Nothing about traffic is ever certain or moving in a straight line. No one is immune to traffic drops, and traffic peaks are not always there to stay. Understanding the why you are experiencing drops or peaks in your traffic is important. So, to avoid barking up the wrong tree, gather evidence first. Check your Google Analytics to see if the traffic shift really looks out of place or it might have been caused by holidays, seasonality, or other patterns inherent to your industry. Don’t forget to check if all Google Analytics codes are properly implemented on all pages of your site! However, if all is there and you still are experiencing a sudden nosedive, here are five common issues that might be causing your traffic to deplete.
1. Changes to your site
Significant changes to your site, such as migration, redesign, and content clearout may have potentially subversive effects on your SEO. Has your site undergone any of these lately? Pay close attention to the aspects involved and don’t forget issues related to indexation and crawlability.
2. Manual search engine penalty
If you have suffered a penalty by Google for violating webmaster quality guidelines, you will be notified in your GSC (Google Search Console) account. While the site being hacked is one possible reason for this penalty and it is not really something you have control over, here are several situations that you can easily recover from:
- User-generated spam
- Unnatural outgoing links and sneaky redirects
- Thin or duplicate content
- Unnatural links to your site
3. Google algorithm update
Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates are indeed a gift that keeps on giving… and taking when you are not aware of it. If dips in your traffic correspond to any update rollout, check the factors triggering it. Of course, new core updates would make a huge buzz, but very niche-specific ones will not. Keep an eye on SERP fluctuations for your industry keywords.
4. Valuable backlinks lost
Losing backlinks is yet another reason for your traffic to decline. It can hurt your visibility especially if your site doesn’t have many backlinks in total. If most keywords and pages were affected by the traffic drop, investigate your backlink profile for any noticeable changes.
5. Competitors
If rankings and traffic are lost to a competitor, it is a good idea to try and reverse-engineer the upranked pages to find the aspect where you fell behind. If your competitor has mobile-optimized pages as opposed to yours, or they have significantly renewed their content and gained new backlinks, you will have to act. And you will have to act immediately.
If you are unsure of how to go about your traffic issues or prefer to have a professional SEO company do it for you, 411 Marketing’s team will gladly handle that for you. Stay tuned for our next topic!