Getting search engine traffic is a tedious task. Running a blog is easy but having reliable search engine traffic is a hard job. Every blogger wants to run a successful blog where he shares quality and unique content and gains lots of traffic. But he makes a lot of common mistakes that cause them not to take their blog to the next level. In this article, I will be sharing several reasons why your blog is not getting search engine traffic when someone searches Google or any search engine.
Blogging can be fun if you are passionate about your subject but it can be frustrating if the analytics show that you have no traffic to your blog or website. That means that no one is reading your articles and appreciating your writing.
15 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Not Getting Search Engine Traffic
- Your Blog Is not Indexed
The biggest reason why you are not getting search engine traffic is probably your blog is not indexed. Once your blog is indexed, you will start to see more traffic from Search engines. Ideally, search engines will index your blog automatically. But you can submit your blog to different search engines to speed up the process. As your site becomes more popular, search engine spiders will visit more frequently and index your content more rapidly.
- Create an XML sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. (If you are using WordPress)
- Submit your sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.
- Submit your sitemap to Bing
- You Are Not Choosing The Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is a challenging task. Before starting any article, find profitable keywords. Keyword research is an often underestimated part of SEO. Write content around the keywords that people are actually searching for. During your keyword research, create a list of keywords that are relevant to your audience and that are searched more than 500-600 times per month. While choosing keywords, focus on relevance, competition, and commercial value. Choose a keyword that is relevant to your blog niche, has low competition and has good commercial value. It is also recommended to use
It is also recommended to use long tail keywords. Long tail keywords rank higher in SERPs.
SEMrush is another awesome tool to find the right keywords to drive organic traffic.
- You Are Not Using Catchy Headlines
Did you know headlines are the most important part of your blog post? A catchy headline helps in better CTR because readers only see headlines to decide whether or not they will click on the link. So, having good and catchy titles are essential in attracting the search engine and your target readers. Try including your focus keywords in your headlines.
Make sure your headline is a long tail keyword, second, make sure it’s wrapped in a <H1> tag.
- You Are Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is critical. Determining if there are enough potential customers for your business will help identify if you are in the right niche. You have a niche website and you need to know your audience. What would they want to read about and what other content would spark their interest while they’re browsing your blog?
How do you find your target audience?
Tips to find your target audience
- Understand what you are offering or selling
- Who are your potential buyers or customers
- Focus and research on your primary market
- Your Blog Post Are Not Long Enough
This is a debatable thought. Few bloggers suggest writing quality and unique content even if it is a 500 words article. On the other side, few bloggers suggest writing a detailed and long blog post with quality content. But as per my experience, content quality and lengthy post are very important to Google. Google job is to find a high-quality long post versus a short fluff post. You should aim to write a minimum of 2000 words. For instance, if you wrote a 500 words blog post versus someone else who wrote 2000 words blog post, Google would find a way to place the long article in the top of SERPs. Also, longer blog posts are shared more often.
- Your Blog Posts Are Not Shareable
Social media is the ultimate platform to boost your blog. If you are not regularly sharing posts, you are lagging behind. It is affecting the growth of your blog. Try to create catchy headlines and professional graphics that will be more promoted and will be shareable. Be helpful to your audience to write post answering their questions. If people are sharing your blog post, that’s a good sign that it’s worth a bump up in the search results. So put your videos on YouTube, post your articles to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and don’t forget others like Technorati and Digg. Go to where your potential audience is. Facebook has over 600 million users, now that is an audience.
Make sure your blog has social media buttons on all posts and pages.
- You Are Not Adding Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the most important factors to get your blog indexed completely. Content links are a strong signal to both the search engine and the user that content you’re linking to is really good. Internal linking allows for good website navigation and structure and allows search engines to crawl or spider websites. Internal linking also helps in decreasing bounce rate of your blog. Internal links also help search engine learn what your website is all about and rank it accordingly.
- Make sure your internal links open in the same window
- Internal links make your website easier for search engines to crawl
- Internal links will improve your CTR (click-through-rate) beneficial to your Google Adsense revenue
I recommend using LinkWhisper for managing your internal links. Check out Link Whisper Plugin Reviews
- You Are Not Optimizing Your Blog Images
Optimizing blog images is another effective technique for getting search engine traffic. If you want more traffic, you must learn how to optimize your images. Many users perform a google search to find images and these images do drive traffic to your blog through image search. Make sure you use your focus keyword in the ALT text of the image. Also, optimize your images keeping the file size low but quality high as possible.
You can use ImageSEO for optimizing your blog images.
- Your website looks Spammy
Are you stuffing your blog with spam links? You are certainly doing things that make your website look low quality and which is creating a problem in getting search engine traffic. Keep following things in mind to prevent your blog from spam –
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- Do not do keyword stuffing
- Do not link to lots of affiliate links
- Do not link to lots of low-quality links
- Don’t link to more than 3 websites per blog post
- You Are Not Updating Your Blog Regularly
If you are not updating your blog regularly, you will not get regular readers for your blog. You need to be consistent in getting search engine traffic. Search engines also look for regular and updated content. It’s just like newspapers being delivered every morning, magazines being issued every month, your blog should have new issues as frequently as possible. If you post regularly and consistently, you will build a following which will get your blog known and you might see an improvement in ranking on different search engines.
- You Are Not Doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Properly
You need to follow SEO guidelines properly for getting search engine traffic. Search engines will send readers your way if you have optimized your blog for search engines. You need to learn the importance of the basics of SEO. You can learn SEO techniques to make this happen or if you’re a big enterprise, hire a professional SEO team to do the work for your blog.
Also Read:
- You Are Not Having Correct robots.txt file
Robots.txt is the crucial file of your blog. It tells what files/folder of your blog is allowed or denied for search engines to crawl your blog. Make sure you are allowing search engines to crawl and index your blog. Robots.txt file can be viewed as http://yourdomain.com/robots.txt
Also Read: How to Edit & optimize Robots.txt file
- You Are Not Engaging With Other Bloggers
The biggest mistake blogger does is not engaging with other bloggers in the same niche. It is important to get to know other bloggers, comment on their blogs, ask to be a guest blogger and build networks. This will widen your reach and let more followers know that your blog exists. Also, it will help you to learn new things from other bloggers.
- You Are Not Optimizing for Local Search
If you’re running a business that focuses on customers within a certain city or region, it’s important to learn more about local search. Most search engines handle it a bit differently than keywords that are more global. Start by including region-specific keywords in your page titles and meta descriptions. You will also want to include an address and local phone numbers on your pages, such as in the header or footer, so you’ll show up in the local results.
- You Are Focusing on Link Quantity Over Link Quality
There are lots of ways to get a high volume of links. But your focus should be on link quality not on link quantity. One link from a popular blog might do more for your search engine rankings than hundreds or even thousands of low-quality directory links. I do agree that it is difficult to get backlinks from popular blogs but they are worthy. They are a more reliable measure of the quality of your website.
That’s all in this article. Do share your views what are other reasons that you think create a problem in getting search engine traffic. Also, share your feedback in the comment section below.
You can connect with me on Instagram Or Quora And Linkedin as well.
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Why my blog not getting traffic? I dont understand. Can you guide me some sothat i can do better for my blog?
Thanks Karan,
Yes, I do agree that many bloggers think that getting success in the blogosphere is an instant activity. If they have just set up their blog and think they will soon get outcomes from it, they are absolutely wrong because as u said – ‘Ranking takes time’ 🙂
There are so many bloggers out there who end up shutting down their blogs, the average time for this was found to be around 9 months, and this is because they are unaware of one simple thing – “Ranking takes time”.
Doing the right thing doesn’t mean that you just jumped in, got a brand new blog, started writing, and Google will say – “Oh yes, please come to the first page, I will replace the old ones no matter how much authoritative they are”. LOL. Isn’t it?
Getting organic traffic is not that much easy but with the right method and a bit patience it is not that much difficult as well.
BTW, nice tips shared for newbies Mohit.
Hi Deepak,
Thanks! Yes, I agree ‘Unique & Quality Content is king’. I did not mention it as a separate point, I just mentioned it in 5th point. Thanks for pointing it out 🙂
Hi Mohit, Nice post. Just to add on one important aspect i.e. content itself. However if all above things are done correctly but content is not unique or with current trends then I think it will loose its purpose.