Traffic is highly essential in any website, be that a personal blog, an online retail store, or a company’s official website. Without enough traffic, a website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERP) drops. For official company or government websites, maintaining a high SERP ranking may not be as challenging, since they have IT personnel continuously optimizing their pages. But for personal blogs and small online retailers, that may not be the case.
If the search engine doesn’t consider a website relevant in a user’s query, then they won’t show that website in the results pages. Even if the website can provide useful information, it won’t matter if another website can do the same thing better.
If you’re running a blog, driving traffic to your website is no easy feat. You may already have a huge following on social media, but that doesn’t guarantee your blog’s success. Luckily, though, blogging isn’t dying activity in Singapore. Lifestyle blogs continue to be popular in the country, so you might have good chances at fame too, as long as your website is always optimized and updated.
Still, over time, you can lose the traffic you’ve built up. If you’re starting to get there, this guide will help you understand what’s driving your traffic away, and how to restore them.
Reasons for Decreasing Web Traffic
A website loses traffic for different reasons. Older websites may be more prone to it than newer ones, because they may be filled with outdated keywords and content. If your blog is more than five years old already, look into your keywords and consider whether they are still relevant today.
Do your keywords contain niche or industry terminology that doesn’t align with what the current web users know? If so, chances are your keywords are the culprit for your declining traffic. Even if you phrase them differently in hopes of making them match users’ queries, search engines will still ignore your website if your keywords are outdated. Nowadays, Google comprehends more natural language. Users no longer need to type complex words or queries to find results. The plainer the keywords, the better the results.
Algorithm changes are another reason for falling traffic. Even popular bloggers and social media influencers deal with this. To prevent Google’s algorithm from hurting your ranking, use cross-channel marketing. For example, share your latest blog posts on your social media pages. That way, you can channel traffic from various sites, not just from Google.
Restoring Falling Traffic
Before employing any new strategy, ensure that you’ve already figured out what’s making your site lose traffic. That’s so you could work on the problem and see it drives back traffic. If your tweaks didn’t bring much improvement, consider these five strategies:
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Local SEO
If you often partner with brick-and-mortar brands around your area, you need to use local SEO on your blog. Local SEO is a brand of SEO that focuses on optimizing a website so that it’ll rank high on local SERP. For example, if you recently blogged about a new restaurant, you need to drive traffic to your blog and to that restaurant’s website, or else, your partnership would be useless.
Experienced SEO experts can help you build up local SEO. Once done, all users from your area who will search about the new restaurant you’ve posted about will also see your blog on the SERP.
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Make Relevant Subtopics
Google now understands that if you search for “home office design ideas”, you may also be interested in “affordable home office equipment”, “small space ideas”, or “work-from-home essentials”. So to restore your lost traffic, make your subtopics related to the keywords a user searches. Your site should support long-tail keywords so that Google can consider your information helpful. You don’t have to insert the keywords in a single sentence. You can put one word in the title, then scatter the rest on your blog’s body. That way, your keywords are placed naturally.
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Protect Well-ranking Pages
If one of your posts has been ranking high since its publication, protect it and see why it’s attracting so much traffic. Chances are you can pick up tips from that post.
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Write Long and Short Posts
Content doesn’t have to be lengthy to be engaging. Users appreciate content more if it’s straightforward. So if you often go in circles just to convey a single message, shorten that post and only lengthen the ones that require more explanation or subtopics.
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Add Strategic Content Changes
This can be a new site theme, updated navigation, or little tweaks on titles, tags, or categories. If you’re posting a sponsored content, for example, including the words “paid sponsorship” on the tags or on the category can make a huge difference.
These optimization techniques are just some of the strategies that can turn around your website’s falling traffic. Depending on your exact problem, you may need a completely different solution. Hence, it’s important to identify what your site is lacking, so that can implement the proper changes.
