Website traffic is important to any business with an online presence. The more visitors you have, the more opportunities you have to build brand awareness, build relationships, and ultimately sell your services and products. This is why a sudden drop in search engine traffic is a terrifying prospect. Because ultimately it means business loss and lower revenue.
There are many reasons why traffic to your website is dropping, including technical issues, recent website changes, Google algorithm updates, and poor optimization.
Below, 12 members forbes agency Council Any advice on what to look for when trying to pinpoint the cause of an unexpected drop in search traffic?
Your traffic may have dropped as a result of design changes or Google’s algorithm changes.
All photos courtesy of members of the Forbes Agency Council.
1. Recent website changes
Check for recent changes as well as possibly detecting obvious hosting issues. Design changes often affect load times, which search engines don’t really see. Additionally, use Google Analytics to see if all traffic sources are down or just specific traffic sources. Last but not least, check your SERPs (search engine results pages). If you haven’t already, start monitoring your SERPs regularly. – Christina Baldassare, zebra ad
2. Tracking code
One of the most overlooked causes of traffic drop (assuming someone relies on something like Google Analytics) is a change or issue with the site’s tracking code. Changes to your analytics plugins or website code often cause issues with your tracking code and inconsistencies in your analytics reports. Always double check your tracking code before spending time troubleshooting elsewhere. – Vinny La Barbera, Inforza
3. Trends over time
When analyzing client application (web/native) traffic, assess trends in total traffic and relevant segments over time. Understanding seasonal trends/business cycles by traffic medium, channel, and campaign is critical to understanding if a decline is normal. Once a baseline is established, assess whether there are any unusual changes and isolate problems with cause and effect analysis. – Alan Morte, three Ventures Technology Co., Ltd.
4. Easy to Accomplish: A Simple Technical Problem
Find technical issues using simple publicly available tools. google analytics, google webmaster tools, Google’s Mobile Friendly Test, Alexa, Moz, YSlow and more. Fix simple things first: 404 errors, long page load times, missing/wrong SEO (search engine optimization) elements on the page, etc. Moving on to more philosophical issues: performance optimization, A/B testing, user experience (UX), heatmapping, etc. – Andy Etemadi, Imagine
5. Information architecture
Is your client’s website structured properly? How effective is their internal linking strategy? Are they creating a bunch of orphaned pages just for blogging? Have there been any recent redesigns that have significantly increased the bounce rate and significantly increased the number of users sticking to search results? Kyle Sanders, CWR SEO
6. Server overload
A web server can easily become overloaded, so it’s one of the first things to look for when a website goes down. Websites are often unable to meet the demands of people who visit them. Therefore, it is important to optimize your website and prepare for traffic spikes to avoid downtime. – Ryan Pezzotti, Nouzo.com
7. Meta information
Meta information is where Google gets keyword information from your website in order to rank you. First, check if someone accidentally deleted the meta information (which is common). If you’re happy with your meta settings, view your Google Analytics to see if the drops came from organic, paid, or social. For paid, check AdWords campaigns. For organic, check robots.txt, sitemap.xml, SSL, etc. Kelly Samuel, Qode Media
8. Global Traffic
There are many reasons, from server issues to traffic sources to even simple reasons like tracking interruptions, but it’s always a good idea to check the geographic distribution of your traffic. Most apps and websites today have global traffic. For content owners with traffic from emerging markets, government-level blocking or censorship can slow things down, depending on how sophisticated your IP detection is. – baglan limes, Anchor Free Co., Ltd.
9. Traffic Sources
If your organic traffic suddenly drops, there are some SEO issues you’re dealing with. Your website has been updated and search engines aren’t indexing it the same way it used to be, or they’ve changed the way search engines index your website. If your paid traffic drops but your spend stays the same, your ads won’t be as effective as they used to be. – Chris Carter, interactive agent
10. Google Search Console
google search console It’s basically like looking under the hood of a car. Open the hood if the car does not start. It’s like looking at Google Search Console when there are negative or positive spikes in traffic trends. Within Search Console, you can detect malicious issues (such as whether your site has been hacked), HTML issues, or trends that affect your website’s traffic. – Brett Farmiloe, marker
11. Panda or Penguin Update
Over the past few years, Google has made several computational updates to its algorithms (called Pandas and Penguins) to improve the overall quality of search results. Panda examines content quality and penalizes sites with low-quality content. Penguin, on the other hand, analyzes link quality and penalizes sites with unnatural links. One or both of these updates could explain the drop in traffic. – Christopher Jones, LSEO.com
12. Domain, DNS or NS Structure
The first thing I do is check to see if Google has released an algorithm update. If you don’t have a major Google update, start by going through our technical checklist to see if any changes have been made to your domain, DNS (domain name servers), or NS (name servers) structure. increase. – John Simpson, Criterion.B
