You are frustrated when checking your Google Analytics statistics and realize that your blog is receiving no traffic from Google. Even in my own experience creating blogs and sites, sometimes they receive traffic almost easily while others receive none. It is possible that a combination issues is resulting in your blogs’s traffic problems. Below are the first few things to check based on what I realized works.
Is your site indexed in Google?
As my grandmother used to say, “you need to be in it to win it”. While she was actually referring to the lottery, the same is also true for your blog posts when it comes to Google. If your blog posts are not in Google, Google can’t show your content as a possible search result option. Hate to say this, but just because you published your blog posts, it doesn’t mean Google will index them.
To check if your site is indexed in Google, go to Google and search your blog using the following: site:yourblogname.com
This doesn’t guaranty that your posts will be returned in a search result, but it’s the first step to understanding the problem otherwise your blog will have no traffic from google.
What to do if you’re posts aren’t listed in Google
First, check if you accidentally told search engines to ignore your site in WordPress. This is under Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility at the bottom of the page. If that checkbox is checked, that may be the source of the problem.
Second, sign up for Google Webmasters Tools and add an XML site map.
This helps let Google know you exist, especially if you haven’t received any backlinks yet from other sites. Google may not find your blog naturally.
Are you focusing your posts on the right search terms (aka long tail keywords)?
If your blog is indexed, you have a few published posts, and still have no traffic from Google, it’s possible Google is not connecting your blog posts to keywords. If you’re writing posts without thinking about a focus keyword, Google may not be able to figure out how to tie your content to a specific search result.
A few keyword tips to try
Research, don’t guess your keywords and focus on keywords that contain multiple words (aka long tail keywords) because those have lower competition. The lower the competition, the more likely you can rank in that search result. Single keyword search terms have high competition and are likely out of reach for new blogs.
And, if you guess your keywords, you may not be using the same words that your potential visitors are using. Google isn’t always great at making the connection.
A few quick, and free ways to research keywords include:
- Search Google itself and pay attention to the autocomplete in the search bar
- Check the Suggested Searches at the bottom of the search result page
- Install Keywords Everywhere. This is a free browser plugin that gives you suggested keyword combinations along with the frequency the search is tried.
Related: Free SEO Tools for bloggers new to SEO
Is your blog post optimized for a specific keyword?
So once you define the right keywords, (or assuming you are already), you need to make sure the keyword phrase is sprinkled throughout your blog post to give a strong signal to the crawler that your post is relevant to that search term. If you don’t give a strong signal in the blog post about the keyword, you’ll have no google traffic to that post.
Make sure you’re putting the focus keyword in the:
- Meta information (page title, page description, and slug/url),
- Headers (h2, h3, etc),
- Paragraphs of the body content of the post,
- Image alt and description attributes.
While you may be concerned that this will disrupt your writing style, or have been frustrated with getting all green lights on the Yoast checklist, you need to follow some of the best practice guidelines to ensure your blog post is giving a strong signal to the crawler on the relevant keyword otherwise that post will likely have no traffic from Google.
Over to you. Have you checked these things to figure out why your blog is getting no traffic from Google traffic?
Has this helped or have you discovered other reasons your blog is getting no traffic from google? There are potentially other reasons that your blog isn’t getting traffic but these will help as a start point before digging further into the problem.
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