In this post, we discuss what you should be worrying about and why they are causing low traffic on your website. beyond nothing .com still faces this low traffic problem today and is not afraid to talk about it.
You have lots of high-quality content on your blog and your website is several months old. However, you still are not getting as much traffic as you want. Typically, an article answering this issue would start with a “don’t worry”, but in fact you should totally worry.
What causes low website traffic
Your page rankings are low on search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.)
If your pages are not ranking high (or immediately visible) on google search results, no one is going to click on them. This is not as much a reason as a result of what is wrong with your blog site. You need to be ranked higher for more clicks. Lets see what are the reasons for low ranking and consequently low traffic.
I am assuming that you have already correctly linked your website to search engines such as Google and Bing, and are indexing your pages. If you have not done that, I highly suggest you go over this search engine usage and indexing guide.
Your content sucks
This in fact, it should be the number 1 reason for why you are not getting any traffic. If your content was actually good, then google and other search engines would acknowledge it and rank it higher on the search results (Recall reason #1).
‘Good’ content does not just mean high quality / good english / comprehensive. It also refers to uniqueness. If you have a blog post that is saying the same stuff as another (older) post from another site, it sucks, and most likely wont get any importance.
At beyond nothing .com, we acknowledge that our content still sucks and thats primarily the reason why it was an epic fail. From this point onward, all other reasons contributing to low traffic are “also consider”. You can fix all those technical issues for a higher quality website but if your content sucks to begin with, it wont make any difference. I cannot stress this enough.
To summarize, write better content, and remove the low quality garbage off the internet. Yes, some of your trash content is preventing your better content to reach its full potential. Read more about this in the SEO section.
Also, avoid relying on AI / ChatGPT to write posts. The quality of the post is really not that good.
One of the reasons why your content sucks is that your did not “plan your blog”. Read more about that here.
Your Niche Sucks
2.1 You picked a super competitive niche
You decided to blog about your passion, but it turns out there are hundreds of other bloggers passionate about the same thing. Most likely, those blogs have already existed for years and you might have a long way to go before you can outrank them all on google search results.
When you choose to blog in a competitive niche, it goes back to the point of providing unique content. Answering very specific questions that no one else is talking about is your best bet. And now your niche is not looking very competitive anymore. Here you can outrank other websites targeting the same sources if traffic. Learn how to pick a good niche for your blog.
2.2 You picked an obscure niche
Picking an overly specific niche as obscure as “Eskimo owned restaurants in Brazil” is just as counter productive. Realistically, how many people are going to search for that?
Such a niche would just be your personal online journal at best with no traffic visiting it other than yourself. When working with something as obscure, you may have to put in the extra effort of marketing your niche using other methods and create a whole new ‘thing’ that several people are interested in.
2.3 Multi-niche websites suck
For an entry level blogger, it’s important to understand at this stage that a multi-niche site is difficult for google to promote as a reliable resource for a target audience. You can read more about single niche vs. multi niche blogs here, but for now just think of how specialists are more likely to be consulted for specific issues compared to generalists or jacks of all trades. Stick to one niche.
Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sucks
Imagine a Clinic in your neighborhood with no signboard, no adverts leading to it, no indication on google maps. Its just known by word of mouth. How many people are going to find it? That’s your poorly optimized blog.
For good SEO, you need the following:
- Your posts themselves should be optimized internally, oriented to focus keywords, be reader friendly, and have high quality content (images, captions, links, headings, length etc.) Check out this review of some WordPress SEO plugins that help with this process.
- External publicity of your blog is necessary for its online presence. This could be done using Youtube, facebook, or other social media platforms. This would be the “advertising” of your blog and can for the most part be done free of cost.
- Another big thing often talked about is ‘backlinks’. This is the “word of mouth” of the internet. Because beyond nothing .com sucks, no external party or website ever shared a link to any of its articles. All we can advise here really is to be honest with yourself and your audience and no get tempted into paying for backlinks in any form. Google actually catches such patterns and eventually all your work will go *poof* in an instant. If your content is legit, someone will link to you. Do not force it.
In addition to your content’s SEO, your website itself as your content library can benefit from being optimized for the internet as a whole and not just search results. Your can read up on organizing your website, improving performance, essential plugins for SEO, and mobile optimization.
A Slow Website causes high bounce rates and therefore low traffic
A slow website sucks. If a page is not loading fast enough, a user would always hit the back button before giving it a chance. Website speed has become an increasingly important parameter in recent times, especially after the Google search engine update that stressed on improving user experience (or UX). Beyond nothing .com took a big hit the moment this update came out and lost all its ranking almost overnight. See the search console timeline in the image below. We never really fully recovered from that.
Web site speed refers to 1. page load speed and 2. the user experience when the page loads. If your page has LCP and CLS issues, it would still count as a slow loading page with poor UX and its ranking would go down.
What causes low website traffic
Your website is not getting the traffic it deserves because frankly, it probably does not deserve it. In this post we went over the following reasons and areas you need to improve for more traffic:
- Your page on Google search results is ranked too low to be seen (the result).
- Your content sucks (most important)
- You are blogging in either a competitive or irrelevant niche.
- Your SEO sucks.
- You have speed and performance issues with your site.
