Seven reasons your website isn’t increasing organic traffic

Typing its name into the search bar and hitting enter unveils a beautifully designed, concisely written website. Your eyes dance across the page, effortlessly guided by the keenly considered UX design and the pleasant colour palette. There’s a problem, however — you're the one who built it... and no one else is here.

What’s causing this low organic traffic?

1. Your website’s gorgeous, but it’s slow

Page loading times matter — if users have to wait 5 seconds or more for your page to load, the bounce rate increases to 38%. In the time it takes to draw breath, you’ve lost a significant amount of customer opportunity and decreased the chance of repeat visits.

Slow page loading times directly affect your SEO and Google rankings and are obstacles in the way of increasing organic traffic. Several factors play a role in website speed: 

• Images: Have your images been optimised for the web, or are their file sizes weighing down your pages? 

• Responsiveness: What about responsiveness? Does your website perform well across all devices or does it slow down significantly on mobile?

• Animation plugins: Remember when every page on the internet seemed to have some form of flashy animation splashed across the frame? Recall how agonising long those pages took to load? If you’re going to use animation, do so sparingly and ensure it’s optimised for speed and different devices.

• Bad coding: Not all coding is created equal. Formatting issues such as unnecessary spaces and line breaks or badly written JavaScript can weigh a website down.

By pinpointing these problem areas and correcting them, you boost your chances of repeat visits, a healthy bounce rate (26 to 40% is considered excellent), and increasing organic traffic to your website.

2. Lacklustre SEO

If your content and imagery haven’t been optimised with relevant search terms and keywords that people are using, how can you expect them to find your website? Including organic keywords and long-tail search terms in on-page content, headers, meta-descriptions and image alt-tags will help your pages rank higher on search engines.

Site-wide SEO optimisation is one of the most effective ways to start increasing organic traffic. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 57% of marketing professionals agree that on-page content development was the most effective SEO tactic for them. The following statistics drive home the importance of an SEO-enhanced website:

• Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can increase organic traffic by as much as 106%.

• The first 5 organic results on Google’s first page make up 67.60% of all the clicks.

3. Your content is stale

More than a deft turn of phrase, good content generates organic traffic with relevant messaging that taps into customer needs.

Content should be created consistently — many businesses produce two blogs a month and expect to see massive boosts in SEO, when the reality is they’re only targeting two new keywords a month! If you want to increase search engine visibility and drive more targeted traffic, you require high-quality content that’s deployed on a weekly basis.

But content is more just analytics. Good storytelling connects brands with people on an emotional level and builds advocacy. Well-researched articles and informative blog posts can develop industry authority while differentiating your products and services from those of competitors. Relevant content can even draw visitors to your website by answering questions they may not have known they had. 

When looking at your content, ask yourself:

• What value does it offer to people searching for topics related to your industry?

• Does it pose and answer questions that prospective customers will have at every step of the buyer’s journey?

• Are you using a keyword planner to enrich your content with words and phrases that people are searching for?

• Is it actively communicating what separates your business and its products from alternatives?

If you’re unsure of the answer to any of those questions, then it may be time for a content audit to see what’s working and what’s not.

4. You aren’t getting backlinks

The top pages on Google will almost always have other pages linking back to them. If industry peers are directing their readerships to a particular website, it lends that business higher credibility and authority. If you haven’t tried to build links up to now, you probably won’t have many backlinks. Thankfully, a few choice backlinking strategies can change that:

• Start by dropping quality comments on blog posts shared by businesses or brands you respect.

• Write guest posts for other websites and include relevant links in the copy and your biography. 

• Draft a resource page with links that direct your readers to excellent, informative content as it’s another way of building a network of backlinks.

5. Search engines can’t crawl your website

Search engines crawl the web to index and rank website pages so that they can be found by people online. This process helps search engines like Google serve up the most relevant content to people who are browsing for particular topics. 

Have you completed a sitemap and asked Google to crawl your website? If you’re unsure if your site has been indexed, type ‘site:[yourdomain]’ into the search bar (for us, that would be site:hubledigital.com). This will bring up all the pages on your website that have been crawled and indexed by Google.

6. You aren’t linking to internal content on your website

Internal linking builds a repository of original content that keeps readers on your website by linking to additional (on-site) resources of interest to them. It also signals to Google and other search engines that these pages are important, which can lead to higher indexing and ranking. What’s more, any boost in value to one page will be shared with those linked to it.

7. Your website needs an outside perspective

There could be many reasons why your website is not getting the amount of traffic you require for growth. Huble Digital can help you identify and fix them with:

• SEO audits that pinpoint areas of your website that can be enhanced with keywords and terms that search engines love.

• Performance reports that deep-dive into your content analytics to give you a deeper understanding of what your customers read, and what they ignore.

• Content strategy and creation informed by market trends and enriched with SEO-optimised imagery and copy.

We are a full-service digital business consultancy that understands the multi-faceted world of marketing and the crucial role your website plays in generating the traction needed for long-term growth. Connect with us here or download our free e-book: 360° of CRM - to learn how a deeper understanding of CRM can unlock the true potential of your company.