Studies have suggested that over 90% of content gets no traffic from Google. Given this fact, it obviously follows that there are plenty of entire websites getting no SEO traffic at all.
If you’ve noticed that your site is getting little-to-no traffic from Google, we’ll walk through:
Let’s dive in!
Here, we’ll walk through each of the top reasons you’re not seeing traffic to your site and what you can do to fix it.
The first question to ask yourself is whether the tool you’re using to report on organic traffic is accurate (and if you’re using it right).
Here’s what to do about it.
A lot of people don’t like GA4, and if you’re not used to using that tool, you may be using filters incorrectly.
You can quickly check for the existence of organic traffic from search engines by going to reports > acquisition > user acquisition and looking at the First user primary channel group:
In any view where you’re expecting to see organic search traffic but aren’t, make sure it’s not being filtered out:
If you’re looking at an exploration in GA4, the same principles would apply: make sure you understand the way the report is set up and are aware of any filters being applied.
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If you’re not seeing traffic in Google Search Console, the filtering issue won’t be traffic source (as it’s showing you only Google-specific traffic), but could be another issue:
Make sure you’re not filtering by queries, page, etc.
Assuming you’ve checked the tools with which you’re measuring traffic and have confirmed that you are legitimately not getting traffic from SEO, the first thing to confirm is that your pages are actually getting indexed.
Here’s what to do about it.
First, check to see if your site is getting indexed. You can do that in two ways:
1. Site search operator: You can quickly see if your site has pages indexed by using a site search operator. Go to Google and type in site:yoursite dot com and see what results are showing. You should see results like this:
And not results like this:
If you have Google Search Console set up, you can receive even more robust reporting on which pages on your site are indexed and their current status.
2. Google Search Console: Once you see the breakdown of not only the pages on your site that aren’t indexed, but also the reason, you can start to address issues:
In this screenshot, we see a few different problems:
Pages that have been crawled and not indexed or “discovered but not crawled” are often the result of Google not deeming your site sufficiently authoritative and/or not deeming those pages valuable and unique (more on addressing these issues later as well).
If you’ve found that your site isn’t getting indexed, there are a few particularly common issues that could lead to pages on a site not being indexed.
You can look at the source code of a page and search for the noindex tag.
You can also use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your site and identify pages that are noindexed.
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If you’ve confirmed that you’re reporting traffic correctly and that there aren’t specific technical issues preventing your site from being indexed and showing in search results, another issue may be a lack of links to your site.
If you’re hoping to get any kind of significant search traffic to your site, you’re going to need to build links over time. As your site first launches, you may not be showing in any search results because your site has zero or very few links. This can be particularly likely if your brand name is something generic that existing companies already have as a name (e.g., Apex), as you may not rank for even your own brand name.
A quick way to address this is to build local citations for your business, and then start to work on different link-building tactics if you’re hoping to grow your site’s organic traffic.
Some examples of local citations for this bakery that can act as backlinks.
If your site already has a baseline of some links, and you’re still not seeing any traffic from SEO, keyword targeting could be the issue.
Again, if you don’t have a unique brand name, your pages may be:
If you’re using GA4 and not seeing any organic traffic, you can use Google Search Console to see not just clicks but also impressions:
And of course, you can use third-party keyword research tools to identify keywords that have search volume as well.
As you identify relevant keywords, you want to build content that provides value while looking for internal and external linking opportunities to those pages to help drive organic traffic to them.
If you do have links pointed to your site as well as relevant content that targets low competition keywords with search volume, there’s a chance your site has been penalized and will be unable to rank.
Here’s what to do about it.
The most clearly identifiable penalty is a manual penalty, which is the result of a manual review of your site where a Google Quality Rater flagged your site as spam. You can identify these in Google Search Console:
If you do have a manual action, there will typically be some information about the nature of the penalty, example URLs of the offense, and you’ll have an opportunity to submit a request for re-inclusion.
Manual penalties can often be difficult to remove and require significant time and effort, but there is at least a feedback system and some indication directly from Google as to why your site has been penalized.
If your site is adversely impacted by an algorithm update, on the other hand, you won’t be given any information by Google and will have to try to self-diagnose the issue with your site.
If your site had been receiving traffic and then it dropped off, you can start by trying to correlate the drop with Google’s algorithm updates, which they list here.
The most common causes of traffic drops to zero when it comes to being penalized are:
If you were using a vendor or someone inside your organization was doing SEO for you and you weren’t exactly sure what tactics they were using, investigating the links they were building and the content they were creating on your behalf is a good place to start.
If you investigate the activities you’ve taken on your site and there’s no manual action, you may have a historical issue with your domain. If you purchased this domain and there are existing links pointed at it, those may be causing you an issue. Third-party tools like Semrush and Ahrefs allow you to see the links pointed to your domain–looking at these to determine if this may be the cause of an issue is again a good place to start.
Getting zero SEO traffic can be frustrating, but as we’ve seen, there are often clear, identifiable reasons for this problem. The key is to work through a systematic diagnosis process:
It’s also important to keep in mind that even after fixing these foundational issues, it may take time for Google to recrawl your site and for rankings to improve.
Set up regular monitoring through Search Console and GA4 to catch any new issues early and consider implementing technical SEO audits to ensure your site remains healthy from an SEO perspective.
And if you’re stuck troubleshooting a particularly challenging SEO issue, you may want to consider consulting with a professional who can do additional troubleshooting and provide more targeted guidance based on your specific situation.