Stagnant Traffic
-
The traffic on my site (http://www.tbreak.com) has been stagnant over the last few months. We're a news posting site and posting a good 4-8 posts per day and using Yoast plugin to make sure they are optimized, but traffic has not grown at all.
What could be the reason for that?
-
Thanks Moosa-
Appreciate all the inputs. Any one if you guys available as a freelancer for some guidance on how I should formulate my content strategy moving forward?
-
Abbas I love your site and links that are pointing to your site are decent (atleast most of them) there are quite a few links that contain a red flag but you can always remove or update a disavow file in Google to tell Google that you are not looking for a juice from certain websites.
If the traffic is stagnant from the last few months my advice is to see what is missing by auditing your few blogs posts from the past few months and compare it with old post that help you increase traffic. Also try and look in to different traffic channels and see what traffic is actually causing the problem. Is it the organic traffic, social media or others!
If the traffic is stale from organic channel, my advice is to look in to your keyword research and write blogs by targeting keywords accordingly. On blogs, it’s important to target quite a few long tail keywords as this will give you a small bump but it’s easier to rank as compare to head tail keywords.
Another important thing is internal linking, make sure you are properly internal linking blogs each other. This will not only decrease your bounce rate but it will also help you get good rankings in search engines.
As far as the bounce rate is concern, usually on blogs the bounce rate are high but you can use multiple techniques to reduce it. Try to keep good call to actions at the middle or the end of the blogs posts that help people continue their journey on the blog.
I may be wrong here but from what I see most of your blogposts are reviews, I would advise you to create multiple types of content that will engage users with the content. BuzzFeed Content is the great example here.
Also, make a blog calendar and decide how many blog posts you are going to publish on the website and what time they will go live. With proper social media promotional plan! Search Engine Journal update multiple blog posts in a day so tracking their strategy would be a good idea here.
Try > Learn > Repeat! As you are a blog, it’s important to try different ideas, learn from them and implement the learning again.
There must be more areas you should consider but above is a general idea that I can quality thinks of!
Hope this helps!
-
Well, 90% is way too high. As Umar mentioned here, you really need to make a content strategy first. Do a full fledge keyword & trends research before investing any time on writing the article.
-
Bounce rates are high- usually around 90%. For Social, each post is auto tweeted and posted on our Facebook page with an image and then repeated the next day.
-
Abbas, if you also publish 3-5 features post, I'd love to know the bounce rate, traffic stats and social count of them. If they are low, it means you need to seriously work on the promotion strategy.
For handling those 404s, it's better to redirect them on relevant pages. Check out these resources for handling redirection:
https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
https://moz.com/community/q/best-way-to-handle-404-errorsApart from that, do consider my above suggestions.
Umar
-
Thanks for ll the suggestions Umar-
The reason behind the high news count is that we're a tech news reporting website so need to have that many posts per day. Most are news posts so they tend to be between 150-300 words in counts but we do publish 3-5 features per week which are more like 700 words or do.
I've looked at the crawl and the biggest issue we have are older 404 dead links that happened when we switched our CMS to Wordpress and lost the content.
-
Dear Abbas,
Thanks for posting your question.
Your blog has good authority and the design is quite simple. It's good to know that you're using Yoast for handling all the on-page things.
Problems:
Abbas you really don't need to post 4-8 posts every day for the sake of traffic. Quantity of posts will never bring you desired traffic unless you achieve some significance. Another thing that I notice is the low word-count and absence of interactive content (videos, images b/w the posts, etc) in majority of your blogs. I think you might have a high bounce rate also.Solution:
- Do aggressive keyword research before writing.
- Find out the crawling issues that search console highlighting
- Post in-depth and interactive content.
- Start content marketing activities.
- Promote your blog to all the related communities.
- Cite external high authority links in your content (you can put nofollow if you're conscious)
- Allow Guest contributors and add a separate page for that. (This thing instantly grab the attention of fellow bloggers)
- Conduct experts round-up posts and interviews.
I am pretty sure that, the above things will surely help you out.
Good luck!
Umar
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Help recover lost traffic (70%) from robots.txt error.
Our site is a company information site with 15 million indexed pages (mostly company profiles). Recently we had an issue with a server that we replaced, and in the processes mistakenly copied the robots.txt block from the staging server to a live server. By the time we realized the error, we lost 2/3 of our indexed pages and a comparable amount of traffic. Apparently this error took place on 4/7/19, and was corrected two weeks later. We have submitted new sitemaps to Google and asked them to validate the fix approximately a week ago. Given the close to 10 million pages that need to be validated, so far we have not seen any meaningful change. Will we ever get this traffic back? How long will it take? Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. On another note, these indexed pages were never migrated to SSL for fear of losing traffic. If we have already lost the traffic and/or if it is going to take a long time to recover, should we migrate these pages to SSL? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | akin671 -
Does Google's algo look at all traffic mediums with regs to onpage metrics or only organic traffic metrics?
Hi folks, This is something I've pondered for a while. I've ask a couple of Googlers but no reponse yet and I don't I'll get one! In your opinion, do you think Google looks at on page metrics like bounce rate for example from all traffic mediums (organic, paid, email, social referral etc etc) or they only look at on page metrics from organic traffic? I'm not talking about direct correlations from other mediums. I'm only talking about when a user lands on a website, do the actions they take matter with regards to Google's search algo no matter of the referring medium, or do Google only look at onpage metrics on visits which came to the site via organic search as a medium. Option 1 As a very simplified example: Google gives extra weight in the SERPs to website A which has an average bounce rate of 30% from all mediums compared to website B which has a bounce rate of 50% from all mediums. Option 2 Google gives extra weight in the SERPs to website A which has an average bounce rate of 30% from organic traffic only compared to website B which has a bounce rate of 50% from organic traffic only. I'm not sure if anyone outside Google has the answer/proof of this but was keen to get other people's thoughts. If you think the also uses one or the other, can you give an insights/proof of one or the other? For me it would make sense for them only to use onpage metrics from sessions which came from organic seach traffic, but who knows! Merci buckets, Gill.
On-Page Optimization | | Cannetastic0 -
Why would changing 404 pages increase traffic by 9%?
Neil Patel claimed in this article that by creating a custom 404 page that links out to 25 to 50 random internal pages on the website, he was able to increase the traffic of Techcrunch by 9%. I'm a bit skeptical about this claim. A couple of questions: Is this theory sound? If you've personally tried this or have read other articles supporting Neil, I'd love to learn more. Would a big site like Techcrunch really have problems with Google not indexing all of its pages? Also, does getting more pages crawled help you get more traffic? Specifically, would it help a site like mine? For reference, my site gets an average of 12,040 pages crawled per day in last 90 days. Currently 28,922 pages have been indexed. Are there any possible downsides to trying this? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Sudden Drop in Rankings/Traffic/Organic Impressions Without a Penalty
Hi Moz community! I have a question about a local client in Raleigh, NC - http://paragonbuildinggroup.com This client came to us from another agency who had previously not done such a great job with the design/development of the site, or with the marketing of it, so we are somewhat limited in terms of what we can do on design, user experience, etc. But, the SEO is all still easy to tweak and we've been working on it for some time now. As of July 5th, their keyword rankings have dropped dramatically (we're talking from first page rankings to nothing, according to Authority Labs), and they've fallen completely off the map in the SERPs. Their local listing doesn't appear in search results anymore, and WMT is showing a drastic drop in impressions (from 457 on July 3rd to 92 on July 5th). There have been no manual penalties on the site, no recent major development work done, and from what I can see, no signs of hacking and no bad backlinks. The only thing I can see is that Mozcast showed an 83 degree day with some clouds and rain on July 5th, the day that our rankings dropped off, but I can't find any documentation showing what might have changed. Any insight as to what might be going on? I'm completely stumped!
On-Page Optimization | | TriMarkDigital0 -
Homepage SEO: Does Text Content Help Traffic?
Hi Mozzers! My employers homepage (www.swarovski.com) is - amongst other problems we're about to fix - very thin (not to say empty!) in text content. If we were to put relevant text on the next version of the page, would that be beneficial in terms of traffic to that page? Thanks and cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | Diderino0 -
Long tail traffic - what is the best way to go back and add focus to repetitive long tail keywords?
Hey everybody, So, our niche doesn't have a million and a half searches per month, which makes a handle full of visitors look mighty enticing to a CMO Our price point is very high too, so to the question, is it worth taking the time to put a whole new content strategy in line for a few new visitors, the answer is yes. Now's the hard part. How on earth do I make 1,000 pages for similar topics? Is making new pages the best way to go about this? (probably so right? It's the only thing that I can see that would certainly increase likelihood of being more relevant, plus if I don't I will be missing out on the benefits of beefing up our site, AND the opportunity to more specifically answer a users query.) With phrases like "keyword" and "aftermarket keyword," the searcher is asking for two totally separate collections of results. I'm always reading about the importance of being there throughout the buyers complete purchasing /research process, which makes me think that considering doing anything other than creating unique pages is simply missing out.. Suggestions? Massive Content Strategy Help? Anybody? Thanks, TA
On-Page Optimization | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Authorship and 50% Drop in Search Traffic
Hi. I had some problems with my content being copied by other sites, and was suggested to claim my pages. Immediately after Google started listing the posts with my photo next to them my traffic picked up slightly but since, over the past few weeks, it has dropped by about 50%! It seems that the average position has declined (as has the CTR) At the same time as claiming authorship I added the post date to my articles which I have now removed. Does anyone have any ideas for me? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ben10000 -
How to get Google images traffic?
How to get Google images traffic? Take a look at traxnyc.com and sugest what we can improve. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0