If you are a blogger or a digital marketer or a website owner, you might have experienced a noticeable drop in your traffic on multiple occasions. Therefore, it is important to investigate the reasons and tackle this problem to get things back on track.
The first step is to take an in-depth look at your website analytics by using Google Analytics or SEMrush or Google Search Console, to get a much better idea about lost traffic sources and whether your website was hit by any google penalty or is it due to bad SEO?
After analyzing your web analytics, ask yourself a few questions: Is there a sharp decline or a slow and steady decline or a sudden drop-off in your website traffic rankings? Did my site’s traffic drop for a few days or is the traffic recovering on its own? This will set you in the right direction in discovering the possible reason behind the traffic drop.
Let’s take a look at the ten things you should check for when you notice a significant drop in your organic traffic. Go through!
- Hit by Google algorithm updates
Google constantly rolls out updates every once in a while. Unfortunately, these changes may have impacted your website. However, keep in mind that this traffic decline can be temporary lasting for at least a week or two. Make use of algorithm-tracking tools like Mozcast or SEMrush or Algoroo to get information on up-to-date algorithm releases and analyze the factors triggering the decline.
- Crawl errors
Crawl errors prevent search engine bots from accessing your pages. These errors are caused due to server, redirect and 404 errors, which negatively impact the crawling, indexing, and ranking of your website.
- Manual penalties
If your website ranks high on other search engines and a significant drop in rankings on Google could indicate that you are suffering from the Google penalty because the content on your site is against Google’s guidelines. To fix the problem, check for penalty warning messages in Google search console and take necessary action.
- De-indexing of URLs
When Important URLs are removed from the indexing causes a sudden website traffic loss. Check whether the important pages are still in the index using the URL inspection tool, or else use the request indexing option in the Google search console.
- SERP layout changes
SERP layout changes impact the way Google displays organic results like showing knowledge graphs, featured snippets, suggestions and advertisements, etc. Thus, it can decline your traffic levels. So, make sure you are adaptable to changes.
- Page speed
Page load speed not only affects your rankings but also visitors’ user experience. When page speed is slow, the bounce rates are higher. Check your page speed using the PageSpeed tool.
- Server issues
If the website encounters server issues because of a broken caching function, then look for errors in your server logs and resolve them quickly.
- Redesign of website
Substantial website changes, like redesign or content migration, may have potentially reduced traffic and rankings. Pay close attention to the concerning aspects like 301 redirects, site audit, etc. to avoid negative impact.
- SEO technical issues
Technical SEO issues are the baseline of your website that can stop you from ranking. It affects how the search engines crawl and index your page. Make sure you fix the issues to keep your rankings up.
- Cannibalisation
When a website appears for a keyword with multiple URLs due to keyword cannibalisation, it results in link losses, which may hurt your visibility and traffic. Make sure you track the lost inbound links to get them back.
FINAL THOUGHT
Organic traffic decline can be greatly damaging to your website rankings if unaddressed. However, carefully analyze with the right tools and follow a proper approach to uncover the reasons behind the issue. Take time to fix things with a strategic plan and restore your website rankings and organic traffic.
Durga
About The Author…
Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.