Why does the site I am working on have so few visits from organic search results?

[nyc-seo]

Hello!

I am not very experienced with SEO, but I am trying to help out on a site that has been around since 2010 and has well over a thousand pages of high-quality, original content, with more being added all the time. Only around 65 of the site's daily visits come from organic search results; this seems very low. There has already been significant SEO work done on the site. Is there something about the site that strikes anyone as obviously getting in the way of organic traffic? The URL is ellenjovin.com.

I would appreciate any thoughts you may have.

Thank you very much!

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

I think it's definitely important to first determine which keywords / searches / niches you think the site should be getting visits from, rather than wondering why the initial number is so low. You will need to consider what people could be searching for that the site could potentially rank well for. If the primary purpose of the website is to source work or speaking gigs, what do people looking for Ellen's services search for?

Is there significant search interest around her work from people simply looking to read? If so, what do they search for in the linguistics / grammar niches that the site should show up for but doesn't? With 25 linking root domains as shown by Open Site Explorer, is this much lower than the sites currently ranking for her primary search terms, or is it about right? Do those links go just to the home page, or to pages that should feasibly rank for the terms key to her audience?

I hope this gives you somewhere to start from - I would say that 65 organic search visits per day is fine for some blogs, but is low if there is significant search engine users interest in a topic. Start with the Google Adwords keyword research tool to look into the volumes around Ellen's subjects and see if you can pick out a good list that she should rank for. Then take a look at how the site could be better optimised, or how your off-page / PR / link building work could be better to drive traffic / rankings to those pages.

[GregB123]

I only took a quick look at a few pages, but it appears a little thin. There's not much content on each page.

Also I couldn't tell what the purpose or the focus was. Is it meant to be a resource where people for reviews of language-learning programs? If so, there is not much depth to the reviews so they are unlikely to rank well. Or is it meant to be a record of one person's quest to learn lots of languages? If so, I wouldn't expect much organic traffic because few would search for such a topic to read about.

Suggestions: If the focus is reviews - get some more in-depth content there. Leave the blog pages day-to-day musings.  Also do add meta-descriptions to the blog pages.