Recently I talked to a job board owner who was worried that his job board isnt growing. The site was in the work at home niche and was getting around 14k monthly uniques along with 70k monthly page views. As we checked the google stats traffic was steady this year but down about 5% from the beginning of the year to now.
He said he’d been doing nothing different. The site has a blog and he was cranking out content that he pays for. So as I poked around the site I came up with some reasons why its not growing.
1. Design. His homepage was text heavy with lots of ads on it. It looked kind of spammy. I told him to freshen up the look and dont put so many ads on the pages.
2. No mobile. The site was not mobile friendly. Since mobile traffic is now at least 20% on most sites that is lost opportunity to create a good visitor experience. Plus google is now penalizing sites for not being mobile friendly. This could be another reason why traffic is flat.
3. Average content. He is paying 10 bucks an article to people in the Phillipines to write articles. But I have a feeling the content is just average and doesnt speak well enough to the niche he serves. better to pay more and write longer “deep dive” articles that offer real value. And for that matter start using more video. Talk about the industry news or interview people who work in your niche. Consider making an ebook.
4. Revenue. He wants more but he wasn’t utilizing backfill. Based on his traffic he could be pulling in as much as $500 a month from Indeed.com if he backfills.
5. Google’s algorithm. It changes so much now that you cant rely on SEO traffic anymore. I have no clue what its doing these days so your guess is as good as mine. Best to try and lessen your reliance on search engine traffic. You have no idea how long it will last.
