How Blogging Can Help Increase Your Declining Website Traffic

During last week’s Blogging Content Camp Waldman Grant from Pinnacle Lists asked a question about website traffic and blogging.  Even though you're blogging regularly, it is possible to see a decline in your website traffic.  

If available, the first thing you should do is examine your traffic numbers from the previous time period last year. Are the numbers lower, the same, or higher than what is being reported now? If they are lower than some of the following things might be occurring.

Seasonal Fluctuations

This can occurr for both B2B and B2C businesses and in all industries. B2B companies typically see less website traffic during the summer because a lot of business professionals take vacations.  B2C businesses can see the same fluctuations depending on the season.

I’ll use our friend Marcus Sheridan who sells pools as an example. He definitely does not see as much traffic during the fall and early winter because pools are not on the majority of people’s minds.

Stale Website Content

If you weren’t producing new content and website pages on a regular basis the major search engines will start lowering your keyword rankings, thereby giving you less traffic. It might take a few months after starting to write blog articles for you to see traffic increase.

Holiday's

Almost all B2B sites see a decline in traffic during holiday periods. People are traveling, entertaining and are not focused on working. Most websites see a decline in overall website traffic during the month of December.

Duplicate Content

Your blog posts probably are not duplicate content However, if your other content is also on other websites then it could be a reason why you're seeing a decline in traffic. Google will not be indexing the pages that have duplicate content; leaving you with fewer opportunities someone can find your website.

Is Your Website Being Indexed

You need to check to make sure the search engines know that your website exists. One of the best tricks to get indexed is to Tweet several of your website links. The major search engines index each tweet and will visit the link in the tweet almost immediately. 

You should also register your website with Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster tools to make sure your website is being properly crawled and indexed.

Quality vs. Quantity Traffic

You might have just re-optimized your website and changed a lot of your content. Now you're getting less traffic, but it’s more relevant and higher quality.

Website Redesign

Anytime you do a website redesign you will probably see a decline traffic. Be sure to create 301 redirects from your old website URLs to the new ones. It can sometimes take a few months for a website to see normal traffic again after a redesign.

Paid Search Ads

Were you running Adwords or banner ads and stopped them for a period of time? This can be a significant reason why you’re website traffic would be on the decline.

Declining Industry

Sometimes niche industries or industries overall can see a decline in traffic which can affect your website traffic. For example, take the fax or copier industry. Those two products have been declining in use for years.

What other reasons do you think attribute to a decline in overall website traffic?