Getting people to visit your site is an ongoing problem for people. Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean that your target audience is going to find it. Especially if you are have just started, it can be challenging to get high enough in the rankings to get new traffic. According to a study done by Ahrefs, only 5.7% of newly published pages ranked in the top ten Google search for at least one search query within the first year of being published. So how do you beat those odds and make sure that people are coming to your page, regardless of when you started? If you feel like you aren’t getting enough site visitors, here are a few reasons why and how you can fix them.
1.Your content isn’t good enough
The quality — or lack of quality — can have a significant impact on how search engines like Google rank your website. If your content is not high-quality, then you most likely won’t be ranked high in the SERPs, and you will see less traffic.
The way SEO and website ranking have changed in recent years; before you could trick search engines into thinking that you had quality content by directing a few backlinks to your website to get rankings that way, but that is no longer the case. Google especially has become very efficient at judging good content.
Content that helps to attract website visitors typically share the following characteristics:
- It is published on a website with quality indexed pages. However, if your site is new, it can be difficult to rank regardless of how good your content is, especially if there are older websites with more indexed pages on the same topic.
- It is unbiased and well-researched, that is original and tells both sides of the story. If you are merely re-writing text or always writing in favor of a particular product or service, your content won’t rank as high.
- Your content is fresh because your readers won’t read something that is old news or outdated.
2.You aren’t paying attention to SEO
You have to step up your SEO game if you want to get on that first page of Google results. The first step is consistently producing quality content. But if you aren’t trying to do anything to improve your SEO, then you are letting potential new visitors to your site pass you by. Some of the factors you should consider are setting up an XML sitemap which allows website visitors to easily navigate on your site. It will enable Google’s bots to read and analyze your site, helping to boost your position in the results page.
You should also be using Google Analytics which helps you to monitor your entire overall site traffic. It helps you to make sure you are bringing in people that you want to and when your traffic spikes.
You can also install the free WordPress plugin Yoast SEO which can help attract more visitors from social media and search engines. It can also help you optimize for keywords and even will keep your site updated for Google’s algorithm. Without making efforts to improve your SEO, you probably won’t see very high rankings.
3.Your Website is Too Slow
How fast your website loads is critical in the ranking process. According to surveys by Akamai and Gomez.com, roughly half of web users expect a website to load within 2 seconds. In fact, they will abandon a site that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. 79% of online shoppers who had experienced poor website performance say they won’t return to that site to buy again, and about 44% of them will tell a friend they had a bad experience. Having a slow website doesn’t just put your further down in the rankings, it could be the reason you aren’t converting sales from the people that do make it to your site.
If this is your problem, you should go back to your hosting provider and see what sort of resources you are getting directed at your website. If you are on a small plan where you have to share your resources with others, perhaps it is time for an upgrade.
You should also try to optimize your images by using the “Save for Web” option in Photoshop or Fireworks. This can help to reduce image size without having to sacrifice image quality. You can also find web-based programs to do the same thing for you if you don’t have a graphics program.
Content management systems (CMS) like WordPress have free plugins that can help you to cache the latest versions of your web pages, so the browser doesn’t have to generate the same page every time the visitor comes back to your website. A plugin like WP Super Cache can help to reduce those page loading times.
4 .You Aren’t Using the Right Keywords
One of the most common mistakes people make is aiming for high competition keywords. If you are trying to use a common keyword, the chances of your website, especially if it is new, getting that first page ranking over pages that are more trusted and mature is extremely unlikely. For example, if you are targeting keywords like “how to lose weight,” you will see that the competition is fierce and the top rankings go to authority sites.
To fix this problem, you can either increase your authority – which could take years and lots of hard work – or use long-tail keywords. This type of keywords has more than four or five words and are extremely specific. That way, you have a better chance at directing search traffic to your website.
Doing a combination of the two is most effective – target long-tail keywords and continue to grow your authority. For example, when you are creating a blog post, you should make sure it is better than everyone else’s and use the long-tail keywords.
Using these techniques can help you to increase the traffic on your site. However, you will have to continually work on your website to make sure that you are consistently delivering great content that reaches your targeted audience.
