlinks. This will penalize your site. If you buy backlinks or get links from low-quality, spammy sites, this could be hurting your domain authority even further.
You want to build backlinks with high-quality connections. Your links should be relevant to your site and applicable to your content. If you need some extra help crafting your SEO strategy try using a backlink checker tool, there are plenty of free options online.
We also recommend checking out this article for in-depth advice on building quality backlinks.
Increase website traffic to your website
At the end of the day, the key to gaining more traffic is producing quality content. If you are creating high-value content, which showcases your industry expertise, the traffic will come. It just may take time.
Have you tried everything but still aren’t seeing the results you desire? Check out our free Ultimate Marketing Cheat Sheet! Make sure you are checking all your marketing boxes.
Want an expert to help drive traffic to your site? We’re here to help!
