A quality website is essential for all businesses, but it can be frustrating when your website isn't getting the expected traffic. As an SEO agency, from our experience, we have identified 10 reasons why this might be happening.

3. The Site is not Mobile-Friendly

People use smartphones when searching for products and services daily. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, you could lose many visitors. A mobile-friendly website should fit on smaller screens, load quickly, and be easy to navigate with touch screens. To be mobile-friendly, a responsive design that displays well on different screen sizes is necessary. Furthermore, check that your site images are optimised for mobile use. Another example where sites need to be corrected is navigation menus that don't present well on mobile devices.

The reason you should prioritise a site that is optimised for mobile searches can be seen here:

"Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing."

    Source: Developers.Google.com

4. Not Enough Backlinks

Backlinks give your site credibility and authority and help search engines find your content. Sites with more backlinks rank higher than sites with fewer. Not enough backlinks mean your website doesn't have many other sites linking to it through a hyperlink; if this is the case, it could be because the site is new or lacking quality.

For example, if a website produces a blog called The Best Roof-Cleaning Companies in the UK. If your company does roof cleaning, you should try and get on the list to get a contextual backlink to your website. This type of backlink should be targeted due to its contextual relevance. Because backlinking is essential for ranking your web pages, it is an SEO component that you should pay attention to. 

5. Slow Page Loading Speed

One reason your website may not get traffic is due to slow loading speeds. Visitors want websites to load quickly; if your site takes too long, they may become frustrated and leave. This will also negatively impact your search engine rankings, as Google takes loading speed into account when determining search results. To improve your website's loading speed, consider optimising images, reducing the number of plugins or scripts, and using a content delivery network (CDN).

We recommend you use  Google Search Console and leverage the information from Page Speed Insights. See an example below:

6. Poor Website Design

Ensure your website has a clean, modern design that is easy to navigate. Visitors will likely leave and find another website if your website is cluttered, not visually appealing or challenging to navigate.

The success of websites and apps largely depends on UX design, which directly influences the user's experience. A good user experience can increase engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction. Conversely, a bad user experience can cause frustration, confusion, and negative brand perception. Therefore, businesses should prioritise UX design to stay ahead of their competitors.

As SEO specialists, clients often do not like to hear that their website has been poorly designed, especially if they were heavily involved in the design process. However, this is something that must be overcome as a priority. Again, see your competitors that rank higher than you in search engines and look at their sites to compare.

8. Targeting the Wrong Keywords

If you're focusing on the wrong keywords, your website may struggle to attract the right kind of traffic, even if it's already optimised for search engines. 

As an SEO agency, we commonly see companies targeting keywords with lots of traffic without having the credibility to rank for them. For example, if you are a new window-cleaning business targeting the keyword window cleaning (33,000 searches), you may find it difficult to rank. However, if you target the keywords locally, such as window cleaning Norwich (580 searches), you will have an increased chance of being seen in search results and getting site visitors locally where you are based.

Another problem with keyword targeting is when you use technical term names known in the industry but not by searchers. What is important is not what you call it but what web searchers call the product or service.

Here is a fantastic blog by Ahrefs listing free keyword tools that you can use.

9. Not Updating Content

If your website hasn't been updated with fresh content in a long time, it may be perceived as outdated and irrelevant by visitors and search engines. Refreshing your content and producing blog articles, news updates and content on social media that links back to your website is the way forward. This gambit should not be undersetimated and is particuarly useful if technology has changed and your older content has been superseeded. Or you have a new service that is not refelected in the old content.

10. You are Using the Wrong SEO Company

It is unfortunate reality that there are some SEO companys and so called digital marketing experts that simply are not good enough. If you have been with your current SEO provider for longer than six month and you have not had enquiries and orders the problem could be them.

SEO work shoud be an ongoing process, but you should be seeing some positive results between three and six months if the work being done is quality. To find out ore about how long SEO takes to work in 2023 click the link.

Summary

The above ten reasons why your website is not getting traffic can all be investigated with a free website audit by Make Space Marketing. Your website could have several of the problems listed or just a couple of small issues that are preventing you from increasing web sales. By investigating and referring to this resource we hope you can get to the bottom of your website issues.

If you would like us to investigate your website for you, fill out the form below and we will be happy to help.