Content is the lifeblood of a website and campaign. To see a piece of content you’ve invested time and effort into struggle to garner traffic can be difficult, but there will be a logical reason. Rather than write another piece and hope for the best, you need to learn from the mistakes of your on-site content and find out why it’s failing to inspire traffic.
Poor SEO strategy
If you aren’t investing time into SEO, we may have solved your traffic problem straight away.
A great SEO strategy helps your website move up the Google rankings, giving you the best source of unpaid traffic your pages could ask for. Google respects good content, but you need to make sure your content pages are optimized to give yourself a fighting chance against those SEO-savvy writers and webmasters.
There are numerous factors you need to get right with a page’s SEO. You need to make sure your content page has an optimized meta title and description, and that you’ve set up an XML sitemap. What keywords you’re hoping to target is an essential consideration, as you will need to make sure they’re correctly peppered throughout the article and placed in the optimum positions to increase traffic. You may be struggling to drive traffic to your content because it’s optimized for the wrong keyword, or you didn’t do your research right.
Installing an SEO plugin can do a lot of this work for you, giving you a checklist to fill in. However, this needs to be coupled with thorough research of the kind of audience you want to capture through Google and an understanding of the importance of keywords.
It’s bad content
Sometimes it helps to admit your content just isn’t any good and you need to change things up. Take the necessary steps to work out why it’s not working and build from there.
Writing for the web isn’t something that comes instinctively to all of us. It’s a different form of content creation that requires foresight into how users engage with a page. Reading content that performs well and even running heat maps and A/B testing on your content pages can tell you a lot about why and when a user drops off.
Make sure your paragraphs are segmented with clear headings. A user will often skim through a page for the specific information they came for. So don’t spend hours tweaking sentences when you could do much more impactful work just by adding some negative space. Bad content won’t get you anywhere and creates a bad impression.
You’re using an external blog
Using an external blog on your website can confuse a new user. One moment they’re browsing a website and getting familiar with it, the next they’re being sent to a blog platform with a completely different appearance. Using an external blog platform such as Blogger or Medium can be jarring to the average browser, and make them think they’ve done something wrong.
If you’re using an external blog, this might be why you’re experiencing such a huge bounce rate. This can ultimately affect your Google ranking, which will impact your traffic. You’re also making life difficult for people who have already found your website and enjoyed using it. The average user enjoys the familiar, and won’t read your content if it doesn’t look like it’s yours. Even if the content is great, it’s not what they were looking for or feel comfortable with.
This is why all-in-one, drag-and-drop website builders remain so popular amongst budding web developers and experts alike, as they feature a consistent design that can be adapted and an internal blogging platform. Scrap that external blog and build content that’s easy to find and retains your style and branding.
The user experience is un-friendly
As any good web developer knows, user experience is everything. It’s the online equivalent of ‘the customer is always right’, and you need to stick to that mantra even when you’re working with content.
Great user experience is what keeps someone on a website. Your website needs to load quickly to keep users calm. It needs to have a clear, hand-holding interface that guides users through the content and moves them onto where they want to go next. If your pages aren’t doing this, the average user isn’t going to stick around, no matter what they think of your content. Slow websites appear untrustworthy or poorly made, and Google punishes them accordingly. While a bad design can make a visitor quit out of annoyance.
Concentrate on developing a user-friendly feel throughout your website, but particularly content pages you are looking to push traffic towards. Once they’ve read or watched the content, it should be clear where you want to push them next, such as obvious links to a product page if you’re running an ecommerce store.
You’re not using social media properly
Social media is one of the best avenues for pushing engaged traffic towards your content. If your social media strategy is flat or being executed incorrectly, it could explain why you’re seeing less than flattering traffic results on your content.
Your social media needs to be consistently active, not just when you’re looking to promote content. Think of good social media as a constant grind, you must always keep your audience engaged so that when you drop a piece of content they are ready to react. Consistency is the key, even if terms of how you present yourself on social media. You should reflect the brand color, identity, and language of your website so that anyone looking for your social media for the first time can instantly recognize it’s you.
Without this pre-built relationship, any content you throw out onto social media will only get limited engagement. You need to endear yourself to the algorithms of your chosen social by being active prior to a big campaign and telling it you’re important through engagement levels. Only then will your content receive the traffic it deserves.
Content doesn’t have to be a burden on your website. It may be underperforming but that doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Implement these changes and continue to put out informative and innovative content and you’ll see a quick upturn in traffic.