10 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Generate Traffic

1. Inactivity in Social Media

Many people are not aware of the power of social media in online marketing. If you want your online store to be a huge success, users must know about it. How? This is where social media enters the game. Create accounts on the most influential social media platforms for your industry. But that’s not enough, of course! Provide high-quality interesting content that will attract users’ attention. What’s more, insert links to your website on your profiles in social media. This will make users more likely to visit your site and, as a result, generate traffic to it.

Which social media are most influential in 2020?

As you can see, you should, first of all, create an account on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Remember to make your content interesting and unique (Google does not like duplicate content!). Share interesting photos on Instagram or video tutorials on YouTube. People just love multimedia content – it will definitely attract their attention.

LinkedIn is another social media in which your brand should necessarily have an account. This is a perfect platform to promote content that is already on your website. What’s more, thanks to LinkedIn users will recognize you as an expert in your industry.

2. Weak Backlinks

Backlinks have a huge influence on search rankings. Numerous backlinks from reliable domains is one of the factors that have an impact on the ranking in search results.  However, not only the number of backlinks matters. You must also be aware of other important factors that Google takes into account.

Choose links from domains with high domain and page authority. How to check which domains will be suitable for you? I recommend tools: Moz and Ahrefs.

Let’s take a look at Ahrefs.

This is one of the most trusted tools to check: URL Rating (UR), Domain Rating (DR), the number of links from other websites pointing pages to your target (backlinks) and the total number of referring unique domains. Above, I show you an example of a domain perfect for link building. Backlinks coming from this domain will be really powerful and thanks to them your website will rank higher in search results. Unfortunately, these tools are not free of charge.

If you want to learn more about link building, check out the article on our blog: 5 mistakes of link building you should avoid

3. Slow Loading Page Speed

Let’s face it – none of us like to wait. The same applies to waiting for the website to fully load. Simply put, if your website loads too slowly, many users resign. What happens then? They go to your competitors’ websites and search for products there. Your competitor profits and you lose.  So, as you can see, if you don’t improve your page loading speed, you will never succeed.

First of all, check out tools that will test the fully loaded time and total page size. I recommend GTmetrix to you – it’s a great tool that will show you if the page loading speed is correct and how to improve it.

One of the main factors that affect the page loading speed is its size. The average page size should not exceed 2 MB. Check if the images on your site aren’t too large – if so, it’s worth reducing their size and you’ll notice the difference.

4. Domain with a Bad History

You bought the domain mainly because it had a nice name? That’s quite a common error! The most important factor you should pay attention to when buying a domain is its history.

Quite often it happens that someone buys the domain, posts interesting content on the website, promotes the online business, and still has no expected results. What is the reason for that? Bad domain history! Google bans or filters especially these domains that have published a lot of spamming links and illegal content. As a result, the website on this domain will not rank in the search engines.

How to check a domain history?

The best way is to use the free Archive service. You only have to take 3 easy steps:

1. Go to Web.archieve.org.
2. Enter the URL you want to verify.
3. Analyze its history.

The archive will show you exactly on which days of the year the layout of the website have changed. Choose a screenshot and you will be able to see what the website looked like on that day and whether it contained illegal content.

5. Low-Quality Content

Believe me, not only users pay attention to the quality of content on websites. Especially in recent years, Google has become increasingly efficient in evaluating the quality of content. Even if you have a blog on your website, but it is of poor quality, you will not succeed in the search engines and you will not increase traffic to your website.

Content is king – this slogan is no longer valid. Personally, I would say:

Do you want to create high-quality content? Remember these rules:

1. It should be unique and fresh. Google doesn’t like duplication, that’s why you should always create content that isn’t copied from your other subpages or from your competitors’ websites. If you want to check the internal duplication rate I recommend the Siteliner tool.
2. It should be correctly optimized, i.e. it contains internal linking, title and meta description tags or URLs.
3. It should meet users’ expectations. If your content is informative or substantial, users will be more willing to read it or link to it. With good content you will also reduce the bounce rate.
4. Even if you create good content but Google doesn’t crawl it, your work will go for nothing. Remember to index your page in Google Search Console.

6. Wrong Keywords

You probably know that keywords are extremely significant for search engines. That’s why, at the beginning of your SEO journey, it’s crucial to choose the right keywords so that you can compete with your main competitors. Let’s face it – wrong keywords will not guarantee you reach  TOP 10 in search results.  This way you don’t increase traffic on the website.

What’s the solution? Target long-tail keywords. More detailed keywords will enable you to compete with your competitors.

Look at this example. Imagine you are running a new online shop offering clothing for women. Do you plan to compete with the biggest brands such as H&M, Zara, or Stradivarius? You can try, but unfortunately, you have little chance to succeed.

General keywords are targeted at a much larger audience. As you can see, the keyword dresses has a very high volume – 673,000.

Take a look at the more niche keyword phrases:

Long-tail keywords have a much lower volume. What does that mean? You have a better chance to rank in search results as they are not as competitive. So remember – you don’t have a good chance of succeeding and increasing traffic to the site with general keywords. Unless you’re an internationally recognized brand like Apple, McDonalds or Nike…

7. Horrible UX

Okay, so you started a SEO campaign, planned marketing strategies, created interesting content, and still have no traffic to the website? Well, maybe your website is not user-friendly. What do I mean by that? Some websites are completely non-intuitive and visually unattractive. This results in users not wanting to spend more time on such websites.

I have already mentioned too long loading time. The examples of other things you need to bear in mind are:

• mobile responsiveness. More and more users enter websites using mobile devices, that is why your website should also be mobile-friendly.
• intrusive pop-ups. Users do not like it when popup covers the central content of the page.
• lack of images. Users prefer to see what they are buying, so you should include images of your products of the highest quality.
• website navigation – it is one of the key elements of every website; remember that correctly optimized website navigation should, for instance, be divided into categories, organized according to users’ expectations and contain various clickable links.

8. Poorly Optimized Website

Are you doing SEO on your own? I must admit – it may prove problematic, especially if you don’t have access to proper SEO tools (most of them are not free of charge) and the necessary technical SEO knowledge. There are several elements of the website that have an impact on the ranking in search engines. It would be extremely difficult to list all of them in one article because there are so many factors determining the correct optimization of the site. There is no one recipe for good SEO.

The following elements should be optimized in the first place:

Google Analytics and Google Search Console implementation

Don’t you have access to these two tools offered by Google? That’s a huge mistake! Thanks to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you will be able to constantly monitor web traffic, check which subpages are the most popular, on which keywords your website is displayed in the search results and see if there are any indexing errors or 404 and 500 errors on your website.

XML Sitemap

The XML Sitemap will indicate how the search engine should crawl your website. It is literally a map of your website.

Yoast plugin (WordPress)

Without a doubt, WordPress is the most popular CMS worldwide. If you also built your website on WordPress, you need to install the Yoast plugin. It will help you to easily optimize your content:  to analyze the target keyword and optimize title tag, meta description tag and URL.

Content

As I mentioned before, high-quality content is not sufficient to achieve a great success in search results. You must also optimize it correctly.

Consider the following factors:

• title tag – the most important element of the page, it should contain the target keyword and briefly describe the content of the page;
• meta description tag – a short description of the page which appears in Google search results, should encourage users to visit your page;
• <strong> and <em> tags – indicate to users and the search engine which elements of the text are the most important;
• alt text for images – describes briefly what appears in the image, should contain the most important keyword;
• H1 and H2 headings – H1 heading should contain e.g. the name of a product (if you run an online store) or a service, usually the page contains just one H1 heading, while there may be more H2, they should divide a text into smaller paragraphs and include keywords.

9. A decrease in Website Visibility Due to Google Algorithms

Changes in Google algorithms are a frequent reason for the drop in visibility of websites in the search engine. Believe me – so many websites have been hit by Panda and Penguin! Most probably you have heard more than once about these and other Google algorithms that strongly affect the visibility of websites and positions in search results. If you notice that suddenly in just one day the traffic has dropped dramatically, you most probably have the answer.

If you want to discover how to react when Google introduces changes to its algorithms, check out the article on our blog, you will find there all the information you need!

10. Wrong Choice of SEO Agency

Unfortunately, this problem happens quite often. On the Internet, you will find many SEO agencies that promise a large increase in website visibility and TOP 10 position in the search results. However, their methods can be ineffective and bring more harm than good. If you have been cooperating with a SEO agency for a long time and you still don’t notice any effects of their SEO strategies, maybe it’s high time to change the agency?

Summary

There are many reasons why you don’t achieve the expected increase in traffic on the site. You can do SEO on your own, but it will be much more complex and demanding than you think.  You would have to react quickly to changes in Google algorithms, constantly monitoring the position of keywords in search results and errors on the site. Keep in mind also that SEO is a long-term process – you will not achieve a huge increase in traffic in one day or even one month. If you need help from a professional SEO agency, don’t hesitate to contact us. We will plan long-term SEO strategies for you, which will increase traffic to your website and generate more revenue.