Where Has All Of My Blog Traffic Gone?

A client shared his concerns with me over a sharp downturn in traffic to one of his sites and was thinking about launching an expensive advertising campaign to bring people back. This particular site consists of standard HTML pages which means it isn’t based on a blog platform, rather on a nicely designed CSS theme, and is updated fairly regularly.

Although I’m not directly involved with this site, I reviewed his pages and then assured him that the drop in traffic was probably seasonally related. After all, we’re in the middle of the summer months and when your site is seasonally themed, then there are times in the year when an even steeper drop will be noticed.

When Your Blog Loses Traffic

My client’s concern brought up an issue that many bloggers contend with too – a sharp drop to their blog’s traffic. Blogging can be immensely frustrating especially if you pour your heart and soul into it and the returns are just not there. After all of that work you notice that your Alexa number continues to rise, your PageRank sinks and your traffic numbers plummet. But on closer inspection and after an honest assessment of your site, you may discover a number of reasons why traffic is down. Let’s take a look at five of the more notable ones here:

Seasonal Traffic – If you have a Christmas season site, you’re probably going through one of the biggest drops since December 26th. Very few people are thinking about Christmas shopping, but I would venture to say that once Labor Day has passed your traffic will begin to tick upward, increasing noticeably in October and surging by early November. For everyone else (in the northern hemisphere), the months of June, July and August are generally slower as even web addicts like to take a break, head to the beach, visit their families, etc. They haven’t logged off completely, but they’re making good use of their warm weather time. Surf’s up!

Blogging Frequency – Have you been blogging less frequently lately? Check back to when you first launched your blog and compare how often you blogged then with how often you blog now. Over time, you may have gradually slipped to where you’re posting less frequently. Perhaps when you got started you wrote 15-20 articles per month but have since slipped to around 12. Fresh articles bring in the traffic, so consider ramping up your production to match or even exceed previous levels. Don’t let your quality slip!

Article Appeal – Maybe your subject matter simply isn’t of interest to your readers. I always tell bloggers to write about their passion as their enthusiasm will shine forth. Enthusiasm is contagious and people are drawn to blogs where the blogger knows his stuff, is excited about the topic and offers a unique and helpful perspective to his readers. If you’ve gotten in the habit of producing boring articles, then your uninspired audience will flee. Time to ratchet up your blog’s appeal!

Check Analytics – I use Google Analytics to review my traffic on a regular basis. Analytics and similar free or low cost tools give me clues on where people are coming from, what search terms brought them to my blog, which articles were most read and a host of other nifty features. You don’t have to be a statistical geek, but it is certainly helpful if you have a general understanding of these types of programs. You’ll also want to make sure that your sitemap is up to date, that Google webmaster tools is indexing all of your pages and you’ll want to check the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to see how high your pages are appearing for certain traffic generating keywords. Make adjustments as needed and your traffic numbers should increase.

Promote Wisely – I’ve noticed that some bloggers aren’t very active in promoting their articles. I arrived on the blogging scene late, launching the forerunner to this blog in December 2005. For the first full year, my site wasn’t set up to encourage commenting (people had to register which means few left comments) and my articles were stilted, not conversational in nature. By Spring 2007, my traffic numbers began to increase sharply as I understood that making my blog user friendly would be a big help. I also joined StumbleUpon, which soon began to bring more traffic to my site and carefully chose several other social media sites where I began to establish a presence and a following (Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, to name just a few). Needless to say, when I stoke the social media flame these days, my traffic numbers increase; if I neglect adding fuel to that fire, then my traffic gradually slides.

Thoughts For Your Day

Technorati tracks blogs and regularly issues a “State of the Blogosphere” report which offers excellent insight into the world of blogs. This report gives a fascinating and comprehensive look at blogging and what all of this means to you. The top blogs out there have been around for three years or longer but as you might guess, the vast number of bloggers eventually give up.

If you plan on being around for the long haul, then develop a strategy to increase your visibility in order to bring in more traffic. Quite a few of my blogging friends are committed to blogging until their fingers fall off, creating interesting and engaging posts on a regular basis. These people know where their blogs have been and they know where they’re going, setting themselves up for long term success.

Oh, what about my client who was worried about his traffic? He decided that a marketing campaign wouldn’t be worthwhile and is the process of making some changes to his web pages. The coming weeks should reveal whether these changes bring in more traffic, but if not I may have another gig to take on.

See Also — Is Your Work To Marketing Ratio 2-1?

Should You Update Your Blog Posts After Publishing?

I’ve always wondered what other bloggers do when they publish an article – do they tend to consider it final when it goes live or do some people make changes later on?  Personally, when I publish an article I will make a return in order to respond to comments, but beyond that I don’t do a whole lot with aged articles after I’ve gone to press. Over the past few months I’ve made sure to include a link to a related article at the end of my piece, but that’s about it.

Modifying Your Articles After The Fact

Barry Welford of SMM Internet Marketing Consultants recently made a compelling case for making later updates in his piece titled, “10 Reasons For Editing Your Published Blog Posts.” Without rehashing all ten of his reasons, I encourage you to read his article to see how you handle your own blogging. It turns out that after finishing reading his narrative I realize that I do modify previous pieces on occasion, although not with the same degree of intention as Barry. Allow me to share with you four of Barry’s points that resonated with me.

You fix mistakes, don’t you? I like to think that I catch every mistake before I publish, but that isn’t always the case. I proofread as I go along, but I also do one final, comprehensive read through to make sure that what I wrote makes sense and that all words are accounted for and spelled correctly. Usually, it is one of those smaller words such as “an” or “and” that I get sloppy with. Not that I have a grammatical problem, rather I sometimes type faster than I think which means I’m bound to miss something – even what should be obvious.

Image Addition? I must say that I do not add more images to an article later on. On most blogs (such as this one), I’ll include one image with the article, while on my car blogs I’ll include as many as six pictures if the article is discussing a new product release. I understand that images can add SEO value to an article, so maybe I should give this some closer scrutiny.

Update Developments – This is a good one. If I update my html pages I use on sites not powered by WordPress, why not update my blog posts too? It seems that a policy that we web developers used to follow — update fixed pages as needed – should apply to our blogs. But for some reason it doesn’t, so we don’t. Hmmm….

Search Engine Visibility – This is important, but I also think we miss out on keeping up with it. How many times have you written a piece that rushed to the top of the SERPs only to slide back down over time? Perhaps we should pay more attention to who has surged ahead of us because I’m sure that it isn’t just newer articles that are pushing their way to the top, but updated information as well.

Update Or Perish?

With so many new blogs and websites launching daily can we afford to neglect our sites? It seems as if we are doing just that if we fail to take advantage of the opportunity to make changes later on, especially when those changes may have a positive impact on our readers as well as on our visibility via the search engines.

See Also — You Can Blog Better Than That!