All website’s generally have the same ambition when they are first created: to generate consistantly high levels of traffic as quickly as possible. For the majority, this would have people investing in SEO to gain organic health, whilst there are some that will look to gain traffic through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. But, what if you think you have been doing everything right and after, say, 6 months, your website is still hardly generating any traffic? Here are potential reasons as to why your website or blog is not growing.

#1 You’re Not Promoting It

Search engine optimisation is a very long process. For example, for one of my content mill websites, I only started to see traffic pick up at around 10 months later! However, every website equally needs to be promoted, be it in communities, comments to other websites (not spam!) and social media platforms. Increasing your brand awareness is crucial in the early stages of your website/blog, which can be done via promotion.

#2 Your Website Lacks a Niche

You may feel you are producing the best content out there. However, if the content you are producing is hitting different categories online, then it is simply going to confuse Google and make the search engine struggle to understand what target market and category your website is hitting overall. The SEO of articles depend on the SEO of the website. If the website’s category and target market/sector cannot be determined by Google because you have content covering several different categories, then the SEO of your high quality content will suffer consequently.

#3 Your Articles are Time Based

There is a big differentiator online between websites that not many bloggers pick up on. You can categorise any article into one of two categories:

1. Time based articles. These are articles that contain content which is related to what is happening in the world right now. Therefore, if the article was published in the past or future, it would not be as useful to web users reading it since the article applies to now. Examples of time based articles including news articles and pretty much anything relating to something happening in the present. The problem with time based articles is that the traffic they generate in the long term rapidly diminishes.
2. Non-time based articles. As you have probably guessed by now, these are articles that are independent of time. This means no matter what time these articles were published, they are going to still be useful to the web user +/- 5-10 years. I tend to find the most successful websites are those with non-time based articles, since the future looks strong for them.

An example of this is my website about poetry analysis – no matter when people are searching for poetry analysis, be it 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s or beyond that, people will find the articles just as useful as the day the poetry analysis was published.

From this, what can you categorise your articles into? If they are time based articles, you need to make sure you are publishing enough content to stay up to date with present news. If your website is not growing with non-time based articles, then something is seriously wrong with your website.