Blog Traffic Dropped?: 17 Reasons Why Your Traffic is Declining

Are you facing a sudden drop in your blog traffic? What could be the reason behind it?

Well, you are not alone. As a blogger, I understand the frustration and confusion that comes with a decrease in blog traffic. But fear not; in this blog post, I will uncover 17 reasons why your blog traffic is dropping and give you practical solutions to get it back on track.

A steady stream of traffic is essential for any website. Google is our primary source of traffic (?) and they determine your search engine eligibility and rankings using a complex algorithm. If they made any changes to the algorithm, your search traffic volume may vary.

Sometimes it will increase or decrease. There are many factors that influence search engine algorithms, including poor SEO practices, outdated content strategies, bad backlinks, etc.

Let’s explore the top reasons that negatively affect your search engine rankings and traffic.

Why Your Blog Traffic is Declining: 17 Reasons You are Not Getting Visitors (How to Fix it?)

Blog traffic is the lifeblood of any successful blog. It represents the number of visitors who reach your website, read content, and engage with your brand.

High blog traffic increases your online visibility and helps you collect more leads and sell more products. Therefore, when you see a drop in blog traffic, it is essential to identify the causes and take necessary steps to reverse the trend.

1. Not updating content frequently

Maybe you’re not updating blog posts regularly. Make sure that your content has up-to-date information and pricing details. When Googlebot finds outdated information on many posts, it will consider that you are not actively maintaining your blog, diminishing search rankings.

Prepare a content update schedule for your blog. Analyze blog posts to detect information that is no longer relevant, outdated pricing details of your affiliate partners, broken images, and dead links. Find and fix broken links without postponing, as they will also affect your online reputation and user experience.

Add attractive call-to-action blocks to encourage readers to perform an action or buy a product. This will help you sell more products and get new email newsletter subscribers.

2. Publishing lots of AI content

Are you publishing AI content without proofreading? AI dominates content creation, from blogging to social media, these days. Open ChatGPT, Copy, or any other AI writing tools, and enter your topic idea, and it will generate even long-form articles in one minute.

No brainstorming ideas. No need to follow case studies or blogs to get inspiration. AI will do everything for you. However, it has a downside. You may lose search rankings and traffic.

Everyone wants to read human-written content. Only humans can share real life experiences. AI can write content ten times faster, but it won’t have originality. If you prefer AI for creating content and save your time, do this─

• Proofread articles before publishing. Remove writing mistakes and phrases that AI tools commonly make.
• Check your content with AI detection tools like Grammarly, Quillbot, etc.

Don’t publish AI content just to save your time and money. It won’t help you get more traffic and increase earnings.

3. Not doing keyword research

Keyword research has a crucial role in traffic generation. Not all keywords can bring visitors to your pages. You should identify what readers are searching for in your niche.

Discover low-competition keywords with a keyword difficulty of up to 50 and a monthly search volume of 100 or less. You can rank for them easily. Analyze top-ranking pages and create a compelling article by addressing related keywords, questions, etc. Use Semrush, Answer The Public, and Google’s People Also Search For section to collect commonly asked questions.

Incorporate your keywords in your blog post naturally without stuffing them. Add FAQ sections at the end with questions you found and their answers. This is useful for getting ranked for more keywords and earning more clicks from search queries.

4. Ignoring on-page SEO

Do you create content but don’t bother about on-page SEO? If so, you are making a big mistake. Creating high-quality content and optimizing it for search engines are equally important.

Ensure you deploy your target keyword in the meta description, URL, SEO title, and images. Add a click-worthy meta description for your homepage, blog posts, and archives.

Organize your content into short sentences, paragraphs, and sections. Assign H2, H3, and H4 tags whenever necessary. Make sure that you include the main keywords in headings to improve their visibility. Follow your SEO plugin’s on-page suggestions to boost your content readability score and traffic.

Next, insert relevant internal and external links with keywords. Internal linking is a great strategy to send visitors to other internal pages and reduce your bounce rate. If you have mentioned any complex term in the content and don’t have any matching internal content for detailed information, find a similar post on authoritative websites. Mention it in your post. This way, your content authority score will improve.

5. Depend on limited posts

Do you write new content frequently? Or are you just focusing on updating the existing, limited posts?

The lack of fresh content leaves readers hungry for more information, forcing them to seek alternative sources. Millions of websites exist in every niche. If visitors leave and find a better blog, they may not return.

Therefore, you should publish new blog posts at least once a week. Prepare an editorial calendar and set a day for publishing new posts each week. You can also assign different days for different categories. So people who are interested in specific topics will wait for that day to see your new, fresh content.

6. Content cannibalization

Content cannibalization is an SEO concept that occurs when multiple pages on your blog are competing for the same keyword or topic, resulting in a drop in blog traffic. It will confuse search engines in determining which page is the most relevant and valuable to display in search results. As a result, none of your pages will rank for the topic.

To find keyword cannibalization issues on your blog, do this:

• Open Google search, enter site:example.com “topic”.
• It will list your pages optimized for the keyword.

Google hates duplicate content. It will also affect your page authority score, trust, and search engine’s crawl rates. To fix cannibalization issues and increase blog traffic, do any of these things,

• Delete or de-index any content
• Re-optimize any content with alternate keywords
• Merge similar content and add redirections
• Add a Canonical URL (from secondary to primary page)

Implement these strategies to claim your lost rankings and increase your traffic.

7. Not checking for errors

Everyone makes mistakes. You too.

Are you checking content for spelling and grammar mistakes? Online grammar checker tools read texts as you type and highlight mistakes in real-time. Click highlighted text to identify your mistakes and get replacement suggestions.

Grammarly is a popular tool in this category. It works across different platforms, applications, and browsers. Install its browser extension and access the settings to set your target location. The spelling suggestions will vary based on your location.

There is a Plagiarism Checker that can check if your guest author’s content is copied from any other website. Before publishing any guest post, you should check if it is plagiarized or AI-generated. Grammarly is the best tool for all these things. Otherwise, you will see a serious decline in blog traffic.

8. Slow loading pages

You have created amazing content and optimized it for search engines. However, it loads slowly on desktops and mobiles.

What’s the use?

You won’t get traffic. No one will visit slow-loading websites. Optimize page assets, use a WordPress caching plugin, or switch to a faster web hosting service to increase performance. There are many more things that affect your page loading time, such as themes, plugins, scripts, and others.

Check your page speed with GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights and follow suggestions to remove slow speed issues and increase blog traffic.

9. Not optimizing images

Are you compressing images and optimizing them with relevant content keywords? If not, you are doing wrong.

Compress images to make them lightweight. As a result, they will load faster on the frontend. Use an online image optimization tool like TinyPNG to reduce your image size. Alternatively, you can use Shortpixel or similar image optimizer plugins to compress blog post images automatically and serve them in search engine-friendly WebP or AVIF formats.

Ensure that you are optimizing images with relevant titles and alt texts. Many SEO plugins automatically insert image alt texts based on their titles.

If your SEO plugin is not doing this job, install and activate Auto Image Attributes From Filename With Bulk Updater on your blog. It is a free, simple WordPress plugin that automatically adds Image attributes such as Image Alt Text, Image Title, Image Caption, and Image Description from the file name.

Image SEO plays a vital role in building traffic from image searches. Never ignore it.

10. Not promoting on social media

Not spending time on social media promotions? Social networking sites can attract more visitors and clients to your platform.

Connect to niche influencers and fellow bloggers and build a strong network with them. Join blogging groups and communities, and share your content regularly.

Visit Google Analytics to identify your top traffic sources and target location. Understand your audience’s requirements and create new blog posts they may like. Schedule them on social media at peak times, so you can expect more engagement on them.

Use a content scheduling tool if you don’t have enough time for social media promotions. It helps you schedule and recycle posts on popular networks, respond to social media messages, create viral posts with AI, and monitor performance from one place.

Sharing interesting tips and creating stories and reels helps you boost your social media reach. Don’t just post your blog post links. Instead, share your life experiences and productivity tips, and create short videos on your profiles and pages. This way, you will get more followers and blog readers.

11. Not engaging with readers

Blog commenting is a powerful method to build relations and get some backlinks. Respond to people commenting on your blog and answer their queries or suggestions politely. If they feel you are considering their thoughts, they will return to give feedback on another post.

Visit similar blogs and leave your honest feedback there. Many websites allow you to insert a link back in comment forms. Add a blog post link that matches the current topic. It helps you get a free backlink and some visitors.

12. Not building backlinks

Backlinks are considered as trust votes for your content. Therefore, you should build backlinks consistently through guest posts, social bookmarking, and blogger outreach.

Discover niche blogs that accept guest posts. Reach out to them with your blog post pitches. For that, analyze the content of your target blog first. Semrush or similar website analysis tools will help you in this case. Find their missing topics and offer them a compelling article on the subject. In return, you will get a link back to your blog.

Share your guest post on social sites and interact with commentators to boost exposure.

13. Technical SEO issues

Complex SEO issues could be another reason for a sudden drop in blog traffic. They include issues relating to duplicate content, slow speed, redirections, robot.txt, metadata, and more.

Run an SEO audit to detect optimization issues and mistakes on your site. You will also get step-by-step instructions on how to fix things. So, you can quickly remove warnings and regain search engine rankings without expert guidance.

14. Bad backlinks

How often are you running a backlink audit? Link building is a proven method to increase blog traffic. However, bad backlinks will negatively affect your rankings and reputation.

Sometimes, your competitors or spammers create toxic, spammy backlinks to eliminate traffic. Therefore, it is essential to be vigilant to ensure your link profile does not contain bad backlinks. If you don’t know how it is possible, this detailed guide helps you detect and remove dangerous backlinks easily.

Automated link generators and cheap backlink selling sites are other reasons for low-quality backlinks. Before building links, analyze your target domain’s authority, traffic volume, and spam score. If they are worthy, you can go ahead with link-building campaigns.

15. Not monitoring visitors

You create content for readers and expect them to buy products you promote. I have a question. Do you track visitors to detect their needs, the content they like most, and their location?

Visitors tracking help you understand the requirements of your readers and create new content accordingly. Google Analytics will tell you where your visitors are coming from, where they land, and which is your most popular post. Analyze how long they are spending on your pages.

Raise questions at the end of your blog posts, so you can know what readers expect from you. Create follow-up or related posts to your popular content and link them to each other. It will result in boosting conversions and reducing bounce rates.

16. Not building email lists

Email marketing is one of the best methods to get more traffic to your blog. Send weekly newsletters to subscribers with details of your latest blog posts, product offers, and discount deals.

Analyze previous campaigns to find when your subscribers are mostly active and when they open your emails. Schedule your newsletters at optimal times to get more clicks.

Some email marketing services won’t allow you to promote affiliate deals through newsletters. It is better to share information about your new blog posts via email. From there, you can redirect readers to deal posts using inline widgets, popups, and related posts. This will help you to get guaranteed visitors from email lists and sell more products.

17. Competitor’s strategies

In this competitive world, everyone wants to be number one. Your competitors may have found new ways to grow their business and increase traffic.

They may have stolen your backlinks and thus got ahead of you in the SERPs. Or they may have reached more people through new marketing methods like paid ads.

To understand all this clearly, you should conduct a competitor analysis. It will help you uncover competitors’ content creation, marketing, and link-building strategies, and prepare a better plan for your business.

Final Thoughts

Blog traffic depends on several factors such as content quality, update frequency, website speed, content optimization, etc. Focus on creating quality content and update them regularly to deliver the latest information. This will help you build trust among readers and search engines, and they will prioritize your content.

Guest posting, engaging with readers, and social media promotions are other proven methods to improve your online visibility and build blog traffic.

If you are using AI to power up blogging strategies, use it to generate content ideas and run SEO audits. Don’t use AI-generated content on blogs without manually editing. However, you can utilize AI to create converting social media posts and attract more visitors to your blog posts.

Make your pages lightweight and actively promote them on all possible channels. Work hard. Improve your knowledge by reading and experimenting new things. Share what you learnt with readers. Inspire them to follow your journey.

As a result, your blog traffic and revenue will increase.