Good ranking and traffic are continuous work.
But just because you are working hard doesn’t mean the inevitable won’t happen – a decrease in traffic or a falling down in page ranking.
Fear not, it happens to those with the best intentions.
It only means you need to take a step back and look at the different aspects of your efforts.
There might be small things on the website that are actually hurting your traffic or ranking.
Here are the 11 small things hurting your website’s traffic:
1. Low-Quality Backlinks
Be careful with the links you create to your website. Page ranking manipulation such as buying links that don’t have any relevance, to your niche, or your brand are considered low-quality. Low quality can be from web directories, article directories, guest posts on non-relevant sites, or spam comments. These are considered unnatural by SEs. Determine the low-quality links to your website; go to Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Links to your site. If you see any unnatural links pointing to the site then you need to fix these by removing them. Removal means sending a request to the Site Owner via email. Or, using Google’s Disavow Links Tool.
2. High Resolution, Non-Compressed Images
In the real estate industry, you need high-resolution, compressed images. While high-resolution images are great, if they’re not compressed, you won’t do as well in Google images. Images search can drive a good amount of traffic.
3. Duplicate Content
Duplicate means content from one part of the site matches or is very similar to others. Identify these duplicates through a free site audit tool like Ubersuggest. To avoid duplicates, use 301 redirects when creating new pages, to make the old content or pages not accessible by visitors or SEs. Avoid boilerplate text. This is any written content that is reused in new pages.
4. Thin Content
Writing too much thin content won’t rank well. More importantly, you should ensure you cover every aspect of the article that helps someone get what they need. Content that is too thin isn’t centered around length, it’s about value. If you can provide value in 500 words, then you are good. If you can provide value in 2500 words, then you are good. The key is to be super thorough.
5. Low-Quality Traffic
Low-quality traffic could be affecting your ranking indirectly. Low quality means visitors that do not convert or stay only for a few seconds. Visitors that aren’t really interested in your site or have no real business being there. Low-quality traffic indicates visitors do not like the site, thus, affecting the SE rank negatively. Identify low-quality traffic using analytical tools like Google Analytics & a free plugin like Analytify to help determine the URLs sending it. After identifying the sites that originate low traffic to you, remove the links. Measuring the quality is the only way to protect you from unwanted traffic.
6. Excessive Anchor Text-Rich Links
It makes no sense for every link within the site or even externally to have the same anchor text. This isn’t natural, it needs to be varied. It’s common for your anchor text to say, “Click Here,” “Learn More,” or other words related to real estate, such as “Sell Your Home”. It needs to be natural and whatever’s best for the user. Also, consider using keyword phrases for example, “Sell Your Home in San Diego” which are great for SE’s.
7. Redirect Loops
Many times, you’re going to delete old pages or consolidate content and use 301 redirects. What happens when you do these 301 redirects is that many businesses will redirect one page to another, and then that page will be deleted and then the page will be redirected to another page or the original page. This leads to a 301 redirect loop, that’s going to hurt your traffic, which you don’t want.
8. Pages with Errors
Fix all pages with errors, whether there are 400 errors or 500 errors. The Ubersuggest site audit report can also show you what these 400 or 500 errors are, and you should fix them.
9. Internal Broken Links
Broken links are inevitable as your site ages and your business grows. It’s natural for everyone to have them, so make sure you clean & monitor them regularly. An excellent free tool for this is the Broken Link Checker plugin, it’ll break down any broken links and send you email notifications when they arise.
10. Links to Redirected Pages
If your internal links lead to redirecting pages, you should fix them. Update those old internal links and link them to the correct destination. Internal links should not be redirected. So every time you add 301 redirects or 302 redirects, make sure you update the internal links.
11. Orphaned Pages
Your online business is still like a physical office, you need to take notice of the finer details to keep it running smoothly, and ranking well on SEs.
