Reasons My Site Has No Traffic?

15 replies
Hi, guys. So I've had a certain site up now for around 2 months and over that time I've added several articles to it, all targeting certain keyword phrases in the titles of the pages and in the content. I've also been going the article marketing route and published a few articles to ezine, ideamarketers, and articlesbase.

Yet to this day, I've been looking at my cPanel stats, and it looks like I don't have a single visitor. I believe it's all bots. My site has been indexed with the big 3 SE's for probably about 6 weeks now. I've created only about 8-12 backlinks to my site, though most of them are to a specific article.

I know I need more backlinks, and I'll add them as time allows, but it seems like I should have some traffic by now. I would ask if maybe I just needed more articles on the site, but I've seen some sites reach the number 1 spot with very few pages. Another thing is that I can search and search through pages of results for the keywords I've targeted, and I neither see my site, nor any of the articles I submitted to the directories.

From the information I've given, does anyone have an idea why nothing has happened? I used to think it took a long time to get traffic to a site, but it seems like some people are getting results in a fairly short amount of time, so this leads me to wonder if I might need to change something about my approach before I keep going. Thanks, everyone.
#reasons #site #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author CatherineC
    Banned
    You didn't mention the only thing that matters:

    How are the keywords you targetted RANKING for your page/pages? Saying "I couldn't find them" is rediculous. Buy Market Samurai, or any other of a dozen programs, and learn them to know your exact rankings always. For your model this is all that matters, nothing else.

    Backlinks? You don't even know where you are in Google, why would you even be thinking about backlinks?

    Find your exact numeric rank, for every keyword you suppossedly focused on, and start breaking down the competition for that keyword on page 1 (backlinks, PR, on-page optimization, etc).

    Only THEN do you know if you need backlinks, or anything else. Or if you even have a chance to rank at all.

    Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author HotDamnShortSales
    Catherine, your hired! call me!
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    • Profile picture of the author tpw
      You got an hour? You have left some questions unanswered...

      What keywords are you targeting in your articles? (This is a rhetorical question that should not be answered in public...)

      What does your competition in Google look like on the keywords you are targeting? In other words, how many back links do your competitors have for their ranking pages...

      How competitive is the keyword you are targeting? In other words, how many of your competitors are getting back links for their sites...

      How many of your competitors are buying Adwords on that keyword?

      Going beyond competition...

      How many people are searching for that keyword in an Exact Match? Globally and Locally?

      Did you attract a Google ban? If you type site:domain.com into Google for your domain, how many pages does Google see? How many pages do you have for Google to see? If Google returns zero results, you have attracted a ban... Chances of this are super slim though... More likely, you just don't look worthy to them...

      As the OP said, where "exactly" do you rank currently in Google?

      On how many keywords?

      That generate how many searches?

      And what does your competition look like for each?



      Now that we have tackled the Google issue...

      What do your ads look like? How good is your ad copy?

      Where are you getting your ads?

      How closely targeted are your advertisers to your offer?

      In this case, it appears that you are not actually doing any advertising beyond your article marketing...

      So as a result, when I speak of ads, I am in fact asking about your author's resource box...



      On the article sites, how frequently are your articles getting viewed?

      How many of your readers are clicking through to your website, from your articles?

      Have you made a compelling call to action in your author's resource box?



      Of course, the way you have written your OP, it seems that you are intent only to drive traffic from Google...

      That is rather short-sighted to rely on only one third-party website to deliver people to your website...

      Depending on your market research and your skill at getting the job done, it could take days, weeks or years to get recognized as a quality website in Google -- worthy of getting good rankings from Google...



      I launched a new website one month ago... Within days of starting my advertising, I reached page 11 of Google... This week I am at the bottom of page 2... In the next month, I expect to be on page one, towards the top...

      Right now, I have passed all of those pages that are not exactly relevant to my target audience... For the rest of my journey, I have to knock off my competitors (18 of them)....

      For this niche, my competition should be stronger, because it is a smaller niche within SEO... LOL

      But when I climb past the weaklings over the next month, I will only find 3 real competitors at the end of the road...
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      Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
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  • Profile picture of the author vok
    First of all what type pf platform are you using is your site SEO friendly in the first place? I'd start a blog and turn it into a traffic machine, there's two bottom lines in internet marketing the first one is how much money you make and the second one is how much traffic you control and capture.

    You need to have a blog up and blogging on it daily to show Google that your site is active content wise you then want to be building relevent baclinks, create yourself a plan 1 post a day followed by building 5-10 backlinks and keep the process up.

    You can't expect to throw up a few articles build a few backlinks and then see like 1,000 UV's a day flooding your site, gee if it was that easy we'd all be millionaires.
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    • Profile picture of the author Bill Farnham
      Type in the keywords you're targeting and look to see how many people are targeting those keywords using Adwords. If you see little or no Adword ads, or dynamically created ads (shop dot com, Amazon, etc) there may be very little traffic even if you get a top spot. Get a few pages down in the serps and you may not even get any echos.

      The other thing you need to do is check this same thing out with the keywords you are ranking for. (They could be different than the ones you thought you were targeting...it happens )

      ~Bill
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      • Profile picture of the author Long Beach Nathan
        Originally Posted by Bill Farnham View Post

        Type in the keywords you're targeting and look to see how many people are targeting those keywords using Adwords. If you see little or no Adword ads, or dynamically created ads (shop dot com, Amazon, etc) there may be very little traffic even if you get a top spot. Get a few pages down in the serps and you may not even get any echos.

        The other thing you need to do is check this same thing out with the keywords you are ranking for. (They could be different than the ones you thought you were targeting...it happens )

        ~Bill
        Thanks. However, one of the keywords I'm targeting has almost no ads in search, yet gets about 12,000 searches a month. Sometimes I wonder how accurate the google keyword tool is. Anyways, maybe then I need to start paying more attention to the presence of ads.

        Anyways, as far as keywords I'm ranking for, so far I don't seem to be ranking for anything.
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        • Profile picture of the author Bill Farnham
          Originally Posted by Long Beach Nathan View Post

          Thanks. However, one of the keywords I'm targeting has almost no ads in search, yet gets about 12,000 searches a month. Sometimes I wonder how accurate the google keyword tool is. Anyways, maybe then I need to start paying more attention to the presence of ads.
          One of the reasons I brought this up is because those search guesstimates that say a given keyword gets X amount of searches a month are usually misleading.

          So how do you find keywords that are proven to be good ones that have a proven track record of attracting spendable dollars?

          You follow the money.

          As a rule of thumb, keywords that have a lot of Adwords ads associated with them have those ads because of and through market testing by other marketers. There is very little happenstance about this.

          Here's what you need to keep in mind...building a ton of backlinks, writing articles, etc, for keywords that are not searched very often (forget the estimates) or are not "buying keywords" (as opposed to informational keywords where the searchers just want free info) is an exercise in futility if you are trying to make money. It may be good for practice, but it won't pay the bills.

          And that's a prime reason you won't find other astute marketers wasting their adspend on such keywords. The ROI just isn't there.

          ~Bill
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        • Profile picture of the author tpw
          Originally Posted by Long Beach Nathan View Post

          Thanks. However, one of the keywords I'm targeting has almost no ads in search, yet gets about 12,000 searches a month. Sometimes I wonder how accurate the google keyword tool is. Anyways, maybe then I need to start paying more attention to the presence of ads.

          Anyways, as far as keywords I'm ranking for, so far I don't seem to be ranking for anything.
          The answer on Google keyword tool is, Not Very Accurate...

          But who cares?

          If you look for the presence of paid ads, you can get an idea as to what your competition thinks is important to them...

          They could be doofs or right on the money... So keep that in mind... But generally someone who is in Adwords this month, next and the month after might have it nailed...

          Historical Adwords presence is usually a very good indicator of many of your competitors ability to convert that keyword...
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          Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
          Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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  • Profile picture of the author Long Beach Nathan
    @Catherine:

    Well, naturally I did quite a bit of keyword research before I even bought the domain. I saw that there were quite a few keywords I could easily compete with. Some sites near the top of Google didn't even have but maybe 1-10 backlinks from any other sites. Plus, all the keywords I'm targeting involve the main keyword which is the niche itself (and it's a niche that has tons of hungry buyers and a fair amount of competition)

    Are you talking about using a page rank tool such as prchecker, because I thought most people said that page rank doesn't necessarily prove anything.

    @Chris:

    I'm using Wordpress, but not in blog form. I used it to create a page oriented site. I did this because I heard that WP had great SEO. Thanks for recommending a blog post a day though. So does that apply to pages as well? I hope not because with my schedule I'm lucky to do 1 page a week!

    As far as writing a few articles and expecting many people to show up, yes I know that I can't expect that. What I'm saying is that I have absolutely zero traffic at this point.
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    • Profile picture of the author SantiSantana
      As a recent purchaser of Market Samurai (bought it three days ago) AND total advocate of it now that I can see what it does, how it does it and how it can help, I absolutely second Catherine´s opinion that you should get it as soon as you can.

      You say that there is a market there and the competition is not too tough, yet unless you have a set of tools to accurately assess that you might be working on the wrong set of data, which is fatal.

      Case in point: the website I´m working on right now. When I did my first round of research ( using mostly the Google keyword tool) I found that the keyword I wanted to get in had about 500 searches a month. It did seem a low number considering the word "free" is involved, which should be a bit of a booster ( a lot of people look for free or cheap options,I´d give you the numbers but I can´t recall the research article where I saw the stats).

      Analysis with MS showed me fairly quickly where I was wrong (permutation) and showed me a whole universe of options and figures to see for myself (the competition tool where you see the top ten results and how theygot there was a eal eye opener).

      So although the software isn´t the cheapest around if you are just starting out ($149), you can get the free trial after which there is ( I believe) a 35% discount coupon.

      I got it at $97 after the Thirty Day Challenge and I can tell youit´s wellworth the full price.

      On another note, I also had a problem with that same website in which for a month and a halfI had 0 visits. Turned out it was a technical glitch with the nameservers. On another domain it was a technical glitch with the hosting company itself, so you may want tocheck that both your hosting and your DNS are working properly.

      Hope this helps.
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  • Profile picture of the author petevamp
    How much traffic do the keywords you are targeting get. How tough is the competition for those keywords. It sounds to me like you are not doing your research before to add new articles. Look at your ezine stats what is the ctr of the articles you posted. Are you targeting a specific niche or are you all over the board trying to target every single keyword you can think of off the top of your head. Add google analytics to your site do not try to sit there and read the webalyzer stats. It will show you all traffic coming to your site from bots and people and you get to play the guessing game on who is actually coming to your site. So don't say it looks like no one is coming to your site when there are plenty of free tools you can add to your site to show you exactly who is and isnt coming to your site and for what keywords and or from what sites. With out the pain of going through and trying to read webalyzer stats that just show you all the traffic coming to your site. It could be that the bots are coming to your site more often then actual visitors because you are adding content every single day. Which would make the bots come to your site more often and is just covering up the actual visitors to your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author rondo
    Start using a proper stat service like Statcounter or Google analytics. These will give you a much better idea of traffic and visitor stats. Both are free.

    Also you need to get more backlinks before you see results. Get 50 more links then assess the situation.


    Andrew
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  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    You need to push your site on social media sites. More SM exposure leads to better search engine traffic eventually.
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  • Profile picture of the author NewbieLifer
    So, if you type in your targeted market keyword search, does your site not show up on the first page of google? Is that what is happening? If so then, do you have your website pages SEO optimized with headlines containing your keyword phrases? Do the pages of your site contain the keywords as your page filenames? Do the images on your site contain the keywords in the file name? Did you add alt tags to the images? Did you submit sitemaps to google and Bing? Those are the only hope and prayer that my sites have for getting found. Personally, those have been the key factors for me.
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  • Profile picture of the author alvinchua91
    SEO takes time. For immediate traffic, I would suggest using StumbleUpon. Fast and lots of traffic. (It's a social bookmarking site)
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