Solve problems with low traffic on your website

If your website is losing traffic and its ranking is declining in search engine results and you do not know the reason, now I present to you 20 reasons for the decrease in the number of visitors to your website in the following article, in addition to:

• Find out the source of this decline and solve the problems of low traffic on your website.
• 15 tips to increase the number of visitors to your website again.

All this until your site visits moderate again; Because the decline in visits and the decline in the site’s ranking is the nightmare of all website owners, especially after obtaining high visits and achieving appropriate profits.

Why did the number of visitors to a website suddenly decrease?

There is more than one reason why the number of visitors to your website suddenly decreases, so let me explain to you the most important 20 reasons why the number of visitors to your website decreases:

1. There are technical problems on the site that have not been resolved.
2. Problems with server hosting.
3. Not constantly analyzing competitors.
4. Your site has weak backlinks.
5. Poor user experience.
6. Change in site structure.
7. The quality of your site content.
8. Choose keywords that have nothing to do with the site.
9. Loss of external links.
10. Broken redirects.
11. Google algorithms update.
12. Natural search changes (trands).
13. UX changes in Google.
14. Geolocation.
15. Follow competitor improvements.
16. Poor distribution of advertising space.
17. There is no internal linking between the website pages.
18. Your site has poor internal links.
19. Lack of clarity in descriptive information or meta tags.
20. Reduced time spent on site.

Now I will explain each reason to you in detail, follow me.

1- There are technical problems on the site that have not been resolved

The presence of technical problems on websites is a major reason for the decline in the number of visits the site receives.

The most common of these problems that cause significant changes in the number of visits are the following:

• Updating robots txt files, preventing crawlers from accessing your site's pages and archiving them.
• Changing URLs while updating internal content.
• The presence of invalid and unindexed URLs
• There is no fixed publishing rate, which prevents search spiders from determining the access time to your website.
• There is an error in your sitemap.

2- Problems with server hosting

Hosting represents the most important key elements for improving websites, so it is preferable for your website’s server to have a large space…

This is because the storage units in the server on which the site is hosted are small in size; A problem occurs because the server cannot accommodate the number of these visitors, and there will actually be a sudden decline in visits.

If your site is hosted on (Shared Hosting - shared hosting) with other sites, this is also a reason for the decline in visits to your site, because there is a slow response when searchers press on from both sites added on the same hosting.

If your site is located on a remote server and is constantly crashing, you must stop subscribing to this server, because this crash and error in hosting will negatively affect your site’s rankings, leading to a decrease in the number of visitors.

3- Not analyzing competitors

This is a trap that many website owners fall into, which is to start working on the site and choose highly searched words in order to bring high traffic without analyzing competitors and knowing how they work and the keywords they target.

Therefore, you should analyze competitors before starting through a tool such as Semruch or Ahrefs, and then analyze the most important elements.

1. Identify your current competitors.
2. Study the competitor's strengths and weaknesses.
3. Know the most important words he uses.
4. Study the user experience of competing sites.
5. Verifying the existence of any offers or any opportunities provided by the competitor to the user.
6. Number of archived pages of competitors.
7. Analyze the quality of the content it provides and its publishing rate.

The importance of competitor analysis:

It is necessary to do these previous steps well before developing the marketing plan, so that you are not surprised after working on the site that you are following the wrong path, and because of the importance of this step, for example:

1. Ensure the foundation of your site is built before entering the competition.
2. Knowing the most appropriate time to enter the target market.
3. The ability to turn competitors' weaknesses into strengths for your site.
4. Knowing the most appropriate ways to overcome competitors’ strengths.
5. Discover opportunities that you can exploit to overcome competitors.

4- Your site has weak backlinks

Many SEOs and website owners know that building a network of backlinks to websites is a very important thing, but they overlook the main point, which is the quality of these links.

Therefore, we find that links can increase the number of website visits if they are links on good sites related to the business.

Which makes Google see you as more credible and improves your ranking, or decreases it if the site gets links on bad sites that are not related to your field or business, Google will punish you and your ranking will decline.

Therefore, you must constantly analyze the links your site has in order to get rid of bad sites that are not related to your site, in order to raise your ranking again.

How to disavow bad sites:

1. Go to your account in Webmaster Tools.
2. Then choose the site whose link quality you want to check first.
3. After that, choose links to your site from the (Search Visits) tab in the side menu.
4. Download the links to your device as a CSV file.
5. Next, examine the links that generate high traffic to your site.
6. Then sort through these links and extract the malicious or SPAM links in order to disavow them.
7. Next you have to collect the malicious links in Text.
8. But they must be written in a specific format, which is (domainname.com), and if you want to disavow all links that come from a complete website, you can write that in another format, which is (domain:example.com).
9. After that you have to save the file in UTF-8 format.
10. Then go to the Google disavow links tool and select your location.
11. Click on the disclaimer links.
12. After that, click on Choose File, then upload the text file.
13. Then click Submit.
14. Thus, you have completed sending the request to disavow your site from harmful links, and you must review the links after two weeks, because this matter takes some time.

5- Poor user experience

If the user experience of your site is bad, you will lose a large percentage of visitors and lose the possibility of returning to your site again.

Therefore, you must have a good user experience that the visitor prefers in order to gain Google’s trust. A bad user experience results from several elements such as:

• Page loading response time.
• The Call to Action buttons are not in the correct position.
• The site lacks phone numbers or support addresses that facilitate the user experience
• Inconsistency in website colors.
• The size and shape of the font used are not compatible with visual comfort.

6- Change in the site structure 

If your website is receiving high traffic and you decide to change something in your site structure or update the design, you should be aware that this could cause a decline in your website visits.

Because these changes to the site could unintentionally cancel something good on your site, and the change at that time negatively affects the site, so you must test every change before making it on your site, so that it continues to benefit your visitor.

I will explain to you the most important points to consider if you make changes to the structure of your site:

• Ensure that the correct 301 pages are redirected to similar pages.
• Verifying the internal links on the site and their effectiveness.
• Review metadata and titles for pages you're missing.
• Analyze the entire site to ensure its safety through precise tools such as:
  • Google page speed.
  • Validator.org.
  • Mobile friendly test.
  • SEMrush.

7- The quality of your site’s content

The content of your website must be relevant to your field, what your target customers are searching for, and it must be valuable and attractive for the reader to continue reading.

Choosing random topics and writing content in an unorganized manner is a major reason why crawling spiders will not be able to archive your site’s content.

Therefore, you must pay attention to writing your content on key targeted topics with relevant words, in addition to placing these words in the most important and favorite places of the reader in a way that does not make them bored, and these places include (the main title and sub-headings, in the introduction and in the conclusion) in addition to using derived words as well.

Attention must also be paid to checking the language and spelling of the content before publishing, as proofreading contributes to improving the quality of the content, which makes the information reach the reader in the correct manner without any errors that could change the meaning into different meanings.

8- Choose keywords that have nothing to do with the site

If your site is old and you do not find any response to the words related to your field, then you are wrong and you should review your site’s keywords, as your keywords may not be relevant to your site or your field.

Or you use terms that do not match what your target customers know, and then you do not appear when many people search for questions or words related to your field, and this is because search spiders do not find an answer or solution to their problem through your site.

It's important to think about your search behavior and compare that to the keywords that appear in your Search Console data.

So you should look at your keywords and key phrases, if you are using outdated or generic keywords, high competition keywords or low search keywords, or keywords (that are not relevant to your industry) then you are tracking the wrong rankings and you need to update your strategy to be strategic. Suitable for your site.

9- Loss of external links

Another reason that may lead to a decrease in search ranking and a decrease in visits is that you have lost a number of external links, and you can check for missing links within the last 90 days using different tools.

For example Majestic و Ahrefs و CognitiveSEOIf you lose a lot of links, this may be the reason for your decline in the rankings, and at this time you should ask yourself some questions:

• Is the loss of links across the entire site or only on the pages where there has been a decline?
• Have there been a drop in inbound links to your pages that have lost their rankings?
• Are there links to your website pages that link to other pages with lower rankings?

After asking these questions and answering them, you will reach the solution. If the links related to your site are broken (broken) or missing, you will need to determine exactly where these links come from and know the reason for them being broken.

You can then either remove them, replace them, or keep them, this way you can be stronger than your competitors and take the right actions before you lose your ranking.

10- Broken Redirects

If you're launching a new website, moving to new hosting, or making any structural changes to your site, you'll likely see your rankings drop unless you have a proper 301 redirect plan in place.

Broken redirects have a reputation for being an SEO pro's worst nightmare, so when using a 301 redirect you should make sure your XML sitemaps, canonical tags, and links are up to date as well.

301 redirects are a signal to search engines that a page, several pages, or your entire website has been moved to a new address and not the same old address.

If done correctly, you will not lose your rankings, nor will you be penalized for duplicate content because search engines index both the old and new web address.

11- Updating Google algorithms

Google is always looking for ways to improve strategies and results by making changes in the algorithm, or what is known as Google Algorithm Update.

We find that many sites are affected by these changes and suffer from lower site rankings, in order to avoid being exposed to a decrease in visits and rankings due to Google updates.

Therefore, you must use an effective marketing strategy through various marketing channels, such as social media platforms, advertisements, and other marketing channels.

12- Natural search changes (trends)

There are times when you may notice a drop in your site's rankings in search engines, and those times are because...
Google makes changes to the type of results based on user behavior.

For example, if there is a sudden increase in searches for a particular topic, Google may display the most recent results first and push static content to the bottom.

If your content falls into the second category, you will see a loss in your ranking, and here you can find out why the decrease is trending or not by taking a look at Google Trends Which explains any changes regarding them to help you explain these discrepancies.

13- UX changes in Google

The Google search engine sometimes changes the user experience of search pages in different ways that result in a decrease in visits, due to the impact of some search experiences on the click-through rate and impression rate. Therefore, when examining the user experience of your site, you should ask yourself the following:

What does the user experience look like on your page?
Does the layout change often?
Are there a lot of ads in the interface?

Read also: Keywords in search engines - a comprehensive guide

14- Determine the geographical location

Your rankings will be different depending on the location where your audience was searched, so if you check your rankings in one geographic area, you will need to check them in several others to get a more precise and accurate understanding of your rankings.

Therefore, you must focus entirely on targeting the words used by your audience in the geographical area you are targeting so that they appear in the SERP results of the site you are targeting.

15- Follow up on competitor improvements

You're probably doing everything right, but you're still losing traffic and seeing your rankings drop, and one of the reasons for this could be because your competitors are doing a better job.

Therefore, you must monitor your competitors through constant analysis, monitoring their activity on social media, link building strategies, and their content marketing.

You can also use tools like Way back Machine or Visionist to see what changes your competitors have made.

You can also use backlink tools to see if they have new backlinks; Maybe they're running their own SEO campaign.

Once you understand what your competitors did to outrank you in search results, you need to make some of the same changes, but better.

16- Poor distribution of advertising space

One of the most common factors that lead to a decrease in visits and rankings in search results is the presence of advertising content in the wrong places that hide the basic content of the page and hinder its appearance.

Therefore, you must divide the advertising spaces within your site in a way that does not disturb the visitor and does not hinder the appearance of your site’s content.

17- There is no internal link between the pages of the site

Search engines may stop discovering and archiving new pages on your site when they do not find any other link through which they can access these pages...

This results in forgetting many pages that may contain important content, which will lower your ranking and thus you will get less visits to important content areas on your site.

Therefore, you must develop strategies for internal linking between your important pages on the site, as it is part of good search optimization. Internal linking also works to retain customers and enhances other ranking metrics, such as the time spent by visitors on the site.

18- Your site has poor internal links

Many search engine optimizers place internal links between pages without considering the word they are targeting and how it relates to the content mentioned on the page. This is a big mistake that leads to a decrease in your site’s ranking in search engines and a lack of credibility for the visitor, which makes him quickly leave your site and not browse the pages. Other.

Therefore, you must take care of linking relevant pages, and it is preferable that the keyword used is a word that is already targeted by your audience.

For example, if you are improving a website that specializes in cooking, and you have a page that talks about cooked rice recipes, do not link to pasta recipe pages, but rather link them to rice cooking pages.

This gives the visitor more credibility, and through it he enters pages related to the same topic he is searching for, thus achieving a longer session on your site on different pages.

19- Lack of clarity in descriptive information or descriptive tags

One of the fatal mistakes that search engine optimizers make is the lack of clarity in the descriptive information or meta tags of your website, as they are among the necessary things that benefit your website. Because they are used to tell search engines what information your site provides.

So avoid forgetting your site's meta description, and you should also use more specific title tags that include your target keyword.

20- Reduced time spent on site

Bounce rate and the average time visitors spend on your website pages are two metrics that you can easily measure within Google Analytics.

When we find that this average time is low, this is a major problem for the site, although the bounce rate is not a direct factor in the ranking, but it indicates whether you are providing a good experience for users or not.

Therefore, you have to make people spend more time browsing your content so that Google will favor you and improve your site’s ranking, thus increasing the number of your visits.

What is the source of the decline in visits and the decline in the number of visitors?

After you know the reasons for the decline in the number of visitors to your website, you must examine in order to know the specific source of the decline in visits, and these sources are as follows:

• Visits from social media platforms.
• Visits through both versions of the website (desktop, phone)

Visits from social media platforms

You can lose a high percentage of expected traffic to your website through social media platforms; for the following reasons:

• Lack of interest in managing your website accounts on social media platforms.
• Not participating in topics suitable for trends.
• Choosing the wrong platform that your audience is constantly using.

Visits through both versions of the website (desktop, phone)

You can lose a high percentage of your expected website traffic if your site is not compatible with the mobile version.

This is after researchers have become more dependent on using the phone in searching than on the desktop. For this reason, if your site is not suitable for the mobile version, you will lose a high percentage of customers.

You must also pay attention to the necessity of adjusting the response of the desktop version in terms of (speed, advertising spaces, writing the user experience in it, and the design being easy to use) so that your competitor does not occupy the highest ranking and the visitor enters it instead of you.

15 tips to increase the number of visitors to your website

You can increase the number of visits to your website and avoid a decline in visits by following the following tips:

1.  Pay attention to searching for highly searched keywords that are relevant to your site.
2. Writing valuable content that is useful to the visitor in an organized and organized manner, so that he turns into a loyal visitor to your site.
3. Analyze your site and competitors on an ongoing basis, which is best (monthly analysis).
4. Ensure the integrity of your site in terms of HTML and CSS codes.
5. Ensure that the response speed of your website pages is (89:100) so that it is an appropriate speed for the user.
6. Ensure internal linking between the most important pages on your website.
7. The Call to Action buttons are in the correct position.
8. Divide advertising spaces within your site in a way appropriate to the primary content.
9. Building Backlinks Good quality for your website on sites related to your niche.
10. Analyze competitors, monitor their activity in content marketing, examine their backlink building, and share them through social media.
11. Choose good hosting suitable for responding to high traffic.
12. Your user experience should be good.
13. Interest in adding your site to international and local directories.
14. Update the content of the posts on your website.
15. Use pictures and infographics that indicate the topics you are discussing in order to attract visitors.

Thus, we have finished our next article on solving the problems of low traffic on your website and the source of this decline in visits. I also provided you with 15 tips to increase the number of visitors to your website, and you can also Contact us in SEO Correct to improve your website and increase the number of visits.