Stagnant Traffic

[tbreak.ae]

The traffic on my site (http://www.tbreak.com) has been stagnant over the last few months. We're a news posting site and posting a good 4-8 posts per day and using Yoast plugin to make sure they are optimized, but traffic has not grown at all.

What could be the reason for that?

[UmarKhan]

Dear Abbas,

Thanks for posting your question.

Your blog has good authority and the design is quite simple. It's good to know that you're using Yoast for handling all the on-page things.

Problems:
Abbas you really don't need to post 4-8 posts every day for the sake of traffic. Quantity of posts will never bring you desired traffic unless you achieve some significance. Another thing that I notice is the low word-count and absence of interactive content (videos, images b/w the posts, etc) in majority of your blogs.  I think you might have a high bounce rate also.

Solution:

1. Do aggressive keyword research before writing.
2. Find out the crawling issues that search console highlighting
3. Post in-depth and interactive content.
4. Start content marketing activities.
5. Promote your blog to all the related communities.
6. Cite external high authority links in your content (you can put nofollow if you're conscious)
7. Allow Guest contributors and add a separate page for that. (This thing instantly grab the attention of fellow bloggers)
8. Conduct experts round-up posts and interviews.

I am pretty sure that, the above things will surely help you out.

Good luck!

Umar

[tbreak.ae]

Thanks for ll the suggestions Umar-

The reason behind the high news count is that we're a tech news reporting website so need to have that many posts per day. Most are news posts so they tend to be between 150-300 words in counts but we do publish 3-5 features per week which are more like 700 words or do.

I've looked at the crawl and the biggest issue we have are older 404 dead links that happened when we switched our CMS to Wordpress and lost the content.

[UmarKhan]

Abbas, if you also publish 3-5 features post, I'd love to know the bounce rate, traffic stats and social count of them. If they are low, it means you need to seriously work on the promotion strategy.

For handling those 404s, it's better to redirect them on relevant pages. Check out these resources for handling redirection:

https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
https://moz.com/community/q/best-way-to-handle-404-errors

Apart from that, do consider my above suggestions.

Umar

[tbreak.ae]

Bounce rates are high- usually around 90%. For Social, each post is auto tweeted and posted on our Facebook page with an image and then repeated the next day.

[_nitman]

Well, 90% is way too high. As Umar mentioned here, you really need to make a content strategy first. Do a full fledge keyword & trends research before investing any time on writing the article.

[MoosaHemani]

Abbas I love your site and links that are pointing to your site are decent (atleast most of them) there are quite a few links that contain a red flag but you can always remove or update a disavow file in Google to tell Google that you are not looking for a juice from certain websites.

If the traffic is stagnant from the last few months my advice is to see what is missing by auditing your few blogs posts from the past few months and compare it with old post that help you increase traffic. Also try and look in to different traffic channels and see what traffic is actually causing the problem. Is it the organic traffic, social media or others!

If the traffic is stale from organic channel, my advice is to look in to your keyword research and write blogs by targeting keywords accordingly. On blogs, it’s important to target quite a few long tail keywords as this will give you a small bump but it’s easier to rank as compare to head tail keywords.

Another important thing is internal linking, make sure you are properly internal linking blogs each other. This will not only decrease your bounce rate but it will also help you get good rankings in search engines.

As far as the bounce rate is concern, usually on blogs the bounce rate are high but you can use multiple techniques to reduce it. Try to keep good call to actions at the middle or the end of the blogs posts that help people continue their journey on the blog.

I may be wrong here but from what I see most of your blogposts are reviews, I would advise you to create multiple types of content that will engage users with the content. BuzzFeed Content is the great example here.

Also, make a blog calendar and decide how many blog posts you are going to publish on the website and what time they will go live. With proper social media promotional plan! Search Engine Journal update multiple blog posts in a day so tracking their strategy would be a good idea here.

Try > Learn > Repeat!  As you are a blog, it’s important to try different ideas, learn from them and implement the learning again.

There must be more areas you should consider but above is a general idea that I can quality thinks of!

Hope this helps!

[tbreak.ae]

Thanks Moosa-

Appreciate all the inputs. Any one if you guys available as a freelancer for some guidance on how I should formulate my content strategy moving forward?