The answer is yes and no. Yes, you can get more traffic to your website by publishing more articles. But, the fact is that the more content you publish, the smaller the impact each article has. Once your website gets to where it ranks #1 on search engines, there is no more room for it to grow.
How to get more traffic to your website is the most common question people have with their online presence. When you Google, “How to get more traffic to my website”, you will find hundreds of results that will recommend you publish more content. It’s by far the number one answer.
But here are the facts…
- Each new article you publish on your website has an exponential decay on your traffic increase (see graph above). That is, if your website has only one page, and you add a second page, you might expect to increase your traffic from Google by 50%. However, adding a third page increases your potential by only 25%. Adding a fourth page is just another 12.5%. If you already have 100 pages, then adding one more is just a 0.1% chance of increase.
- There is always a fixed number of people in the world interested in your niche. It’s not possible to manufacture more interested people by publishing more articles. Even though writing more articles in your niche will get you more visibility on Google, all you’re doing is showing more choices to the same number of people.
- If your website already ranks #1 on Google for much of your primary keywords, then adding more articles will have no impact, or negligible at best.
What About Broadening Your Niche?
The big mistake that most website owners and publishers do is broaden their niche in hopes of serving a larger audience. However, this also has the effect of “watering down” your demographic.
What we mean is that when you start publishing content in other niches related to yours, your website becomes less focused. While your website may appear more often in Google searches, to a wider audience, that audience will become less interested.
- The most “passionate engagement” is between a visitor with a high degree of interest in a niche, and a website that is purely focused on that niche. This is where a visitor reads every article on that website, then subscribes to the mailing list, and then clicks over to the Facebook Page and joins it. They may call the website owner and purchase a service or product.
- But if that website also publishes lots of content on related niches, that visitor may not find everything they are looking for. They may lose patience in having to navigate through content they don’t want. Worse, they may go back to Google Search and click on other results.
- Moreover, having lots of articles in related niches will cause advertising networks like AdSense, Mediavine, Ezoic, etc., to display ads that are not fully relevant to the visitor.
- In addition, publishing lots of content in related niches will cause Google Search to become confused as to what your primary niche is, and may end up reclassifying your website into the wrong niche, causing you to lose traffic.
So How Do You Get More Traffic At This Point?
You have to start building traffic streams from other than Google. Here are examples of other traffic streams…
- Increase your referrals from other websites. This can be websites in your niche, particularly forums like Reddit, Quora, Discord. It can also be online business directories and professional organizations. Spreading your name recognition through other websites helps other interested persons remember who you are, rather than forgetting about you.
- Rely on your mailing list. Mailing lists are better than social media because people who opted to join have already expressed their interest in you. You can talk to them on a more personal level, and offer them content, services, and products on a channel that you own.
- Collaborate with podcasters and videographers. Podcasting is exploding with demand due to more people working from home with headphones on, while video consumers are spending more time watching YouTube videos on their smart televisions rather than Netflix or Hulu.
- Join forces with your competitors. Instead of fighting your niche competitors for Google rankings, join them! Make arrangements to guest blog on each other’s websites. Give each other spaces in your respective newsletters. You don’t have to create reciprocal links; just promote each other by name and logo.
- Local businesses need local visibility. Shops, restaurants, service providers, all need to allocate a small budget towards marketing each month. This can be a print ad in a local publication. It can be sending an employee to 20 or 30 other businesses in town and leaving a stack of business cards or brochures on a counter. It can be buying a coupon from a print mailer company. The goal is to keep your brand name fresh in the minds of local residents, not necessarily drive immediate sales.
