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
-
We recently updated a large guide that takes the place of the original. The original has some nice organic traffic to it and I don't want to risk losing it. Should I 301 redirect to the new version, or update all the info directly on the original page?
We don't have a lot of content that garners much non-branded organic, so this is something I don't want to risk losing. We do not have a whole lot of external links into the page either.
On-Page Optimization | | AFP_Digital1 -
Drop in Traffic
We recently went through a server upgrade, including SSL, Encryption, Browser Caching and Image Compression. Most articles I've read, state there will be a slight decrease in traffic shortly after launching before an increase from the normal volume. However, we launched over 3 weeks ago and our traffic has dropped consistently since. Question1: What would be an average length of time after implementing this type of update to rebound from the drop? Question 2: I follow Moz to the letter and have scores of 97 and 99 ,from the optimize a page section, for most of our product pages targeted keywords. What recommendations do you, my friends in the Moz Community, suggest we do next? TY in advance, you input is very valuable to me. KJr 7NSVm
On-Page Optimization | | KevnJr1 -
Can anyone see what hurt me in my traffic
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/ I need some fresh eyes on this traffic of mine. I have compared the dates to when updates have been rolled out (panda, penguin, page layout, top heavy, etc...) and I cant match these dates with any of them. Can anyone maybe shed some light to my traffic drops and recovery then traffic drop again and see if there is a correlation with any major updates? Dropped Jan 22 2014 Dropped April 4 2014 Recovered August 25 2014 Dropped September 18 2014 google-analytics.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
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 -
Should we de-index pages that not receiving any traffic?
We had a 10 pages website that was doing great with very competitive keywords, ( Vancouver Landscaping, Surrey Landscaping, etc) than we added 90 more pages to the website in order to target long tail keywords. Our traffic grew a little bit, but we lost all high competitive keywords, instead we got more traffic for our long tails like ( Yard clean up Burnaby). Is it a common rule in SEO? If yes, should we de index or even delete "long tail" pages that not receiving any traffic? Would it give us bigger chance to get our high competitive keywords back? We are looking for a SEO strategist that can help us, so suggestions and audits would be greatly appreciated and could lead to business with us. website- www(dot)beaverlandscape(dot)com Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | vadimmarusin100 -
Should I index news and blog posts which receive little traffic
Hi all, I have a very large site at the moment with a handful of high authority pages with great content which describe the charity's work. But the main content on the site is blogs and news article which, while being good quality content from a reader's point of view, receive little traffic from search engines as they are so niche and long-tail. They do, however, get ok internal traffic from other pages. Should these pages be indexed still or should I remove them? Is there a rule of thumb regarding minimum clicks/bounce rates that an indexed page should have? What do big news agencies do with really niche articles that may get next to no traffic but have valuable content on for those that do click through? Thanks in advance! Den
On-Page Optimization | | Deniz0 -
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 -
No links or traffic to our articles
Hello, Our articles are written by a professional in the field, taylored to what we think our ecommerce customers would most want to know about. But there is no traffic to our articles and almost no inbound links. We have 15 articles around 500 words (roughly) each. We've got a right sidebar banner about our FAQ and articles and a rotating banner with one slde about our articles. Also, we have a tab at the top. We've had a good article section for 5 months, and a descent one for a couple of years Could it be our industry, or what can we do?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0