Sophia Posted September 14, 2021 Share Posted September 14, 2021 I am trying to figure out what I can do for my blog. It has dropped below 1,000 views per day now when it used to be around 4,000. I can't seem to figure out how to improve this on the back end either. I have reworked keywords, tags, links and other SEO stuff. I just don't know what to do at this point. I feel like Google is screwing me over! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted September 14, 2021 Share Posted September 14, 2021 Is it a seasonal shift? Can you share a picture from Google search console without exposing the domain the name? Are impressions lower too or is it just clicks? Have you built any links? What is the average length of content and does it answer the users question when they land on the page? Would love to try to help troubleshoot this but will need a bit more information. I know my affiliate site is in Home and Garden but leans closer to the lawn care side of things so my traffic is very seasonal coming April - June and then drops off the rest of the year. We have spent this year trying to fix that and the strategy seems to be work at finding a higher bottom. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarlett Posted September 15, 2021 Share Posted September 15, 2021 Usually you can find work-a-rounds by changing titles and doing click-bait articles. I know it is a sleazy thing to do but it can help drive traffic back to your site. I would also test how the speeds of things are running. If you site is running slower, Google will automatically de-rank you for it. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted September 15, 2021 Share Posted September 15, 2021 My favorite method on websites to drive traffic is targeting super low volume keywords and fully answering the question that someone had. If you look at the @TopicStarter I post keyword focused content. This site was having trouble getting any organic lift until I made sure to focus. Watching AHREFs these posts are starting to pick up and rank on page 2 or 3. This was a new domain so I am still likely building trust with the search engines but slowly it is coming around. I do this with a lot of my projects and the traffic really starts to compound over time. Not very many other webmasters are targeting these queries which gives you some easy wins along the way. Building web traffic is one of those things where it just seems to take time. I see webmasters talking all the time about how fast they rank and get traffic and I really have not seem similar results. I try to keep my project count low and just stay focused on the prize. You just keep publishing that content. As long as your site is indexed you will eventually get traffic and natural links. It is a grind @Sophia embrace it and just keep going. It gets better with time 🙂 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ella Posted September 18, 2021 Share Posted September 18, 2021 Just keep posting new content. You will eventually bounce back. A lot of people have been complaining about this so it isn't a certain site or niche issue. You can consider competing with yourself. Make a blog in the same niche and rewrite the same posts you have done using different titles. So this way you will have more of a chance of something ranking at the top. It is a lot of work but some online business people swear by it. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sophia Posted September 19, 2021 Author Share Posted September 19, 2021 On 9/15/2021 at 3:54 PM, James said: Building web traffic is one of those things where it just seems to take time. I see webmasters talking all the time about how fast they rank and get traffic and I really have not seem similar results. It took my one blog almost 3 years before I got good traffic steady. I can see this being the standard. I just hate that you can put so much time and effort in to see it climb and fall back down. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted September 20, 2021 Share Posted September 20, 2021 @Sophia Yes it takes forever now days to get traction on projects. Watching things fall is always frustrating too. There is hope though because typically there is a reason for the drop we just need to dig a deep to find it. The first question I ask myself is have I made any changes to the site? For example a few months ago I installed a new wordpress plugin to help with my AMP pages. Well that plugin apparently conflicted with my theme and I ended up having 100% invalid amp pages. Well I am not in Google Search Console every day to spot this quickly but I noticed in my analytics that I had a sharp drop in mobile traffic. Which led me to start digging. Luckily I was able to find the problem and get it all fixed up. The site is still recovering its mobile traffic 2 months later and search console is finally almost done processing all the amp pages again to show me we have no errors. After checking for technical issues I will go find where the traffic has dropped. Depending on the site some of your pages likely bring in a majority of the traffic. Find the pages where the traffic stopped coming and look at what happened to those pages in google search console. If the rank is dropping then someone competing with you has likely published better content or built more links to the content to push it ahead of yours. I like to review my content that ranks in the top 5 and try to make sure I do a content refresh every couple of years to make sure the content is still valuable to the end the user. Let's keep the conversation going. Get into google search console and start digging around. Make sure to be looking at large enough datasets that you can build theories around why something is happening. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sophia Posted September 25, 2021 Author Share Posted September 25, 2021 On 9/20/2021 at 3:47 PM, James said: @Sophia Yes it takes forever now days to get traction on projects. Watching things fall is always frustrating too. There is hope though because typically there is a reason for the drop we just need to dig a deep to find it. The first question I ask myself is have I made any changes to the site? For example a few months ago I installed a new wordpress plugin to help with my AMP pages. Well that plugin apparently conflicted with my theme and I ended up having 100% invalid amp pages. Well I am not in Google Search Console every day to spot this quickly but I noticed in my analytics that I had a sharp drop in mobile traffic. Which led me to start digging. Luckily I was able to find the problem and get it all fixed up. The site is still recovering its mobile traffic 2 months later and search console is finally almost done processing all the amp pages again to show me we have no errors. After checking for technical issues I will go find where the traffic has dropped. Depending on the site some of your pages likely bring in a majority of the traffic. Find the pages where the traffic stopped coming and look at what happened to those pages in google search console. If the rank is dropping then someone competing with you has likely published better content or built more links to the content to push it ahead of yours. I like to review my content that ranks in the top 5 and try to make sure I do a content refresh every couple of years to make sure the content is still valuable to the end the user. Let's keep the conversation going. Get into google search console and start digging around. Make sure to be looking at large enough datasets that you can build theories around why something is happening. I noticed that Google is very anal about page load times so you have to make sure every page loads fast or they punish you for it. It sounds silly but it is something I check on a regular basis. I am still trying to recover my traffic. It has kind of put me off from making any new content but I know I have to post something. I just hate to put the work in to not even see it rank anywhere. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarlett Posted September 27, 2021 Share Posted September 27, 2021 Just stick with it even when you feel like it is going nowhere. I know it can be hard to add new content but just put the time in. You never know, you might end up striking gold with one of your posts! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted September 27, 2021 Share Posted September 27, 2021 On 9/24/2021 at 5:11 PM, Sophia said: I noticed that Google is very anal about page load times so you have to make sure every page loads fast or they punish you for it. It sounds silly but it is something I check on a regular basis. I am still trying to recover my traffic. It has kind of put me off from making any new content but I know I have to post something. I just hate to put the work in to not even see it rank anywhere. Yes positive user experience seems important to the Google overlords. Are you running Wordpress? WP Rocket + Thrive Products are what my wordpress sites run and my host is Nexcess. I can get my scores pretty high using just those plugins. I have heard great things about Astra + WP Rocket too. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sophia Posted October 2, 2021 Author Share Posted October 2, 2021 On 9/27/2021 at 7:02 PM, James said: Yes positive user experience seems important to the Google overlords. Are you running Wordpress? WP Rocket + Thrive Products are what my wordpress sites run and my host is Nexcess. I can get my scores pretty high using just those plugins. I have heard great things about Astra + WP Rocket too. Yeah I have Wordpress. I am using Litespeed Cache. I can't remember if I tried WP Rocket or not. I will have to look into that more. I know since I changed my theme last, it took a hit and I feel like it should have improved. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Posted October 11, 2021 Share Posted October 11, 2021 On 10/1/2021 at 6:33 PM, Sophia said: Yeah I have Wordpress. I am using Litespeed Cache. I can't remember if I tried WP Rocket or not. I will have to look into that more. I know since I changed my theme last, it took a hit and I feel like it should have improved. Do you see any warnings or anything in Google Search Console? Slow loading pages or invalid code? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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