Why is my website not getting traffic
In our experience it is one of four things, and they are not equally likely. They are listed here in the order we actually find them, which is not the order most articles put them in.
Something is telling Google not to show it
A noindex tag left on from the build, or a robots file blocking the crawlers. The site works perfectly, it looks good, and it will never appear. This is the most common cause of a brand new site getting nothing, and it is invisible from the outside: you can only see it by reading the code.
Twenty seconds to check. Minutes to fix.
The site is too new and Google has not finished looking
A new site takes weeks to be crawled properly, and months to be trusted on anything competitive. Showing up for your own business name happens in days. Showing up for a search that brings customers takes longer, and no one can shorten it by much.
Nothing to fix. A sitemap and patience.
It answers no question anybody types
This is the big one, and it is the one almost nobody checks. Most sites describe the company: who we are, our history, our values. Nobody searches for that. People search for the problem they have, at the moment they have it. If no page on the site answers a real question, there is no search the site can win.
Measure the searches first, then build a page for each one.
Someone else already owns the words you need
Sometimes the pages are right and the words are simply taken by sites with fifteen years of history behind them. That is not a reason to give up: it is a reason to change target. Next to every impossible search there are always narrower ones, with less competition and buyers who are further along.
Find the searches with real volume and low difficulty, then take those.
Check yours in twenty seconds
Put in the address. We open the site for real and tell you which of these problems it has, what they are costing you, and the order we would fix them in. Free, no email, and nobody calls you back.
Questions people actually ask
How long should a new website take to get traffic?
Days for your own name, weeks for anything narrow and specific, months for a search with real competition on it. If you are past three months with nothing at all, it is almost never patience that is missing: it is one of the four problems above.
I have a website but no visitors at all. Is it broken?
Usually not. Zero visitors, precisely zero, points at reason one: something is telling the search engines to stay away. That is checkable in seconds and fixable the same day.
Does posting on social media bring traffic to my website?
It brings a spike while you post and nothing the week after. Search traffic keeps arriving while you sleep, because the question gets typed whether you posted or not. They are different jobs, and only one of them compounds.
Do I need to pay for ads to get traffic?
Ads buy visits for as long as you pay. They are useful when you need work this month. They do not fix any of the four reasons above, and when you stop paying you are back exactly where you started.
If the traffic is there and the phone still does not ring, that is a different problem with a different fix: a website that gets visits but no calls. And if you want the whole picture, the nine checks that decide whether you show up at all.