How can I increase traffic on my 15+ years old website?

[Thaparian]

Hello,

I have a website about quotations. I started it in 2006. Peak traffic was in 2011 and it has been losing traffic ever since. Unless I do something drastic, I think I'll have to shut it down in a year or two.

The problem is I don't know what exactly I need to do in order to improve traffic.

I've tried link building, but it seems to have no impact at all. Traffic keeps dropping year after year. I've tried adding more content, but that didn't make a big difference. Made the site faster, no impact.

Is my site's content just not good enough to rank anymore?

The recent Google update decreased the traffic further.

Site URL is coolnsmart dot com.

Can you please tell me what I can do to improve rankings? It's my first ever website and I don't want this site to die out...please help.

[Brett_Tabke]

>Traffic keeps dropping year after year.

The only cure is content marketing. Small websites have all had traffic taken by Google over the last two decades. The flatout only solution is to build a traffic source that doesn't focus on Google - only on the user. Content marketing is the only strategy I've seen that can serve small businesses in the long run. It is tough, and a slog, but it works. Read any books by Joe Pulizzi ...

[Thaparian]

Should I work on the content or link building?

[instand1]

An old website is valuable. If the pages did a good job till 2011, most likely the content on the pages is too short. Add good content on each page. As Brett_Tabke wrote: Focus only on the user. If the content is related to the keyword on the page, more related content and images should help. Link building is much more work, will take much longer to get results.

Improving pagespeed and good responsiveness on mobile devices is very helpful. For example: Changing the theme in Wordpress to a faster theme does help.

[engine]

Don't rely 100% on Google, and as Brett said, content marketing, and to a wider audience. For quite a few years now site marketing is coming full circle, and back to traditional methods, along with social media.

From a search engine point of view, one thing you could try is adding user generated content: The reason to do that is if the discussion in on topic, it'll help with the content. However, it'll need to be monitored because there's always going to be someone out there wanting to take advantage.

[waynne]

I'm in a similar situation myself. Don't just look at Google and bemoan the good old day, and try to be proactive. I've adjusted my approach accordingly but the days of building a site an sitting back to reap the traffic rewards is long gone. It takes continual work and revision.

If you search for your terms what is coming up? Analyse your competitors and why Google are recommending them over your content.

An old site could have a detailed long page about widgets, green widgets red widgets and which batteries work best in widgets. These pages picked up authority and were great places to go thoroughly covering the topic.

Things change. More pages are published every day. Tools tell webmasters which keywords are most profitable and they will produce pages based on very niche keywords and often will use content plagiarised from the original article which had time and effort invested in it by the webmaster.

If a tool suggested that "green widgets vs red widgets" is a niche keyword, within 30 days there will 100's of new pages competing for that term.

So now we see a page for Green widgets, another page for batteries for widgets, another for 10 things to do with a red widget.

Links and authority are diminishing, and google are matching pages with user intent (according to their AI models), so if a page exactly matches a query it will be recommended by Google, regardless of whether the content has been plagiarised or AI generated from an existing source.

Think also where search is going. One day we are going to ask a digital assistant a question and the answer will just be provided, no links or results pages, just an AI Bot spewing out the content it has stored over the years.

Evolve or be irrelevant is the mantra here. I wish Google and other search engines would detect these super focussed keyword targeting sites and demote them giving the original thinkers and content writers a chance. I also wish weight would be given to a sites authority existing links and a measure of quality and reputation applied rather than just the assumption that new sites with Schema data and listicles content are good quality.

I'm now seeing scraped versions of MY CONTENT that was reworded by AI also being scraped and reworded in ever tighter niches and more and more focussed keywords.

[Dimitri]

Peace first, then ...

The problem is your site has no real content to be indexed. Since it's a collection of quotes, you only have one or two sentences.

So, search engines might ignore most of your pages, and if they do index some of them, it happens that someone searching for such or such quote, will get the whole sentence visible straight in the SERP, without even having to visit your page to get it.

Also, there are millions of sites offering the same kind of content.

You can try to enhance the content, for example, by adding information about the author of a quote, the story behind such or such quote, why it was pronounced, or written , the context , etc... you should also post yourself comments, to try to stimulate others to comment, ... however, to be helpful , you should host your own comment system, so that the text of these comments be taken in consideration by SE.
But still it will be what lot of sites are already doing. So I think this niche is too crowded and certainly with automated processes, producing too many pages to be able to compete with.

If it's not yet the case, you can try social networks too. With a twitter and facebook account. Posting one quote a day, may be to get attention, and have people comment, but it doesn't mean it will bring traffic to your site. But again, lot of people are doing this already.

[RedBar]

I have a website about quotations.

IMHO your site and countless other site subjects all have the same reduction in traffic because of lack of interest simply because Joe Public knows that if they ever need to know the answer to something they can easily find out. Off the top of my head I would say that from '93 until '08-'10, in general people were absorbing and learning lots of things they never knew or were always interested in but never had the "free" information at their finger tips whenever they wanted it.

How many people resort to asking on FB these days instead of searching for themselves? Loads, Joe has transitioned intoo a very lazy person, let someone else do my research for me! And, of course I bet you've been scraped and reproduced possibly thousands of times and over the years Google has completely lost track of what was the original.

Can you increase traffic, maybe but you'll have to think outside of the box, think very smart and be prepared to do a lot of hard work to be completely different to all the look-a-like sites.

[jpalmer]

Feel for you Thaparian, same with my main site (coming up on its 25th birthday next month.)

Site content scrapped and rewritten by AI, rehashed for/on Wikipedia etc. Slow spiral down of organic SEO with newer web site pages targeting tighter niches.

As Brett and others have mentioned, best bet for you is to increase the individual page content. It looks like you could split them into smaller page "chunks", instead of 150 + on one long scroll. e.g. 10 best quotes about xxx, other quotes by the same author, similar subject/industry/vertical quotes by other authors. Cross/link to bio entries.

For my part, having done all of the above at some point, the only thing NOT mentioned so far, is what I'm currently doing with mine.

A complete redesign on the site. If your site is 15+ years old, and you haven't refreshed the look or feel, even if its a WP theme/template, then chances are you're also losing SEO traffic on that basis.

Get a fresh template, and also do some separate blog posts. I have a separate freebie WP blog, and have noticed that some of my posts appear above my site in the SERPs. I'm OK with that, anyone goes to the post, they get the content or links to my primary site anyway.

I also notice that you don't have much in the way of imagery. People still love eye candy, even more so with mobile devices, Instagram and Pinterest ruling SM over the last 10 years.

Sparkle up the pages at little, maybe embed a YT video about an author or subject niche on the primary subject/vertical index page, see if that improves the session times and bounce rate. That will be a positive signal to Google,

Hope this helps, best of luck!

[tangor]

Tough niche! The data available is fixed (past quotes, present quotes) and without value added content the other sites doing the same thing are competing for the same audience, and by attrition your traffic will fall.

I have a 25+ year old site based on a single author that has suffered the same fate, is constantly ripped, is included in Wikipedia, often appears in the "answer boxes" and traffic has plunged. The only way to keep it going is to constantly create new content (and I mean NEW not rehash or duplicative). Adding images works great ... until the rest of the web steals them. (sigh)

Find a unique way to make your topic "topical in the modern world". You can improve things, but the old days will never return. Too much competition and bad actors out there.

[Bluejeans]

I would go all in on social media. Select a "quote of the day" (maybe related to current events?), put it with an eye-catching background, and promote the hell out of it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. I would also come up with categories that solve problems: quotes for the recently widowed, condolence quotes, quotes to meditate on, quotes to cheer you up, quotes to calm you down. Make sure the quotes are visually interesting and easily shareable.

[Lexur]

Come on, Thaparian, with all these good ideas you've been given (for free), either you fix the site now... or I'll make one just like it! :-D

[not2easy]

One last idea - Google recently published ideas for AdSense users - "How to grow your website traffic" - so even if you don't use AdSense you might pick up ideas here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Thaparian]

thanks everyone for the detailed suggestions...since no one suggested to build links (I'm surprised)...I will stop doing that, and spend my time on making the website better.

Will change design of the website...not sure about social media..i post updates but I get very little engagement...maybe what I post should be related to what's in the news...need to study other popular accounts.

@Lexur +
I will work on it...I wouldn't suggest this niche...since it involves duplicate content..and a lot of new quote sites are popping up.

[tangor]

...and a lot of new quote sites are popping up.

Ya ... this is what is known as low hanging fruit that only needs a ripper and template to make a new site that goes for "volume" rather than fresh content.

edit: by the bad actors, of course!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My advice is to step back and be objective about what your site offers and how it offers it. I'm not in the quotes industry but I would do two things immediately if I were in your shoes.

#1 - Dig into your data, including search console, and find opportunities to expand the reach of what you already have. A different title here, an expanded focus there. Queries data in search console is especially helpful once you learn how to read it. It allows you to do things like create a new article with a different intent for queries Google assigned to a page but ranks it 30+ where it generates 0% CTR. Look for queries with a high number of impressions but poor rankings and CTR. Think about intent and if it makes sense write the new article.

"what does so and so mean", for example, might show you where you can expand on the content of a page. Pages where one person said something but another famous person quoted it might deserve two articles with explanations.... hopefully you get the idea.

The goal is simply to get more from the content you already have.

#2 - Delivery, or content marketing as some call it, is important. How do your visitors receive their quotes? Could you make your site a bit more socially sticky or self-propelling? An app with a daily quote delivered to an inbox for example, does that still work? A social media group might not make a difference but offering quotes to people who like to post "inspirational" quotes a lot might be helpful if you go find them and interact with them.

Quotes is a tough field as they are often repeated but you can increase traffic if you help people find your site and help them tell a friend about it by design as they share your content. I'm assuming most people visit to find a quote to share and few are just wanting to read large numbers of quotes but I could be wrong.

TL:DR; Get the most from what you've got and look for new ways to serve it up where people do the sharing to, hopefully, encourage others to do the sharing for you. Perhaps look to other similar industries for ideas, like meme sites. Since you're not worried about copyright issues and protecting your content your challenge is to help people to your site wherever a quote is posted.

- There's synergy with the meme industry as quotes are often paired with funny images. Can you get your site exposure as a source of quotes for various meme maker sites? Could you leverage that relationship into more visitors going to your site for quote/meme ideas? Good luck.