Do You Know the Reasons for Low Website Traffic?

Are you wondering what could be the reasons for low website traffic? Whether it’s happening to your business or personal website, it’s a problem you’ll want to fix.

There are several reasons why this could be happening, and many aren’t too difficult to correct.

1. Indexing Not Turned On

The first thing is to check is that your website is set to “index.” This is a very simple mistake. It often happens because your site was set to “no-index” during the website development process. This would keep Google from showing your site in search results.

Setting a site to “no index” makes perfect sense when you are still developing your site or doing some significant revisions. You wouldn’t want visitors to land on pages that are under construction or displaying the wrong branding.

But once the site is ready, this setting needs to be switched to “index.” While it’s a simple thing, it’s often overlooked.

Fixing it is easy. If you have a WordPress site, just go to your admin panel. Then select Reading settings. One of the settings is labeled “Search Engine Visibility.” There you’ll see a checkbox and the statement “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” If that option is checked, that means you are not allowing the website to be indexed.

So you want to make sure the box is unchecked so your website can be properly indexed. That’s how you let Google know you want your site to be added to its database and to include it in search results.

If your site was built on a platform other than WordPress, correcting the index issue is equally simple. Your website developer should know exactly what to do.

2. Technical and Content Issues

If indexing isn’t the reason for your low website traffic, the following things to consider are technical issues. First, even if your site is indexed, there might be some other technical issue stopping Google’s bot from crawling your website correctly. So some technical issues might be getting in the way.

Factors such as page speed and how quickly your site loads make a difference. When Google’s spiders crawl your website to analyze what to include in its index, they consider these factors. If your site has too many false loads or the spider can’t correctly navigate around your website, it just decides to leave.

Think about it. Every time that Google’s software goes to your website to index it, it costs them money to assess any changes you’ve made. It costs them electricity to run the software and to be able to catalog and index your website.

And if crawling your site has taken too long, you’re running up their bill. Multiply that across the millions of websites out there that they’re crawling every single day. Google isn’t about to waste time waiting for a slow site to load. So they won’t bother indexing your site.

So that’s one thing that might be stopping your website from adequately showing up. And that could be one reason for your low website traffic.

Another technical issue might be a plug-in that’s stopping the spider from correctly cataloging your site. These are just two examples of many possibilities.

How can you find out if you’ve got technical issues? There are plenty of tools out there that can help. Many are simple to use and widely available. You can pick from Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and Y Slow are just a few to get you started.

Look for the easy fixes first. For example, are your pages slow to load? Do you have 404 errors and broken links? And of course, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, that’s another huge source of traffic that you’re turning away. And Google will punish websites that aren’t mobile-friendly by putting them lower in the search results.

But even if your site loads fast, is mobile-friendly, and you don’t have broken links, you could still have some technical issues that cause your low website traffic. For example, are you missing some vital SEO elements? If your site doesn’t have the proper search engine optimization, then you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

And before you dig too deep, take a second to make sure all your metadata is still there, especially if you’ve just updated your site or made some changes. It happens more often than you think. Someone updates a site and wipes out the metadata. And there goes a lot of your traffic.

While you’re at it, make sure your site is providing a good user experience. This is more than just fast page loads or being mobile-friendly. For example, do you have outdated contact information, too many pop-ups, or videos that play automatically?

These are the kinds of things that make users bounce right off your site and never come back. And you can be sure Google considers bounce rates when it calculates where a site will show up in the search results.

And don’t forget to update your site with new, fresh content. That will help get Google’s attention and ensure you show up higher in the search results. If you haven’t added anything new to your site for a while, you’ll start sinking in the search results and likely will end up on the second or third page, where almost none of the traffic is.

3. Ineffective Marketing Campaigns

If your site is indexed and there’s no technical issue that’s stopping Google from being able to crawl your website, then you might be asking what the problem is? Why is my website traffic dropping?

Often it’s the type of marketing campaign you’re doing. Because just putting your website online is not sufficient enough to get visitors. There has to be something driving traffic to get people to visit your website.

Consider how many hundreds of thousands of websites exist in every single sector and industry.

For any of those websites to be found, there has to be something that’s driving traffic and awareness so that people visit those websites. So whether you’re a small brand or a big brand, you need some marketing campaign to drive traffic to your site.

One way is by search engine optimization. When somebody searches for any given keyword, Google serves up the websites it considers most relevant to that keyword. And those sites get the traffic.

Or you could try an external marketing campaign. For example, you could try advertising on the radio, newspapers, and magazines, or television. Or content marketing on social media or online advertising. But it would help if you had something that will create awareness about your business and drive traffic to your website. That’s the only way prospective buyers will find out about what you’re selling.

Solving the Problem of Low Website Traffic

So these are the three things you’re going to want to look at. First, make sure it’s not an index issue with the settings. Then check to ensure you don’t have a technical or a content problem keeping the Google crawler from probing your website or ranking you highly. And third, make sure you’ve got an effective marketing campaign to drive traffic to your site.

Take a look at these, and you’ll probably be able to evaluate what’s going on with your traffic and why it’s so low.

As we all know, the customers aren’t just going to come to us. So we as business owners need to put the effort in to attract the traffic that will turn into buyers. But it will take some hard work overtime to make it happen.

Fixing these issues can seem overwhelming. If you’d like some help identifying the reasons for low website traffic and correcting the problems, give us a call.