A website's purpose is to harness traffic, with the objective that someone at the very least will eyeball your impressive website, and will be motivated to become a customer.
The formula to achieve this is all about ranking, which is all about traffic, which is all about customers.
A website needs:
Traffic = should intensify results for more
Viewers = who will become
Customers = all of the above should result in
Higher ranking = SERP (Search Engine Result Page)
If you notice a reduced performance that is a screaming signal for h-e-l-p!
So how to fix this? There are several places to explore and identify the problems for implementing appropriate solutions. It could be as simple as outdated keywords. Or, maybe the content needs a rewrite. Here are a few insights into the common perpetrators for a drop in traffic.
1. Recent website changes and redesign = resubmit your website to Google in GSC to
speed up the indexing process
2. Are 3xx redirection codes updated?
301 permanent redirects mapped out correctly
302 temporary
3. Make sure all internal & external links are working
4. Check for common HTML status code errors:
4xx client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
5xx server error – the server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request
5. Site structure and formatting errors in the sitemap.xml and robots.txt will impact crawling and indexing. Is something blocked?
6. On-Page SEO errors may include:
Errors in title tags, H1, missing alt-tags
Duplicate content issues
Absent meta description
Duplicate meta descriptions
7. Technical SEO issues
Nasty bounce rate
Mobile unfriendly
8. A lot of spammy links coming in may affect ranking, even with a disallow attribute
How to detect and resolve issues (to increase visibility)
This graph shows how loading speed may affect increased bounce rate
(loss of real traffic)
If you want more traffic, it is essential to maximize the visibility search results in Google and any other search engine.
Finding solutions that are preventing visibility can be challenging and daunting. That's where the SEO audit can be very helpful ... which is a downloadable Ebook.
It's a deep dive and maybe a bit time-consuming but the effort is worth it.
If you enjoy geeking out on details try this handy tool, Screaming Frog SEO spider/Google Partner, which offers a free downloadable version with tutorials and video. This app has the ability to resolve issues such as:
Identify broken links
Analyze page titles & meta descriptions
ID pages with thin content
Verify Indexability
Improve site optimization
… and much more
To outwit the complexity of a full-blown audit, another approach is to jump directly into the Google Lighthouse, a free tool. It provides a detailed report of what was analyzed, diagnoses the issues, and offers suggestions on how to fix them. If you follow all prompts the vexing low traffic issue will be significantly solved.
Assuming all of the above was taken into consideration and explored, now comes the real question, "How to generate more traffic?" Try these tips for generating more traffic to a website.
