SEO Mistakes: Why 91% of Content Gets No Organic Traffic
Here at Ahrefs we studied nearly a billion
pages of content and found that 91% of these pages get no organic traffic from Google. And to top that off, 4.5% of these pages get less
than 10 visits from search each month. So that means that over 95% of pages are struggling
to get any meaningful search traffic that can really impact their business. So what can you do to get more organic traffic
and be in the top 5% of all pages across the entire internet? You're about to find out in this video. Stay tuned. [music] What's up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that
helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. For this SEO tutorial, I want to focus on
a couple key mistakes that people make when creating content and I want to show you what you should do instead to increase organic traffic to your pages.
Some of these methods are faster than others,
but nonetheless, all of these tactics and techniques are important things to do to have
a successful SEO strategy. Let's get to it. The first mistake is that most "trafficless"
pages don't have any (or many) quality backlinks. Now, I hate to be clanging the same gong as
everyone else, but I know that there are some link building skeptics out there.
The thing is that quality backlinks do help you rank
higher. And our research confirms this data along
with many other credible research studies. We found that 55.24% of pages have zero referring
domains pointing at them. And 29.79% of pages have links from less than
three websites. To paint an even clearer picture, we looked
at how the number of referring domains to a page correlates with its estimated organic
search traffic. And there's a linear correlation here. The more backlinks a page has, the more search
traffic it gets from Google. And the same goes with the number of keywords
a page ranks for. Now rather than going deep into every link
building tactic, I'll leave links to other videos that'll help you build links.
But I will tell you the link building strategies
that you can focus on specifically to build links to existing content that may not be
ranking because you don't have enough links. The first one is to steal links from the
Top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword. Just go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool
and type in your target keyword. Next, I highly recommend clicking the "Update"
button to refresh the Top 10 SERP and pull the most recent and reliable data. After the refresh is done, scroll down to
the SERP overview where you can see the top ranking pages as well as the number of backlinks
pointing at each page. Next, click on the backlinks number to open
the page's corresponding backlinks report.
From here, look through the linking pages,
analyze the context of the link, and then reach out and try to get a backlink to your
own page. And it's important to note that you should
do this for all of the top ranking pages that are relevant to your page to increase your
chances of gaining a top ranking position. The second tactic is guest blogging.
And this is a great way to supplement links
to pages that need the extra boost. Since you're creating the content, to a certain
extent, you can control the linking URL, its placement, and the context of the link. So to find guest-posting opportunities, you can
go to Google and type, intitle:your topic and then "guest post by" as a phrase match. And as you can see, there are a lot of very
relevant places that you can pitch your guest content to. But since you don't know anything about these
websites from an SEO standpoint, I highly recommend installing Ahrefs SEO toolbar, which
will give you an inline view of both page level and domain level metrics.
Again, we have a full video on finding guest
posting sites, which I'll link up. Now, correlation doesn't necessarily imply
causation. There are plenty of pages that get traffic
without any links as you can see in this graph. This is normally for one of three reasons. #1. Some of these websites have PBN links which
they block from being discovered by web crawlers like ours. #2. They're targeting a super-low competition
topic that likely has very little search demand. And #3. They've already built a ton of quality links
to other pages across their website, where they can use internal links to pass Pagerank
to the new pages that appear to have little to no backlinks from external websites.
Since these cases are so variable, let's not
dig any deeper into these and move on to the second SEO mistake. Which is that trafficless pages are not targeting
a topic with enough search traffic potential. We took all pages from our Content Explorer
database that get no traffic from organic search and divided them into four buckets
based on the number of linking domains to each page. And you'll see that around 30,000 pages have
backlinks from over 200 referring domains, yet they get no traffic whatsoever. There are two common types of pages that we
found that fall into this bucket. So type #1 are pages that went a little bit crazy
with shady link building tactics, which does more harm than good. And #2 were news sites. Take this one for example. You'll see that they have around 250 referring
domains and get 0 organic search visitors per month. And if you look at the referring domains report,
they have some high-quality followed links from authoritative sites.
The thing is that if no one's searching for
what you're writing about, then you won't get any traffic from Google. So there are two things that you need to do. So first, you need to find out whether you have
any of these high-PR pages that aren't getting as much traffic as they could be. And you can do that by entering in your domain
or a subfolder URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer.
So I'll look up Ahrefs blog URL. Next, I'll go to the Best by links report. And right away, you can see that a bunch of
our most linked-to pages are data studies. Now, the thing with data studies is
that while we have a ton of links, they aren't getting nearly as much search traffic as they
could be. Take this one on on-page SEO as an example. You'll see that it has over 300 referring
domains, but if you look at the organic keywords report, you'll see that it ranks in position
40 for our target keyword.
And this likely comes down to a search intent
issue. Looking at the top ranking pages in Google
for the phrase, "on page SEO," you'll see that all of the top ranking pages are guides. So no top ranking data studies at all. If you have a similar case like this, then
the best thing you can do is try and update the content to match the searcher's intent
the best, while still targeting a keyword. Luckily for us, we made a small mistake so
no need for changes to the URL structure or adding messy redirects. In fact, we changed our on-page SEO data study
to a guide just a little while ago, and look how quickly we hit the Top 10 for our target
keyword.
4 days! Now, if you look at this data study on "how
many keywords can a web page rank for" which has around 250 referring domains, you're left
with a little bit of a tricky situation. Since we can't really turn this content into
a keyword-targeted post that has search volume, the best course of action here would be to
add internal links to other pages that we want to rank. And by doing this, you're effectively passing link equity to other relevant pages and you'll reap the rewards that way. But best of all, you can link to landing or
product pages that have commercial value and usually don't get linked to as easily or as
frequently. And you can see that we've done that here. Now the data that I've shown you in this video
can be simplified down to build links and do your keyword research. But the key takeaway here is to first look
at your existing content that isn't getting organic traffic. Then assess what the cause might be and take
the appropriate actions to start generating more traffic. And if a page isn't serving any purpose at
all and doesn't have any links or traffic from any source, then you might want to consider
removing it from your site.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, then make
sure to like, share, and subscribe. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave
a comment and I'd be happy to help. So keep grinding away, and I'll see you in
the next tutorial..
