As a business owner, you understand how important it is to get traffic to your website. Without traffic, you canât generate leads. And without leads, you canât earn revenue. So, itâs incredibly discouraging when you find yourself struggling with low website traffic.
What you should know is that youâre not alone. According to Fundera.com, generating traffic and leads is the primary challenge faced by 61% of digital marketers. It outranks other key business challenges, such as improving ROI and securing a budget.
Fortunately, poor traffic is easier to address once you understand the cause and develop a formidable SEO strategy.
How Low Website Traffic Affects Your Business
There are many ways low website traffic can affect your business. In fact, there may be some youâre not even aware of! Thatâs why itâs worth taking a closer look at the consequences of poor traffic.
Here are just a few examples…
Loss of Revenue
The most obvious impact of low website traffic is the loss of revenue. About 25% of businesses that operate online generate their revenue from the website. So, when the visitors just arenât coming inâand therefore, not buyingâit dramatically decreases your companyâs revenue.
Impact on Authority
Unfortunately, sites with low website traffic struggle to gain authority in their space. They are often considered lower in value, even if that isnât the case. If your traffic volume is low, proving your worth will be a constant battle.
Effect on Sales Funnels
Yes, you want visitors to your website. But, more than that, you want conversions and sales. If you struggle to get traffic to your website, it will directly affect your sales funnels. That means youâll have a lower chance of converting leads into customers in the future.
Common Reasons for Poor Website Traffic
Before implementing ways to improve low website traffic, you must diagnose it first. There are several reasons you may be having a hard time bringing in customers. So, letâs look at some of the most common.
Your Site Isnât Indexed
Proper website indexing is an essential step in your SEO strategy. If your site isnât indexed, search engines such as Google wonât display your site in search results. And when your site doesnât appear, you miss out on all that organic search traffic.
To check if your site is indexed, type âsite:websitename.comâ into the search bar. If nothing comes up, your lack of traffic is likely due to this oversight.
You Need to Improve Your SEO Efforts
According to Forbes, ranking higher on search engines increases your search traffic by up to 71%. Your inability to optimize your website for Google means losing out on organic traffic from relevant queries. So, brush up on SEO basics and apply best practices. Doing so will allow you to earn free traffic over time.
Your Site Doesnât Have Enough Valuable Content
Content marketing is an integral part of bringing more traffic to your website. If you have low website traffic, itâs time to reevaluate your content marketing strategy.
Although SEO is vital to your success in getting ranked, you must also think about your human readers. Offer value to foster customer loyalty and trust. You want your target audience to think of you as a trusted authority in your industry.
You Donât Have Any Backlinks
A lack of backlinks from outside sites to your own can hurt your traffic performance. The quality and quantity of links to your website greatly impact the amount of traffic youâll receive. (Weâll talk more about this shortly.)
Your Site Is Slow
Itâs not enough to bring people to your website. You must be able to keep them on your website to generate leads and conversions. A slow site leads to a high bounce rate, neither of which Googleâs ranking algorithm favors.
Additional Reasons
There are many other reasons you might not be meeting your traffic target, including the following:
- New algorithm updates on search engines
- Keyword cannibalization
- Bad user experience (or poor UX design)
- Lack of mobile optimization
- Broken links
- Lack of meta information
How to Fix Low Website Traffic
Although poor traffic can be discouraging, there are ways to address it. Once youâve identified the root cause, you should aim to do everything possible to improve your site's quality, visibility, and usability. To make things easier for you, here are some actionable steps to help you put an end to low website traffic…
(Note: This is not an exhaustive list.)
Target Long-Tail Keywords
This can be a point of contention for digital marketing experts. But hear us out here: Long-tail keywords might get less search traffic, but they have higher conversion value. Plus, they are easier to rank for. Therefore, it makes sense to target long-tail keywords since you are hitting two birds at once: boosting traffic and increasing conversions.
Know Where to Place Keywords
Keyword placement can have a significant SEO impact. Knowing where to place your keywords in your content strategically can improve your rankingsâand help with low website traffic.
Ideally, a focus keyword should appear here:
- In the title tag
- In the H1 heading
- In a few H2 headings
- At the beginning of your content
- Throughout the body
- At the end of your content
- In the meta description
- In the URL slug
- In image alt text (where relevant)
Disclaimer: The focus keyword for each page on your site should represent what the content is about. So, it should fit in naturally. Avoid keyword stuffing, as it will come across as awkward to visitors and actually hurt your rankings.
Improve Your Page Speed
Your websiteâs page load time has a direct impact on bounce rate. In fact, as the load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce shoots up to 32%.
The faster your page loads, the more traffic youâll get, and the lower your bounce rate will generally be. It is directly linked to the overall user experience on your website. So, monitor your website speed at https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and hire help as needed.
Write Consistent Blogs
Consistently providing new content on your website is an effective way to combat low website traffic for a couple of reasons.
- Google likes fresh and updated content. The more you write on your blog, the more likely your website will be ranked.
- It gives you more real estate on the internet, which increases your chances of ranking for hundreds or thousands of keywords.
- It helps improve your readership performance as your audience will always look to your blog for new information.
Make Use of Video Content
Creating video content is another way to boost organic traffic to your website. It is easy to consume; therefore, web users often prefer it over text, and itâs a valuable tool to boost your customer retention rate. Plus, Google favors it.
You can get started by using Google Web Stories for this purpose.
Have a Strong Internal Linking Structure
Internal linking is one of the most reliable SEO techniques to improve traffic. It boosts traffic to internal pages within your website and encourages visitors to stay on your site longer.
It can also add value to the user experience since it shows them more information on topics that are relevant to what they are reading.
Acquire Backlinks Regularly
While internal linking can boost your SEO, backlinks to your website can also have a significant impact. You can acquire quality backlinks by guest posting on other websites within your industry or publishing articles to LinkedInâs Publishing Platform and Medium.com.
Leverage the traffic from these other relevant sites to boost your websiteâs authority and get a share of their traffic.
Donât Let Your Content Go Stale
As mentioned earlier, always keep your blog and website content fresh. It helps you build a consistent stream of visitors and makes it easier to rank your site on search engines.
Further, it shows visitors that youâre up to date with the latest goings-on in your industry.
Bring in Immediate Traffic with Ads
You can also address low website traffic by running ads on Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Do your research to maximize your ad placements. Make sure you target the most relevant keywords and employ clever bidding tactics.
Once your ads are published, your work is not done. Perform A/B tests to see which ads generate the highest amount of traffic to your website.
Grow Your Email List
Building your email list is one of the most reliable ways to generate more traffic to your website. Employ an effective lead management strategy to entice people to opt in to your email list. For example, you can offer them a discount, a free guide, a quiz, or anything else of value.
Takeaway
The last thing you want to do is hurt your businessâs chances of success. But if youâre ignoring your poor website traffic, thatâs exactly what youâre doing. Thatâs why itâs crucial to identify the root cause and take steps to bring in visitors.
While low website traffic might cause despair, you can use it as a learning experience to devise a more effective marketing and SEO strategy. Always be looking at analytics to pinpoint areas where you can improve.
Viral Solutions offers a 50-point free marketing audit so you can analyze where and how to improve your traffic performance. Take advantage of it today!
