It is a sad fact that out of all the blogs that populate Google and the internet, that most of them are not getting any real or substantial traffic and the potential to make a passive income from the blog from them vanishes.
If you track down the MAIN reasons this is the case, you’ll find that there’s usually 3 reasons why this is the case.
Here are the 3 reasons your blog is not getting traffic:
- Your blog isn’t targeting the right keywords.
- Your content isn’t plentiful enough or just isn’t good enough to rank.
- Your site isn’t connected with the right tools to show you if it’s getting traffic.
Let’s dive into each reason and see the solution for them:
1) You’re not targeting the right keywords.
Lack of using the right keywords is one of the MAIN problems blogs have nowadays. I get people asking me to check their blogs quite often and when I click the link, what do I see?
- Them writing a lot about their daily life.
- Sharing how they feel.
- Sharing an experience they recently had.
- Basically a literal online journal that they’re sharing with the world.
- And the titles, where keywords matter most of all, are boring, make no sense, and are things you’d never look up anyway.
How to fix this problem: Target the right keywords.
Your blog HAS to target keywords if it intends to get traffic from Google. An in order to do that, you need to understand how to do keyword research. Once you do, I’m certain your blog will start to get traffic sooner than you think.
You see one of the key points for any blog to get spotted is by the keywords it’s targeting. A keyword is basically a way for Google to find your site when neither you nor it have any recognition with any groups of people.
Not to mention the fact that by keyword targeting, you are attracting like minded people who are interested. A keyword can actually be the title of a subject or question people have about a topic.
Think about being stranded at sea, on a life raft, but without any flare gun.
Without it, there’s less chances anyone will spot you, but with it, you have better odds. Well keywords are like the flare gun for Google to come and find you.
I always tell people that when they blog, they should do so about a specific topic to attract the right kind of audience all the time. All about finding profitable keywords.
Now that you know this, how can you add this tip to your pages?
A) Whatever new blog posts you write from now on, always target keywords.
B) Any old posts you have, if the title sucks, change it to a keyword you’re chasing (with a little clickbait).
Examples of how to use proper keywords on your blog:
Example 1:
You like to travel so you start a travel blog. I would tell you to target keywords of popular travel destinations you’ve been to so you can document them and show off to people.
Want to see examples? Then check out my travel blog called TheNatureSeeker.com and you will how I title each of my blogs there.
2) Your blog doesn’t have enough content to rank, let alone get traffic.
Now this is another big one. If your blog:
- Is under 6 months.
- Your blog posts are less than 1,000 words and even way shorter.
- You don’t have at least 30 blog posts on the site.
Then you will not get the kind much recognition by Google that you want and thus no traffic.
Even if you target amazing keywords, the amount of content you write on EACH blog post matters a lot. Therefore aim to write more.
How to fix this problem: Blog more!
Intelligently of course if you use the keyword tip I gave you and I can tell you that if you read something like this article on what to blog about, you will be able to do that quite easily.
3) Your site isn’t connected to the right tools.
There are a number of cases I’ve had where people came to me saying their blog wasn’t getting traffic and when I checked the stats of their site through proper tools, I saw a completely different story. And because these people weren’t using these same tools, they never even knew what was really up!
Here are some tools you should absolutely get up on your blog ASAP:
- Google Webmaster Tools.
- Google Analytics.
- Site Kit (a plugin for your site).
These 2 tools will greatly help you with providing info on your blog and how Google sees it and if it’s doing well.
1) For example, Webmaster Tools tells me exactly how many people visited my website from Google.
2) Google Analytics will tell me how many visitors my site gets and dive deeper and show me where else they are coming from, among other things.
3) And finally, Site Kit is a cool tool that can be installed as a plugin within your site that connected Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics together to help you see the blog’s traffic reports from inside your site.
My final thoughts:
Here’s the thing: Those 3 tips I gave you are good, but they are more applicable to people who know something about blogging. If you’re a new person to blogging, start with a platform like Wealthy Affiliate to learn it.
Now keep in mind that if you have an existing site, you may be confused as to where to go when you start reading it. Here’s the solution to not letting that stop you:
1) Just treat that guide as a new layer to be added on top of your current site. Forget the previous things you’ve written and focus on implementing that guide’s tips from now on.
2) If you find that by reading that guide that your blog may not be suitable to market or get traffic with, you will have to consider possibly making a new one. For this situation, I would recommend you tell me about your site below and I’ll help you figure out if it’s a topic you can salvage and get traffic from or if it’s worth it to begin a brand new one.
Hi,
These are great tips, thanks for sharing. My question is just always, what if the keywords do not quite fit in with your blogging? I would also hate to write just for the sake of writing. I know I am guilty when it comes to this but sometimes I have to share what needs to be shared and if the keywords do not fit in, I tend to just ignore it.
Any good ideas to share?
Thanks for showing the way!
Thia
Well you’re right about ignoring the keywords which serve no purpose to your site’s topic Thia, but I certainly understand that sometimes, bloggers get caught in a spot where they are out of ideas and want to write just to fill in the content gaps.
In that case, you really have to step back and re-analyze the topic of your site and look for more relevant ideas. Here are some tips on this type of thing that I use when I run into the same issue.
Vitally,
I found your blog to be very informative and created several questions for me.What do you consider the correct amount of words that google likes in a post?
Being pretty new at blogging, I find it difficult to write longer posts but that is a comfort zone issue.
You recommend rewriting older posts and I should do that.
Am I able to re-publish after adding content and new keywords? Should I also make new titles?
My traffic has dipped, how do you fix the broken code.
Thanks
Jim
Hi Jim:
1) For the number of words, here’s an article for you!
2) You an totally republish new posts. If you use WordPress websites, all you need to do is go back into the article to edit it, add the content, then update it, and it’ll be fine.
As for keywords, I would not change the title unless there is NO ranking for the article going on. If that’s the case, you can change it, leave the permalink the same though.
3) I assume you mean Google Analytics? If the code is broken, get it back up. You can use the manual option or installing it through a plugin called the all in one SEO which is for WordPress, which I personally find more stable.
Awesome article!
My site is about 3 weeks old and I’ve been wondering how to get more traffic and subscribers. Quick questions: How often should I be posting? And do you have articles regarding converting visitors to subscribers? I got over 400 visitors but most of them aren’t converting into subscribers.
Thanks!
Your site is very, very new still Amiel and I would venture a guess that the 400 visitors you got were either from friends or family who visited it or either bots (spam, it happens to all sites), so I would not regard that traffic as being important.
Right now, for how often to post, here’s a breakdown. As for getting subscribers, that’s something I would only start to worry about when you get real, new visitors every day, you can then worry about placing opt-ins or providing people some sort of social media button to sign up through.
Hi there Vitaliy,
Great article. I dont believe the article length affects how a post ranks as much as some people think that it does. I have several shorter posts all ranking on page one of google and one top spot that is merely 200 word long.
I do believe what counts more, and this is the advantage that longer posts have is the amount of time spent on the page is longer which indicates a good or greater user experience.
Excellent article.
I agree that time spent on the page affects the ranking too Derek and I’ve written about the length of articles recently, but I am curious as to which article you say is ranking on page 1 and for which keyword. I have a feeling that either your authority may be extremely high so you can rank those low quantity articles or perhaps the competition is very. very low for the term.
This blog post really makes sense. I was surprised though at the fact that posts shorter than 1,000 words don’t get much traction. I knew that longer posts were better but I thought it was OK to mix it up and do shorter ones now and then.
I’m a pretty good writer and even I find it hard to write long posts all the time. I don’t even like reading long posts. Get in and out, that’s me.
How would you recommend writing these longer posts?
Thanks
deb
It is true that some people desire to see shorter content but the fact is, an overwhelming amount of high rankings are given to high authority sites with long articles.
One way you can get around this is by having a lot of comments posted on a single blog post which doesn’t have a lot of content itself. That can help boost it up in Google. Another option is to have YouTube videos on the site and let that be the content while having people comment on the site (not the video) to help the rankings.
As for writing longer posts specifically, I have found that by adding stories about whatever you’re writing helps.
Great information! If you go back and edit old work that was way too short, say around 500-700 words do you think that would improve the future traffic? Or do you think it’s best to just create new top quality content instead of worrying about older content? Thanks for your help!
Generally you should prioritize new content and if you have free time, go back to the old posts and make them longer if possible, also interlink them. But in the process, make sure it doesn’t interupt your posting routine of new content.
Good stuff as always Vitaliy. Keyword research is really important for any site to rank, especially those new sites.
I agree completely with the min words to rank. Speaking from experience, I just found out that the reason my earlier posts are not well ranked because those posts contain just about 700 words. It seems Google doesn’t really like short contents:)
Well it’s not that they don’t like it, it’s just that generally speaking longer content usually provides more high quality content. Unless you have a huge following, lots of likes and comments, an article with less content will probably not outrank another site which has more content for the same keyword.
I have been writing longer content these days, sometimes well over 1500 words, but a lot of my earlier content was quite a lot shorter. I think I’ll go back over some of them because I’m sure many of them could be improved in the way you say.
I think info such as what you wrote would have been immensely helpful to me when I first started out… in fact, I think all those contemplating starting a blog needs to read it.