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?

Google Loves Your XML Sitemap!

I just hung up my phone having concluded a long (and wearisome) conversation with a client whereby I explained the benefits of having a sitemap for their 200+ page website. The company has a nicely laid out HTML sitemap, but that wasn’t what we were discussing. Rather, our conversation centered on their need for an XML sitemap, the type that is generated for the search engines, particularly Google.

About half of our conversation was spent discussing the differences between an HTML and XML sitemap, with the remaining time being my emphatic pitch for them to start using the latter ASAP. After all, this client has been upset that some of their most important pages were not being indexed by Google, a reason I determined by their use (or misuse) of Flash and lack of sitemap. When the conversation ended I convinced them to have their web guy call me to go over the steps he needed to take to fix a few of the Flash pages and to upload an XML sitemap.

For those of you not knowing the difference between an HTML and XML sitemap, I’ll offer to you a brief explanation: An HTML sitemap is what your customers use to navigate your site, while an XML sitemap helps the search engines find all of your pages. With the former, your map is visible to your site visitors. With the latter, only the search engines see what you’re up to.

During Google’s normal crawling of your site, they can uncover most of your pages, but sometimes pages with dynamic content are omitted while Flash and Ajax pages can also be missed. Also, if your site is new and/or isn’t particularly linked well with the other pages on your site, an XML Sitemap can find those pages too.

With a sitemap, Google can do a better job of indexing the pages on your site, although they do not guarantee that every URL will be picked up; you can tell Google how often a page is updated including the date it was last modified.

This particular client is afraid of Google, having been penalized in the past for employing certain Blackhat SEO methods at the behest of a now long-gone and discredited “SEO” professional. I ensured their team that Google doesn’t ever penalize sites for uploading an XML Sitemap and that it was to everyone’s benefit to have one in place.

If you are a WordPress user, a sitemap plugin such as the one from Dagon Design is an easy tool to use, while GSiteCrawler can handle most smaller HTML sites (usually 500 pages or fewer) without a problem. There are certain “industrial strength” XML Sitemap generators out there too, but I’m not familiar with them as my client sites are usually between 20-300 pages.

Once my client has his XML Sitemap in place, then we’ll take a look to see just how well everything is going. With Google Webmaster Tools we can examine the evidence to see what pages are being picked up, who is linking to whom, and what errors need to be fixed.

Finally, as far as being afraid of Google, just keep your nose clean and follow their rules and you should be okay. That means avoiding all of the goofy SEO experts who will lead you astray by promising to give you results beyond generally accepted means — just don’t give Google a reason to slap you silly.