- Did you know that you are doing things
that are hurting your traffic?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today, I'm going to break down
10 small things on your website
that's ruining your traffic
and how to remove these today.
(upbeat music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel,
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First one, forgotten noindex tax.
If you ever have anything on your pages
in the header that just tell Google,
"Hey, don't index this page,"
and you're wondering,
"Hm, why is this page not getting any traffic?"
it could be because you have noindex tax.
And even if you didn't add them manually,
what you'll find is,
a lot of the platforms out there
from WordPress to some of the e-commerce
platforms out there,
usually you can noindex pages
with literally a click of a button
or a check mark,
and someone on your team
may have done it unintentionally
and it can be hurting your traffic.
So just double check on your top pages
that you think you should get traffic
and just make sure it aligns up
with what's really happening.
Number two, thin content.
If you write a lot of thin content,
you're just not going to rank well.
There are over a billion blogs on the web.
Google has their prime pickings of content.
They're not struggling to figure out
what content that they should end up ranking.
What they want to do is rank the good stuff,
adding ignore the crap.
And if you have thin content,
unless you're writing articles
on how to tie a tie,
which more so should be images
or animated GIFs or videos,
unless your content's around topics like that,
the chances are,
thin content isn't going to do well for you.
It doesn't mean that you need 5,000 word articles
or even 2,300 or 10,000 word articles.
More so, you just need to make sure
that you're covering
every single aspect of the article
that helps someone get what they need.
If you're not doing that,
then your content is thin.
It's not about length,
it's about value that you're providing,
and if you can do that in 500 words,
then you're good.
If you can do that in 2000 words,
then you're good.
And if it takes 5, 10,000 words,
that's fine as well,
but the key is to be super thorough.
The third one is excessive
anchor text-rich links,
especially from an internal basis.
So years and years ago, when I started SEO
and I wanted to rank for terms like
"online marketing,"
I would take a lot of my other pages
and just use the text "online marketing"
and link to that online marketing page
that I wanted to rank higher.
But if all your pages have the same anchor text
for the term "online marketing,"
or whatever term you're trying to go after,
what do you think it tells Google?
"Hey, this isn't natural."
Why would every single link
internally and even externally
have the same anchor text?
It shouldn't, it needs to be natural.
Some of your anchor texts will say,
"Click Here," "Learn More,"
they may even say other words
like "Digital Marketing,"
which are related to online marketing.
It needs to be natural
and whatever's best for the user.
Four, you don't want high resolution,
non-compressed images.
High resolution images are great,
but if they're not compressed,
you're not going to do as well
from Google Image search.
Images search can drive so much traffic,
especially for industries like travel.
So if you're not leveraging that,
you're missing out.
So make sure you have high resolution images,
high in quality,
but they're compressed
from a file size standpoint.
That will help with your rankings.
Five, irrelevant and intrusive pop-up ads.
So if you have pop-ups throughout your whole site
and it ruins the experience,
you're not going to do as well.
On my site, I have pop-ups
and you're probably like,
"Neil, but you have pop-ups."
If the pop-up provides value
and they're getting more value
than the intrusion effect that you're causing,
you're good to go.
But if it doesn't and it's just ads
and something that just ruins the experience
and doesn't provide any value,
you've got an issue
and you may want to reconsider your pop-ups.
Either remove them
or try to provide way more value.
The sixth thing is pages with errors,
whether there are 400 errors or 500 errors,
make sure you fix them.
And you can go to Ubersuggest,
and type in your URL in the site auto report,
it'll point out a lot of those 400 or 500 errors,
and you should fix those.
The seventh one is redirect loops.
A lot of times you're going to remove old pages
or consolidate content,
and you're going to use 301 redirects.
But when you do these 301 redirects,
what happens with a lot of businesses,
they'll redirect one page to another,
and then that page eventually they'll delete
and then the redirected it back to another page
or back to the original page.
So then you just have a 301 redirect loop
and you don't want that,
that's just going to hurt your traffic.
So anytime you do 301 redirects,
make sure they're not in loops,
and don't do 301 redirects to URLs
that are redirecting to another URL.
Just make them go straight to the last URL
that you're redirecting people with,
and if you have to update
all your old 301 redirects,
make sure you do that.
Eight, orphaned pages.
These are pages that don't get linked
anywhere internally.
You can have the most amazing piece of content,
but if no one knows about it, it doesn't matter,
you're not going to get any rankings from it.
So just make sure that you're interlinking
relevant pages to your amazing content.
You don't want orphaned pages.
If you do that, what you'll find is,
you spent all this time,
money creating this content,
making it so beautiful and visually appearing,
and then no one ends up seeing it.
So make sure you add the internal links.
On my team, what we do is
anytime we publish new content,
we link to it
through three old pieces of content.
And we find the most relevant one,
sometimes we can't do three,
sometimes it's only one link or two links,
sometimes it's four,
but by doing that,
we're ensuring that our new content
also ranks really well.
Number nine, links to redirected pages.
When you have internal links
and those pages are redirecting,
you want to fix them.
Change those old internal links
and link them to the right end place.
Your internal links
should not be going redirected.
So anytime you add 301 redirects
or 302 redirects,
change up the internal links.
Number 10, internal broken links,
and this is the last one.
Look, as your site gets older,
your business gets more established,
you're going to have broken links.
It's natural, everyone does,
just make sure you clean them out once a quarter,
that's what we do.
You can use tools like Ubersuggest,
the site auto report will break down
the broken internal links and just fix them.
If you need help with any of these tactics
to grow your traffic,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital,
or if you enjoyed the video, like it, share it.
If you have any questions,
leave a comment below, I'm here to help.