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Shrinking traffic volume - what to do?

Scooter24

9:31 am on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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I have a large site about travel and photos to which I keep adding fresh content on a regular basis. Over the past years the traffic has been steadily getting less. To give you an idea, years ago (when the site was smaller than now) my daily log files were over 5MB in size. Now it's down to 2.5MB.

The site is written in HTML5 and there are no coding bugs. The site uses no flash, almost no Java.

It's possible that a good part of the problem comes from changes Google made to their search engine. Perhaps Google is penalising me for some reason - just guessing. By now my pages rank much higher in Bing than in Google.

I keep receiving emails from SEOs on a more or less regular basis, offering to optimise my site. These come from people with an American sounding name, but the IP address is from India.

By the way, I'm not active in Facebook or other social media. I'm active in forums and discussion boards but not in social media.

What can I do? Ask an SEO to do something about the website, purchase adwords on Google etc.?

keyplyr

10:15 am on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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I'm not active in Facebook or other social media

You may wish to rethink why you aren't active in SM.

Social Media is a huge source of traffic and you can get it for free but it takes effort. It's possible to bring hundreds/thousands of visitors to your site from SM.

Peter_S

10:53 am on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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A loss of traffic doesn't necessarily mean your site is penalized.

It can simply be because more other sites are covering the same niche as you.

Google refines its algorithms all the time.

Your new content might not be as much searched as your content of last year,

etc...

tangor

11:11 am on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Nothing stays the same. These days most are seeing diminished returns on effort. Even evergreen sites are feeling it. Nothing personal ,just the web getting larger by leaps and bounds and the next bright shiny object bubbles up.

Also check your traffic to see how much is desktop and how much of the rest is "other". Mobile is beginning to make real changes in the way users interact with the web.

NickMNS

12:49 pm on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Is your site mobile friendly?

Scooter24

1:25 pm on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Let's say that on my smartphone it's easy to navigate. The user interface is relatively simple with few, big control elements.

piatkow

2:47 pm on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Nothing beats testing on an actual phone.

According to the emulator that I was using my site was "friendly" years ago but then I upgraded to a smartphone and found that the emulator was a heap of ****! Can't remember which it was now, but I use the phone as well as the laptop to check the site after every update.

Back on topic, I agree that increased competition is the most likely reason. Using social media is a skill and click throughs from a tweet, for example, are seldom proportional to the number of views. Also the stuff that you think is important to your clients isn't necessarily the stuff that grabs them.

NickMNS

4:43 pm on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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@scooter24

Let's say that on my smartphone it's easy to navigate

With the growth in mobile traffic, if had to invest it would be making the site mobile friendly, and not just the bare minimum in terms of usability but really usable on a mobile device.

@piatkow

According to the emulator that I was using my site was "friendly" years ago

Emulator have improved a lot in the past years. That not to say that they are perfect but they provide a pretty good indication of things should look. It is a good idea to test on an actual phone as final check.

Scooter24

5:58 pm on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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It can simply be because more other sites are covering the same niche as you.

Google refines its algorithms all the time.

Your new content might not be as much searched as your content of last year,

Actually for certain search terms my site has much better content than other sites which rank higher in Google, i.e. my site is more spot on, more in depth. Usually these sites belong to big brands, which would indicate that Google prefers large brands.

keyplyr

8:18 pm on May 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Scooter24 - don't know what "emulator" you "were using years ago" but this is Google's tool to test your site: [testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com...]

More searches are performed on Mobile than Desktop. That's the single most important traffic factor today.

Scooter24

7:11 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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OK, my site is getting 53 points out of 100 in mobile friendliness, so I guess I have to do something here.

It says among others that I didn't set the viewport (no clue what that's supposed to be).

I searched a bit and put this into the meta tags: <meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0">

Now the viewport issue is solved, my site has 64 points out of 100 in mobile friendliness, but that is still far away from the 90+ I'mm supposed to have.

The Google report shows a number of other issues, for instance "Size content to viewport". How do I fix these, is there some tutorial?

NickMNS

7:16 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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How was you site built? Are you using something like Wordpress?

Scooter24

7:23 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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No wordpress. I wrote the HTML myself. The pages are generated by a set of PHP scripts.

NickMNS

7:38 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Then I would recommend using a framework like Bootstrap. Bootstrap 4 is about to be released. It is what was used to create WW, maybe not best example but the point being that it is fast and easy to use.

You can check it out here:
[v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com...]

keyplyr

9:39 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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It is what was used to create WW, maybe not best example...

Hey!

NickMNS

9:45 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Sorry, I should have be more precise, esthetically not the best example. In all fairness, this just straight out of the box bootstrap.

keyplyr

9:49 pm on May 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

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Just kidding. There's just so much you can to with a forum set-up and still keep it lean & mean.

tangor

8:38 am on May 16, 2017 (gmt 0)

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And it can be made even leaner and meaner by going high contrast on your personal system and turning off all the bells and whistles. :)

Sometimes shrinking traffic comes from layouts, non-responsive, image bloat, js bloat ....

But the biggest reason is there are just that MANY MORE sites every day competing for the same 10 spots and that's the part you fight, day after day. If brands start to compete the chore becomes that much more difficult.