As a beginner to blogging I often wondered “why my blog is not getting traffic?”. This can be for a number of reasons. If you’re just starting out with a blog the most likely reason is that you aren’t yet trusted by the search engines. Maybe also you haven’t been promoting your content?
As a beginner it’s easy to believe that just throwing up content will have people coming in droves! Sadly this just isn’t the case. In fact, no one will see your content unless you become adept at two main skills: targeting specific keywords (which have less competition) and promoting your content like crazy!
Why my blog is not getting traffic? You’re not established enough. There’s millions of other bloggers doing the same as you and no one can see you in the crowd.
In the United States alone, there are over 31 million active bloggers posting at least once per month. You need to continue working on your blogging for longer than most people will. Most will work for a few weeks, or even months, see nothing happening and then quit! Don’t do this! Become a blogging expert instead and see how magical having a blog can really be!
Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic? Google’s Sandbox
In order to sort through all these bloggers Google create a search algorithm which deciphers which ones to rank. Since Google is the main search engine, that’s the one you need to understand to get more traffic to your site.
The Google Sandbox refers to an alleged filter that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top results. Although Google officially denies the sandbox, the Google sandbox is real.
If content immediately ranked, it would be incredibly easy to spam the search engine. This would mean a much worse user experience. Since Google’s priority is the perfect user experience, it makes complete sense that this is a thing!
So, one of the reasons your blog isn’t getting any traffic is the Google Sandbox. A good way to know if this is the case is to search for something very specific to your content on Bing, Yahoo or Duckduckgo. Those search engines tend to be more lenient on newer websites and your content should rank sooner on them than they would on Google.
Try typing in the name of your website in a normal search. Use Google and then use the other search engines. If your site appears on the other search engines and not Google, you know it could potentially be the sandbox. After a few months, your site might start appearing on Google too, depending on your search terms and the relative competition.
Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic? Keyword Research
Another reason your blog might not be getting traffic is that you’re not researching keywords in your niche properly. Most bloggers will target longer tail keywords with their content because the shorter (two or three word keywords) are incredibly competitive.
So if you are just writing without research, you have a very low chance of getting found in the SERPS – search engine results pages. This means all your traffic needs to come from other sources, more on this later.
To find long tail keywords with low SEO competition, you need to type your main keyword into Google’s keyword planner. Look for the longer tail (3 or more words) keywords which come up. Longer tail keywords have fewer competing websites which rank on Google. Therefore you have more chance of ranking for them.
Still, you’re not guaranteed a top ranking even if you produce the best quality content on a specific keyword with low competition.
Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic: Competition & Authority
Despite choosing a long tail keyword and writing a high quality article for it, you still may not rank for it! But why is this: the simple answer is competition!
Competing websites might have thousands of backlinks and huge domain authority with Google. This means your brand new website doesn’t have much chance of competing with them. You still might not have the relevant authority with Google when you’re starting out. So, you’ll need to build up your authority over time by creating a lot of content.
As you do so, you should attract more people to your site by promoting your content as much as possible (more on this later). A brand new site doesn’t carry much domain authority. You won’t have built up trust with Google or any backlinks from other websites.
Google is much more likely to rank a website which has poorer content for a particular keyword but thousands of backlinks and high authority, than a brand new website with none of that; even if it has better content.
Why Is My Blog Not Getting Traffic: Not Enough Content
A newly built website which is thin on content will rarely attract a lot of visitors for free through the search engines. Only by building content and proving your authority in that particular niche will you start ranking and attracting more visitors, shares and backlinks. When this happens your traffic can grow very quickly. But until it does, you’re likely to doubt that blogging can be effective.
The difficult part of getting started in blogging is when you build a piece of content and start looking for traffic. There’s nothing, just crickets! So you doubt it works and stop blogging! Only when your blog proves itself to you do you consider making blogging a habit.
But this is a catch 22! You don’t believe your blog will work until you see traffic. But you won’t put in the required effort until you see results! This little zen riddle kept me struggling for a very long time, wondering whether blogging could actually work or not. It can work, but you have to put in the work beforehand, to reap the benefits later.
Keep building content and targeting those long tail keywords.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SEO or search engine optimisation is necessary if you want Google to eventually find your content and rank it in their listings.
A good SEO plugin can work wonders at helping you to write search engine friendly content – Yoast SEO is one of the best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Without optimising your content for SEO, you’re running the risk of losing valuable search engines points which will put you ahead of your competitors in the results pages.
SEO means placing your keywords in the required fields to tell the search bots what keywords your content is most relevant for. As you grow your blog, you should also link within newer posts to older articles using your target keywords. This is known as deep linking and is a useful SEO tactic to build your SEO authority. As other people find your content, they should naturally link to it over time too, particularly if you have written good quality content which stands the test of time!
You can build backlinks yourself too, which can help you SEO if you do it right. However, spammy tactics can also hurt your SEO score if you do it wrong.
Blog Promotion
Blog promotion is pretty important if you want more traffic; particularly if you are new to blogging. SEO and free search traffic is the long term strategy. But in order to get that traffic, there’s a lot of work to be done first. When I started blogging I threw up my blog posts expecting them to rank quickly and thousands of people to find me without much work. I was utterly disappointed when this didn’t happen. The truth is that there’s millions of other bloggers doing exactly what you’re doing and they are all competing with each other for traffic.
In the beginning, your blog won’t rank because of the competition, your lack of authority and of back links. So you’ll need to get good at promoting your blog posts yourself. Publishing a blog post is only half the job. You need to spend at least the same amount of time on blog promotion as you do on blog creation, if not more.
Free Promo Strategies
There’s a few free strategies you can use to promote your blog posts as you publish them:
- Use social media share buttons on your site. This makes it easy for visitors to share.
- Use a social media share plugin which automates the process of sharing your content to social media sites as you publish. See auto post to social media from wordpress.
- You can also use a plugin called Revive Old posts which automates the sharing of older content.
Plus you can also use some paid marketing to get more people to your content too. More people to your content means shares, likes and links to your content.
See also increase website hits.
Helping Vs. Getting
I have to admit in the early days of my blogging I was very focused on getting! I wanted to make affiliate sales and so most of my posts were written so I could get traffic and make sales. This of course becomes apparent to your visitors! More and more people are writing blogs and people are more discerning about what they want to read.
After getting help from a mentor, I was reliably informed that switching to helping others was the key to getting traction as a blogger. Remember what you’re doing if you’re a blogger – serving others!
If you keep this in mind when writing your blog posts, you’ll be giving more value to your readers. If your content is well received, visitors will be much more likely to like, share and link to your content! Over time, this will generate traction which will grow exponentially if you do it for long enough.
Patience & Time
When you first start blogging it can be quite exciting. You’re looking forward to being able to get traffic and start earning from your blog. You might even start looking for traffic after you’ve only done a few blog posts. But there’s not traffic! As you look for more evidence of whether blogging actually works, you lose focus on actually doing the work! You get demoralised and stop blogging.
Your blog stalls and nothing much happens. Months later, someone finds your blog posts and signs up to your email list. They might even make a purchase. You get all fired up again, having seen some evidence that your blog has actually worked! So you get back to it, finding blog post titles and creating some new content.
Belief
Your interest dwindles after a week of writing with not much to show for it and the process starts all over again! If only you could see that the small win (of the lead and sale) is all it took to keep up the momentum. If only you had spent that last few months blogging instead of doubting and procrastinating. You’ve have a whole load of traffic, leads and sales! Plus a load of content to build from.
Blogging is infuriatingly slow and often it seems like you’re wasting your time. But if you stick with it when everyone else quits, you’ll find that you are rewarded with more traffic over time. Depending on your topic, it could take months or even years before things start gaining traction. So learn to celebrate the small wins and keep up the momentum.
Focus on the small things you can do today, rather than the things you can’t change. Blogging is a long term strategy which can produce magnificent results if you’re patient enough and work hard at it. But you need to keep fuelling your belief that it will pay off eventually and enjoy the process in the meantime.