Do you wonder how to get traffic from search back to your site? Do you want to find zero traffic pages on your website? If so, then you’ve come to the right place. As part of digital analytics, we’ll discuss how to find zero traffic pages.

To find zero traffic pages means a step higher to achieving SEO success. Zero traffic pages never receive any traffic from search. These can happen for various reasons. For example, they could be dead links that were once live pages or pages that never had enough quality content and therefore did not rank well. You are missing out on marketing opportunities if you can’t find those zero traffic pages.

Why You Need to Find Zero Traffic Pages on Your Website

Zero traffic means there were no visits to your site, hence, no activity on your site.

Every business should understand and determine which pages on their websites are not adding any marketing value. These pages may cause a lack of traffic to your website, which could also be the source of the site not ranking well in search engine results.

How to Find Zero Traffic Pages on Your Website

If you are looking for any source to get rid of zero traffic from search pages on your website, then this article is just for you. There are many reasons why your website might need content transformation. For example, there could be duplicates or broken links. It could also be that you need accurate link metrics on your relevant sites to know if you are on the right path. Business owners should also consider bad SEO issues, poor usability, or other problems. These pages need to be identified and fixed. Here are some ways to solve such web pages on your site.

Resolve Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are web pages that are not linked to any other page or section on your site. These pages aren’t accessible to visitors unless they know the exact source or URL. They also can’t be found via search engines, so they don’t get crawled by them. To make sure crawlers can find your pages, you should link to them from other pages.

Most important, an orphan page is an amazing source of lost opportunities to acquire and engage active users. They also hurt your bounce rate. Luckily, losing out on page traffic, retention, and revenue and harming your SEO success because of orphan pages is something that you can quickly remedy.

What You Can Do with Orphan Pages

Once you know the orphan pages, you can decide whether to delete them or have content upgrades.

  • Keep them, but work to improve their organic search profile. You can search your competitors traffic for some vital information.
  • Keep them, but use the link juice they give you to help other higher profile pages on your site, such as inbound links.
  • Get rid of them, and then redirect them to higher profile, higher-value pages on your site. You can do this using the built-in 301 redirect tools at Google Search Webmaster Tools, or you can use the free Redirect Manager plugin for WordPress.

What’s the Issue with Orphan Pages?

An orphan page has no inbound links. Since these pages cannot be found while browsing your site, they should not be indexed by search engine bots. We do not mark these pages as errors, so you should check if there are any such pages on your site. You can hide them from the web using the robots.txt file.

How to Look for Orphan Pages:

Turns out, a new Google Analytics feature can make it happen! What’s that? It’s Pivot Table Reports

Here’s how you do it:

Analyze your website content using the content section of Google Analytics.

Clicking on the “Top Content Report” displays a URL list of the top ten most viewed pages. But this list is useless without knowing how many people were viewing each page. Click the pivot button at the top right-hand corner of the content performance tab. Change the pivot table to show mediums as rows and pages as the columns, and then you’ll see the page views as the data.

Use Google Analytics

While Google Analytics does not report on web pages with zero pageviews in a selected time period, it reports with zero pageviews on certain time periods and one or more pageviews on a selected time period.

Looking at your GA report with a very large time period, you may see several page views recorded. However, there can be a lot of pages on your site that have never been viewed. These pages don’t get any traffic source from search, but they do exist. It may be that some pages are too old. Others are deleted without being archived. Still, others have been moved to other websites. Regardless, you need to analyze how this came about as part of your digital analytics plan.

Here is how you can use Google Analytics to show your zero traffic pages.

  • Check the All Pages Report for One Pageview a Month Pages

If you go to the “All Pages” report (under Behavior > Homepage), if you sort the pageview column by increasing order, you will be given a list of all the web pages which had only one page view in the last one month period.

If they had only 2-page visits in the last month, they were very much closer to being zero traffic pages. They still received one page view, however, and this is sufficient to work with.

There are many ways to know if you have zero traffic pages on your site. But this is the easiest way to find them. You don’t need any websites, software, or content upgrades, and you don’t need to hire someone else to do it for you. Anyone can do it pretty easily.

When you see 0 to 2 page views in Google Search Console, you must consider two things. First, check the time range. Second, check the content shares over time. For example, there could be some web pages, which you have launched specifically for a campaign or a holiday season. Those pages may get lots of traffic shares over time from search only during a few days.

Consider only those pages that are likely to be viewed by people who might need some further analysis.

  • Use Sitemap.xml

To find zero visit pages, you need first to create a list of URLs for your site. For example, a site with 500 pages can use https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to create a plain text list for you. It’s best to trim the domain name from the list of URLs so that it matches the domain-less data you’ll export from Google Analytics to a CSV file.

Here’s how you should do it:

Step 1: Create a URL list from the sitemap.xml file. You should eliminate the domain name of the URLs. If your site does not have a sitemap, you can create one by following this guide on how to create a sitemap.

Step 2:Go to xmlfiles website and follow code instructions to generate an XML sitemap.

Step 3:Once the scan is completed, there will be a status code that includes the time range, number of pages scanned, etc. Click on “View Sitemap Details.” Once the scanning becomes complete, it will show your results.

Step 4:You can either download the XML file (XML Sitemap file), create a CSV file, or view the sitemap online.

Step 5:Copy all the pages on your site into an excel file. Remove the domain name, so it’s easier to compare with Google Analytics reports which don’t include the domain name (i.e., /about-us).

Step 6:Now, log into your Google Analytics report and select the ‘Behavior’ tab from the left-side menu.

Step 7:Select a time period of at least 5 to 6 months from the drop-down URL list.

Why Does Your Website Have Zero Traffic?

Reasons why you have pages with zero traffic are more common than you think. The great news is, you can easily remedy these technical issues. But before that, here is why you have zero traffic pages.

No Backlinks

High-quality backlinks (organic) increase your website’s authority. Lots of backlinks are important because search engines can interpret them as a sign of high quality content.

To rank well in Google, you will need high-quality links to your pages. Pages with high authority backlinks have a greater advantage over pages without backlinks. Pages that target low competition topics take fewer backlinks to rank well. Uncompetitive queries tend to be less competitive, so fewer backlinks are needed to rank. Use a backlink checker to test which inbound links are viable and which are not. That being said, to play it safe, add evergreen content to your website.

Page Topic Doesn’t Have Traffic Potential

Some pages have lots of internal links, but they still don’t get any organic search traffic from Google if people aren’t searching for whatever you talk about on your page. Because people are unaware of such long-tail search terms, they cannot find them or not bother finding them. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, evergreen content almost always gets organic traffic.

As an original content writer, one of the first things you should do is determine the kind of actual search volume for your chosen topic. Search Volume tells you that thousands of people are searching, looking for, or hoping for answers, information, opinions, or edification around your chosen topic.

Using popular keyword research tools will show you how many people are searching for similar terms. If your article is relevant to those terms, you know that it’s likely to be found. However, if it isn’t relevant to those terms, it’s unlikely to be found.

Try to build long-form content around the few keywords that have higher search volume and that you have access to what your competitors are writing about. Often you can succeed in getting such content to rank quickly and send organic traffic to your website faster than with the more popular terms. But first and foremost, avoid low-quality content.

Use the following keyword research tools to identify what topics are being searched and read in your competitors’ traffic:

Mismatched Search Intent

Ranking well for a specific set of long-tail keywords may be enough if you’re looking for actual search traffic. But if you want more organic traffic sources to come to your site, you need to optimize your evergreen content for search intent too. Google aims to return the most meaningful and relevant organic search traffic results for a search query. So if you have pages that don’t rank well and already target a similar search phrase, then a quick SEO win is to optimize them for search intent. Again, you can do this with minimal effort.

Unindexed Pages

If you suspect that your website isn’t being ranked well in any search engine, try searching for your page using Google. You should get at least one result; if not, it’s not indexed and won’t appear in search results.

There are many criteria for inclusion as to why you can lose traffic to your website. It often happens when you are not paying attention to how search engine crawlers are indexing your site. This can be caused by bad coding practices, missing canonical tags, and blocked content on Google Search Console. All of these technical issues can cause your web pages not to be properly indexed.

You Have Limited Authority

You may have created the best viral content ever written. In that case, chances are your article won’t still have high search rankings, even though the topic has high organic traffic volume and you wrote the perfect piece of long-form content, preferably having question-based keywords. So even if your article is better than those of other high authority sites, you are still competing against them.

Since most web pages do not get many links from other pages, domain authority is an extremely important factor determining web page ranking. For example, viral content with many internal links from an unknown blog or website with low domain authority won’t rank higher.

While this strategy can be very effective for many relevant sites, there are some things to consider. First, you should make sure that your evergreen content format is really good. Then promote it aggressively using a social media platform and one more advertising platform. When influential people share your pieces of content, they will also link to them. As a result, your viral content will gain popularity and authority, and your link-poor pages will start to get links.

Posting links to your relevant content on forums can be useful. But make sure you understand the rules of the forum before adding target keywords to your comments there. Also, don’t spam forums. Doing so will get you banned. Research each forum before posting links to your content there.

Concentrate all your outreach and promotion activities in one day to have maximum exposure for your content. This is better done if you create a content calendar that contains at least one target keyword. The more times your viral content is viewed and shared within a short period of time, the more chances it has to gain momentum and reach more viewers and readers.

Thin and Unoriginal Content

When I see a post with very good content but no backlinks, I can easily tell why it’s not on the search engine rankings. Most times, something is missing!

Thin content is content that hardly qualifies as relevant content. Some websites are filled with pages that only contain short paragraphs that read like summaries of topics.

This kind of low-quality content that passes a plagiarism check, but is virtually indistinguishable from all the rest on the site, is likely to be affected by the Panda Algorithm. Such content is likely being produced for the sole purpose of generating search engine traffic. That being said, your content calendar should also include variety.

What can you do to improve content transformation so that it gets seen?

Your personal experience can help the content be more personable and reach more relevant and active users, setting your marketing campaign in place. In addition, your personal experience can help the relevant content become more “humanized.”

Something peculiar or unique about your city or region would make it interesting to local readers. Try to type in question-based keywords related to your location in the search box. Don’t just write a blog post. Make sure your post should contain a target keyword and has something to say. Don’t just create videos; make sure they contain value. Use the search box to find out what long-tail search terms that can relate to your search intent. Add these to your content calendar. Don’t just post pictures; make sure they tell a story so you can have a higher shot at the search rankings.

To Conclude

You must identify those zero traffic pages and solve your search intent issues, orphan page problems. The likes to increase its viewership and improve your online marketing strategy. Do you need help with your SEO campaign? ITDWebdesign is here to help. Contact us so we can help you solve your optimization issues.