In general, blogs or websites are created for business purposes or earning online income such as marketing products, offering services, or participating in affiliate programs. In order for the goal of creating a blog to be successful, traffic or visitor traffic to the blog is the main key and very important. Visitors to your blog can be potential product buyers, service users, or visitors interested in affiliate programs.
The greater the blog visitor traffic, the greater the online business and income. To increase blog visitor traffic, bloggers carry out various search engine optimization efforts (search engine optimization | SEO), both technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO. The most enjoyable thing is when the optimization efforts are successful and blog visitor traffic increases.
Have you ever been surprised when you checked your blog and found that visitor traffic had dropped? You are certainly wondering why this could happen. Not only you, many other bloggers have also experienced the same thing.
Your feelings are mixed, angry, panicked, disappointed and hopeless at the results of the blog optimization that has been carried out so far. What and where is the error? You end up losing enthusiasm and being lazy about improving.
Why is my Blog not Getting Traffic?
Blog visibility and ranking is fierce competition. There are millions of blogs fighting for the best ranking for the same niche so that they appear on the first page of search engine results (SERP). Blogs that appear on the first page of search results will get large organic traffic.
Likewise, search engine optimization is an effort that is carried out continuously and applies the best SEO practices, not haphazardly and haphazardly. There are quite a lot of factors that can cause your blog traffic to drop. This article briefly explains 12 causes of decreased blog visitor traffic.
1. Algorithm changes
If you focus on the Google search engine, you probably already know that Google makes frequent algorithm updates. Google algorithm updates can be updates that are carried out every day and core updates that are carried out several times a year but have a significant impact. It is possible that blog visitor traffic has fallen due to the impact of this Google algorithm update.
The decline in blog traffic due to Google algorithm updates is not your fault. Google is very secretive about specific updates to their algorithm.
To find out if the algorithm has changed, you can look for confirmation of changes released by Google or you can also use tools such as Mozcast from moz.com or SEMrush Sensor from SEMrush.
However, if you don't want to bother with Google algorithm updates, stay focused on creating quality content by implementing the best SEO practices. You can also try to maximize blog visitor traffic, for example by promoting on social media or through paid traffic such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads.ax
2. Over-optimization
You may be motivated to get your blog to be ranked at the top on the first page of search engine results (SERP) by over-optimizing. Over-optimization such as keyword stuffing, adding lots of irrelevant links, forcing articles to be long but become useless, and so on can actually damage your blog's ranking.
When optimizing your blog, you still have to stick to the best SEO practices. When SEO is done correctly, the blog ranking will improve.
In SEO, too much of a good thing is not better. The SEO techniques that you used in the past may no longer be considered white-had SEO at this time. Google algorithms are always updated to improve the quality of search results.
3. Low content quality
Content is King. Content is the main reason to visit your blog. Quality content has the power to attract visitors to the blog. Content marketing is one of the best ways to market your business with little investment through quality content.
Quality content is created using SEO principles and contains important information for users. With SEO knowledge and skills, you can create quality content. However, if you want to post blog content regularly, you ultimately need the help of a content creator.
You need to be selective in choosing content creators and make sure the content created is quality. Google can find out and will divert visitor traffic from blogs with low-quality content. If this really happens, it can cause blog traffic to drop.
4. Improvements to competitor blogs
If you have optimized your blog correctly, but blog visitor traffic is still dropping, maybe this is because your competitor's blog has better SEO performance because it is better optimized. So, more blog traffic goes to competitors' blogs than to your blog. You need to know how their blog can outperform yours.
You can start by monitoring their social media activities, link building strategies, both internal links, external links and backlinks, as well as their content marketing and then analyze it. You can use the backlink tool, Wayback Machine or Versionista to find out changes to competitors' blogs. Once you know, make some of the same changes, only do them better.
5. Slow blog or website
Blogs or websites are currently created with CMS such as Joomla! and WordPress. Blog pages that load slowly can be caused by many factors such as themes or templates that are used heavily, installing too many extensions, images not being optimized, and so on.
So that blog pages can load quickly, use a light theme or template that has been optimized, install only the necessary extensions, and optimize images by compressing and specifying the engine.
A blog that loads slowly causes visitors to become impatient and end up leaving your blog to go to a competitor's blog. Page load speed is one of the ranking factors. If a blog page loads slowly, this is a negative signal and the ranking is lowered. The next impact is low visibility and decreased visitor traffic.
6. Server downtime
Is it true that web hosting has an effect on SEO? Placing a blog on web hosting can significantly influence rankings, visitor traffic and conversions. Let's take one example, namely a hosting server.
You must often hear bloggers complaining that their blogs cannot be accessed due to server downtime. One of the causes of server downtime is poor server quality. Therefore, choose a web hosting provider that has a reliable server.
Server downtime is very detrimental. Blogs can lose visitor traffic and conversions. Blogs are also considered unreliable. Regarding SEO, search engine crawlers (spider) cannot crawl and index new pages, resulting in temporary deindexing.
Blog pages that have not been indexed do not appear on search engine search results pages (SERP). Blogs have the potential to lose organic traffic. If the server has frequent downtime, search engine crawlers will crawl your blog less frequently.
7. Not mobile-friendly
Nowadays, accessing blogs or websites via mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets is much greater than via desktop or laptop. You must follow this shift by ensuring that your blog or website has a responsive (mobile-friendly) design. Blogs with responsive design can be displayed well on small screens such as smartphone and tablet screens.
Through algorithm updates, Google gives more priority to blogs or websites that have a responsive design. Google also penalizes blogs or websites that are not responsive by reducing their ranking. This decrease in ranking will cause reduced visibility and ultimately reduce organic traffic to the blog.
8. Subject to Google penalties
Google penalties on blogs or websites are truly terrible. Blogs can be penalized for violations such as violating copyright, paid links, inappropriate content, not complying with Google's quality guidelines, and so on.
Google has 3 kinds of penalties for blogs or websites that violate, one of which is a bad ranking reduction. The next consequence of this is that visitor traffic has dropped drastically.
It could be that your blog visitor traffic has dropped because you received a Google penalty. In giving penalties, Google uses two methods, namely manual and automatic.
The manual method is carried out by the Google team by carrying out in-depth checks, while the automatic method is determined by the Google algorithm. Therefore, it is important to follow the blog or website quality guidelines that Google has outlined.
Why am I not Getting Views on Blogger?
The answer I can offer regarding the issue of why it is difficult to get blog traffic nowadays is three kinds of factors: changes in the reading style of Indonesian people, the transformation of conventional media into digital and the rise of the marketplace.
1. Changes in Reading Style
In the 2010-2016 period, blogs became one of the main tools for communicating, developing a passion for writing and especially searching for information.
At that time there were not many instant messaging and social media applications so blogs, both Blogspot and WordPress, became a means of seeking knowledge, insight and information.
What about now? People prefer other platforms to express their hobbies and thoughts, especially when it comes to writing and reading.
Few people still love blogs, especially those who still have free Blogspot or WordPress domains. Everything can be obtained from Line, Telegram channels, Instagram or even Tiktok and especially Facebook and Twitter.
Moreover, when YouTube appeared, people were spoiled with informative content in the form of videos or podcasts. As a result, the number of readers available for traffic has decreased completely. Moreover, in my opinion, the reading style of Indonesian people still likes short and viral news, not long information which is considered tiring.
2. Mass Media Transformation
In the past, Kompas and Suara Merdeka were newspapers. What does it mean? Yes, newspapers in the truest sense. But now they and hundreds of other newspapers prioritize digital platforms.
As a result, the emergence of this news website also destroyed the blogger community. People prefer to read bloomber.com, CNN or other media because apart from mastering SEO, they also clear out all the keywords.
3. The Rise of Marketplaces
Remember that in the past blogs were also used to conduct affiliates or affiliate businesses. But what if everyone could now sell on a marketplace that was built by great IT engineers? Of course the blog will collapse.
Marketplaces make people prefer to buy online without having to bother visiting blogs that market these goods.
So that's the reason why it's difficult to get blog traffic now. Don't blame your SEO skills, but this is the fact. Bloggers are struggling to create good content and find readers while competing with websites with huge capital.
Even blogs that discuss blogging tutorials are now in the dark category, considering that they have to deal with Semrush and other hosting providers who regularly publish articles about blog tutorials.
Actually, this also has a positive effect, namely making blogs become the main tool again as their original purpose, sharing experiences, opinions and ideas. Not just looking for traffic to reap profits from Google AdSense.
So it could be said that there are many causes that make it difficult for blogs to get readers. In general, it can be concluded that the factors that make it difficult for a blog to get traffic are:
- Changes in people's ways and reading styles.
- Newspapers are turning into news sites
- The emergence of many web marketplaces
- Lack of adapting to the latest SEO
- The topic receives little interest from the public
- There are violations so that the blog does not get attention from Google
- The web is not mobile friendly
- Out of date article
- Not competing with other blogs
Closing
You only need to focus on the main goal, namely producing the best possible content that is interesting to your blog visitors and search engine rankings. If you keep these key goals in mind, you will have more natural-looking and informative content resulting in longer-lasting and more productive SEO in the future.