Help! 6 Reasons for Decreasing Blog Traffic and How to Fix It

As bloggers, all we dream of is to have millions of visitors coming to our website every single month. To make it happen, we work very hard for years, day and night, often forgetting to have a meal (true story). Studying different writing techniques, SEO, marketing and even coding – is what we, as bloggers, do. Because we understand that our success, the ability to make money and work from anywhere in the world, something that we all want, fully DEPENDS on that traffic.

At a certain point, we finally start seeing traction. Suddenly, some of our blog posts are being pushed up in the search results and we finally feel like we’ve made it. It is that “momentum” that all successful people talk about. Now we have it, too.

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All seems to be going great.. until one day.. we begin to see those traffic numbers fall again. BUT HOW? WHY? HOW COULD THIS BE? WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG?

Don’t worry, my friend. Decreasing blog traffic is nothing rare. It happens to everyone. Nothing can grow eternally. The only difference between you, someone that has just started to see success and someone that is far ahead of you, is that your smaller numbers feel more significant. Someone with a million monthly visitors won’t even notice those missing ten thousand souls.

In any case, if you want to know WHY you may be missing that traffic, I will help you find out. I want to share with you the 6 reasons for decreasing blog traffic and what you can do about it. Enjoy!

1. Poor content

In some of my other blog posts, I talk a lot about the fact that if you want to succeed as a blogger, you need to write quality, EPIC content!

Now, if your blog has already had some traction and the traffic has grown, then probably a lot of your content is already in fact good. However, that does not mean that the quality has not declined over time.

Just like with anything else in the world, we become used to things and often even bored with them. It’s no different with blogging. No matter how much we love it, if we keep writing about the same things over and over, especially if your niche is very narrow, you will eventually get bored, tired and even exhausted.

As an experiment, try comparing some of your newer blog posts to those that you wrote when you were really motivated. Look at the difference and ask yourself, are the newer ones any good? If the answer is.. “uuuuuuhm, it’s ok”, then that might be your problem.

Epic content is key to becoming a successful blogger!

If you see that your content is poor, take some time off to relax. It helps. Alternatively, stop writing so often. Instead of writing one mediocre article a week, write one good, well-research article every three weeks. Trust me, in the blogging world, quality ALWAYS beats quantity. Your attitude should not be – I’ll throw $#*! against the wall and hope that something sticks.

And by the way, poor content is exactly what happened to be me when I burnt out. I was feeling exhausted of writing every single week, but I wouldn’t allow myself to stop. The result? VERY POOR blog posts. Fortunately, taking a break helped a lot.

2. Popups and mobile optimization

By now, you have probably seen a few pop-ups on my blog. Yes, I know, they are annoying, but statistically, they work. Besides, it’s really easy to close them by clicking anywhere on the screen. So they shouldn’t be too bad.

But you know which pop-ups ARE bad? Those that cover the WHOLE DAMN screen!!! You can’t even click anywhere but the little “X” (if it’s big enough to find). The only pop-ups that I have seen that are even worse are those that cover the whole screen, but the little “X” does not appear until like 5 seconds later. 😑

So why am I saying this? Who cares if they annoy people? Well, Google has kinda noticed that they annoy people as well. In other words, full-screen pop-ups make a bad user experience, especially for mobile phone users. As a result, Google has announced that all websites using full-screen pop-ups for mobile phone users will be hurt and ranked down.

Moreover, Google has also announced that starting July 1, 2019, it will no longer focus on the desktop version of your blog when indexing it. Instead, it will go “mobile-first”. This means that the mobile phone version is more important when making the decision of how user-friendly your blog is… although the desktop version still very much matters.

Now that you know, have a look at what kind of pop-ups you are using for the mobile version of your blog. Additionally, take your phone and see for yourself what it is like to browse your blog. If the experience is not good because of too many things on the screen, you might want to have something redesigned.

3. Bad backlinks

The third reason why you may have decreasing blog traffic is bad backlinks.

When I first started out, I was told that backlinks are goooooooood, very gooooood, the more, the better. You know what I did? I went to Fiverr and paid some dude $5 to have thousands of links put on random websites that would point back to my blog. I thought it was a great idea.

Then, while hesitantly waiting for my blog to become super-duper successful, I decided to read some of the reviews for the service that I just paid for. I began to feel sweaty.

I found out that if you are trying to manipulate the search engines (which is exactly what I was doing) by placing a bunch of backlinks on random sites, the search engines will very easily pick that up and penalize you for it by ranking you down low.

And if Google is having a “very bad day”, it can even de-index your blog completely from its search engine. This means that you will no longer be listed amongst the search engine results, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Fortunately, the websites that the guy had my blog’s link placed on were also not indexed (lol), which means that Google did not even see what he did!!! Well-spent 5 bucks. 💪

The reason why I am saying this to you is that even though you may not have used the same backlink service that I did for your blog, some hater of yours could have done it towards you. It probably won’t hurt you that much, but it still sucks, especially if your blog is still relatively “young”.

4. Better and newer than you

The most common reason why you may be experiencing decreasing blog traffic is competition.

I can assume that you are probably reading this post because your blog isn’t yet that big and authoritative, meaning that your traffic is still relatively low. Yet, as stated previously, you saw traction and you loved it. Also, most-probably, you had 3 to 5 blog posts that were doing good, which was the reason why your numbers grew initially.

Now let’s imagine that for whatever reason a competitor came along and pushed you down the search engine results. Now, all of a sudden, your article isn’t ranking as number 1 anymore, but instead, as number 2. Being second in the search engine results is still good, but it changes the situation dramatically. I have experienced this with my blog over and over. Sad, but true.

It’s also important to mention that the competitor does not always have to have a bigger and better blog than you to get ahead of you in the results. Their blog post may simply be newer and more informative than yours, while yours is outdated. Depending on what niche you are in, Google may prefer fresh material.

If your blog post is, in fact, outdated, you may want to update it and re-index it. That often helps to get your ranking back.

5. Google penalty

Earlier I mentioned that there is such a thing as “Google penalty”.

A penalty is what happens to your blog when Google has found something that you did that was against its rules. One such example is trying to manipulate the system by creating false backlinks to your blog in the hopes of making it more authoritative. Google then notices that and gives your blog a penalty.

A Google penalty won’t kill your blog, but it sure will hurt it. To get back on track, you will probably need to take some actions to improve your relationship with the search engine and then simply wait.

To check if your blog was penalized, you can try this website or any other similar one by searching for “Google penalty checker”.

6. Google algorithm change

The last but not least reason why you may be experiencing decreasing blog traffic is because of Google’s algorithm change.

The reason why I even decided to write this blog post is that recently I started to see a dip in organic blog traffic for no apparent reason. I also thought to myself, how could it be?

I began to research. Finally, I came across the “Google Algorithm Update Impact Analysis Tool – Panguin“. (No, it’s not a sponsored post.)

What the tool does is show your blog’s traffic metrics and show when Google did what changes to the algorithm. You can then compare for yourself whether those changes hit you or not.

And by the way, as Search Engine Land puts it, “Google made over 3,200 changes last year alone, but core search algorithm changes happen only several times per year, with big core updates happening around once a quarter.” So a LOT of changes.

As I suspected, the dip started right when the last major core update was released.

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You may be thinking to yourself, well Victor, what did you do wrong? The funny part is that I don’t know.

This is what Google officially stated:

“We confirm broad core updates because they typically produce some widely notable effects. Some sites may note drops or gains during them. We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things. Moreover, there might not be anything to fix at all.” – Google

Of course, I am not too happy about this change, but since it’s outside of my control, I choose to let it go.

So as you can see, many things can go wrong even in blogging and cause decreasing blog traffic. But the bottom line is that whatever happens, don’t look back. Let it pass through you and continue working hard to make your dreams a reality. All of your work will be rewarded as long as you keep moving forward and never give up.. I know, cheesy, but still. 🙂

Thank you for stopping by and good luck!

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