If you run an e-commerce website, you want people to buy your products. If you manage a blog, you want loyal readers to read your content. But what if your site or blog gets low traffic? Any key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to score or any goal you have planned for your webpages requires traffic to work. Simply put, low traffic is bad for your business and will cause a low conversion rate. That’s why we compiled 5 strategies you can follow to improve those low-traffic pages. Read on to learn more!
Benefits of content audit
Of course, it’s always good to analyze why your pages get low traffic. This will help you identify the issues and might even give you cues to solve them. But there are more benefits to analyzing the content on your website, such as:
– Better content delivery. When you analyze how well your content is performing, you find out what engages your audience. Which you can then use to your advantage.
– Finding thin content, duplicate pages and outdated posts you should update.
– Discovering opportunities for enhanced marketing, such as promotional content, internal linking and social media sharing.
– Helping you optimize your content for your target keyword, so your posts and pages rank well on search engine result pages. Tip: consider using an SEO tool!
How to measure content performance and fix low-traffic pages
Here are the steps you can take to measure content performance and fix low-traffic content:
1. Blog audit
A blog audit is a process of systematically reviewing and analyzing the performance of your website and every piece of content to improve your content strategy. It’s a great way to measure the performance of your content and improve low-traffic blogs.
As a blogger or small business owner, a blog audit means a complete review of all activities performed on your blog, as well as through other channels. These include:
– Content creation
– Engagement
– Blog layout and design
– Search engine optimization (SEO) ratings
– Monetization strategy
– Social media sharing
You can do a blog audit both manually and by using tools. For the manual method, you check each webpage and add links with comments in a spreadsheet. However, this is time-consuming and overwhelming if you have a big website. Alternatively, with content auditing tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Screaming Frog, you can collect URLs and quickly identify and fix the less-performing content.
It’s also good to work with Google Analytics and Google Search Console for blog audit. They can help with website indexing, metrics and sitemap analysis.
Once you have found out the low-traffic pages that need fixing, there are three things you can do:
1. Improve pages
2. Removes pages
3. Merge pages
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
1. Improve pages:
If a high-quality piece of content receives less organic traffic, don’t remove the page. Instead, try to improve it. This can be done in multiple ways. For example, you can:
– Include metadata (meta descriptions and title tags)
– Add relevant target keywords
– Restructure the post
– Update the content
– Add alt texts to your media files
2. Remove pages
It’s better to delete low traffic content with poor quality. But what is a poor quality page? A page that doesn’t:
– Answer questions your target audience is asking
– Give new insights into your topics
– Relate to your ideal customers or brand mission
– Offer monetization or lead generation benefits
3. Merge pages
Google’s John Mueller suggests merging low-traffic pages as a possible solution to less organic traffic. Which is a good suggestion, since it’s difficult to improve every single page. Merging pages that are a good fit will save time, combat low traffic and provide a more extensive and meaningful page.
2. Heat mapping
Heat maps are data visualization tools that analyze user behavior on a webpage. They help you understand how your pages perform by showing you which pages or sections receive more attention.
Additionally, heat maps are easy to read. At a glance, you can immediately glean important information as opposed to traditional or quantitative user analytics tools. Heatmaps allow you to easily measure content performance, as well as pinpoint the pages with less organic traffic that affect your website ranking.
3. Reliable hosting
While creating your website, you should put a fair amount of thought into choosing the hosting provider. Why? Because a mediocre hosting provider can actually be the cause of a low-traffic website. This is because poor hosting can cause:
– Slow-loading websites
– Website downtime
– Improperly displayed website
– Website crashes
All these factors hurt your user experience and increase your bounce rate. That’s why it is essential to review your web hosting service to avoid low-traffic pages.
Bluehost has many hosting packages that suit different businesses. Besides stable servers to keep your website online at all times, Bluehost’s hosting plans cater to your website’s structure, performance, speed, security and web traffic.
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4. User survey
You create content for your users. So why don’t you ask your users what they want to read? You could ask them specifically what they like about a high-performing piece and what they dislike about less-performing content. This is also referred to as conducting a user survey.
User surveys enable you to get opinions from your audience. It’s a direct way to measure content performance. And it will help you understand your audience’s behavior on your website. For example, why they avoid clicking on specific webpages. This will allow you to improve your low-traffic pages and create better content for your customers — a win-win situation.
To conduct a survey, you can use user testing tools such as UserTesting and TryMyUI. For most blogs, however, on-site surveys may be preferable. You can also use social sharing to distribute user survey forms.
5. Search engine optimization (SEO)
You should ensure that SEO is a core part of your content creation strategy. Why? Because 68% of website traffic begins with a search query. That’s a lot of visitors who can land on your page. So if your website ranks well in the search engine result pages (SERPs), more people will see your brand or business name. And more people will click on your page more often!
So, how can you improve your low-traffic blog or page using SEO practices? By:
– Having a strong internal linking structure
– Check if all your pages have metadata (including meta titles and descriptions)
– Analyze your website for keyword optimization
– Optimize your URL structure for search engine indexing
– Obtain valuable backlinks to build your website domain authority. You could even perform a competitor analysis to improve your content marketing strategy.
– Create landing pages optimized for SEO. According to Neil Patel, a well-designed landing page can improve your traffic, lead generation and sales. The more good landing pages you create, the more gateways you open to traffic.
Final thoughts: 5 effective strategies to measure content performance
It’s not a problem if you have a low-traffic page. But don’t ignore it! After all, you could learn so much more about your customers if you measure your content’s performance. Specifically, the content your users want to see. Run a blog audit, use heat mapping, improve your hosting to resolve the low-traffic issues. If you follow the discussed strategies above, you’ll be sure to increase your organic traffic. So run a blog audit, use heat mapping, and improve your hosting! What have you got to lose?
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