Web traffic can change. sometimes for the best. Sometimes not so great. Diagnosing why traffic changes is not difficult. Here’s how to keep your web traffic under control and growing.
1. The mobile paradigm impacts traffic
Mobile is changing search habits. More and more businesses are noticing that their search patterns are changing. This is because we are in the midst of a major shift in the way people search for services and products. Traffic pattern disruptions are especially noticeable where search intersects with local.
This change is due to the shift to consuming content on mobile devices. This affects the days of the week and times of day that users search. This can affect the keywords that searchers use. Understanding these changes and staying ahead of trends can help you regain lost traffic.
The shift to mobile devices is also impacting how visitors communicate with businesses. For example, presenting information in PDF format may no longer be useful. Additionally, by giving your site visitors the option to call, text, or receive a phone call right away, you’re reducing the chances consumers still rely on forms they don’t want to fill out anymore. You can generate more leads than your competitors.
Adapting to the preferences of site visitors is very important.
2. Changes in consumption habits
Identifying what has changed is a fascinating area of research. The challenge is figuring out what has changed in order to understand the overall shift in what people are looking for.
A decrease in traffic for one site may be correlated with an increase in traffic for another product or service.
The most dramatic example of this effect that I have encountered is the changing habits of digital photography. With this change, sites related to digital cameras started losing traffic after the iPhone became popular.
Changes in web traffic due to changing habits
One example of the latest changes in traffic is related to WordPress and blogs. Virtually everything related to WordPress and blogs is trending downward. Meanwhile, search trends related to podcasting are trending upward.
Search volume for WordPress-related queries is still higher than podcasting. But the important thing to note is that blogging trends have consistently been in a downward trend and are likely to continue to trend downward. Podcasting trends, on the other hand, seem to be trending upwards in the long term.
This does not mean that podcasting searches are eating away at WordPress keyword phrases. This indicates a shift in the way people consume content from text content to visual (video) and auditory (podcasting) forms of content.
These trends can affect not only the type of traffic you seek to get, but also the types of promotional activities you undertake to reach potential customers.
For example, there was a time when potential customers read blogs or visited directories to find specific types of products. Now, you might visit a dedicated community about your product, get inspired by a podcast, or look for expert reviews on YouTube.
If your site is ranking well for keyword phrases even though your traffic is trending downward, it’s possible that fewer people are searching for those keywords. The next step is to identify if they are currently searching for videos and podcasts, or if they have abandoned the search for another product or service.
3. Indexing issues
A rare issue that can affect your traffic is Google’s inability to crawl your site. This is not Google’s fault. It indicates that your traffic level is over your current web hosting plan.
As websites become more popular, more scrapers and rogue bots start attacking your site. Unfortunately, these bots attack your site at the same time that GoogleBot is indexing your site.
What happens next is that either the site runs out of resources and starts to display 404 Page Not Found responses, or the web host actively stops rendering web pages.
In the first scenario, the web server stops displaying web pages because the amount of traffic exceeds the allocated CPU and RAM resources. As a result, the web host will not be able to display his web pages. This is similar to having too many web browsers open on your computer and web pages slowing down or freezing.
The second scenario is when your web host stops traffic to your site to protect its servers. This practice is called throttling. This usually happens on shared servers. A web host throttles web traffic to save bandwidth and server resources for all other websites hosted on shared servers.
Neither response is good for you. There are steps in place to mitigate the impact of malformed traffic. A firewall such as Sucuri or WordFence can help slow down or stop bad bot traffic. Another option is to step up to a more robust web hosting plan.
Another reason is that some web hosts throttle their traffic. In other words, it intentionally stops displaying web pages to conserve CPU and RAM for all other sites hosted on the shared server.
However, this can also occur on a dedicated server running outdated software, resource-intensive plugins, or web pages with too many scripts and images. A content delivery network (CDN) can help. But if you want to avoid the expense, consider using a web server with smaller file sizes, software upgrades (such as PHP version), and more resources such as RAM and port speed.
Attacks by scrapers and hacker bots are not negative SEO. We know that some people feel under attack, especially from competitors. Virtually all websites ranked with useful phrases are attacked. This is actually normal activity on the web.
4. Unsafe Websites
Google Chrome is warning visitors about unsafe sites. This may scare potential visitors.
5. Hacking
If a site is hacked, unauthorized links or web pages may be created. This can negatively affect your ranking. An easy way to determine if your site has been hacked is to check your site using an FTP program.
After logging into the site with an FTP client, sort the files according to modification date. Pages and folders that have been recently modified (but not modified by you) could be hacked web pages. However, use common sense when diagnosing hacked files. For example, files created by constantly changing plugins like backup software will generate recently modified files.
Another way to check for hacked web pages is to check the Index section of Google Search Console to see if there are any index pages you haven’t created.
How to recover from a hacking event is outside the scope of this article. In general, you may need to use software such as phpMyAdmin to find and remove unauthorized admin user credentials. Next, we will begin the process of removing the hacked web pages and identifying the attack vector that caused the hack (such as a rogue plugin). Googling the names of software programs and plugins in use, including their version numbers, may show those that need to be removed or updated. If you can’t identify all hacked files, at some point you should remove the CMS and reinstall the latest version. However, it can usually be identified by the modification date.
6. Google Updates Algorithm
It’s common in the SEO industry to try to figure out what malicious activities and websites Google is targeting. Judging by the patents and research in which Google is involved, anti-spam is not the most important of Google’s activities.
Google search is about finding information, and it means knowing the meaning of search queries and the meaning of web pages. Danny Sullivan clarified that unless Google specifically states that it is targeting a particular form of spam, the update is likely to be a relevance improvement.
So, if your rankings drop, you may want to investigate why the sites that remained in the top five are still ranking. The answer usually lies in the difference between your site and the current top ranking sites.
There are many reasons why traffic patterns change. Being able to identify the reasons will help you take responsibility and make changes for the better to improve your sales and traffic.
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Image by Shutterstock, modified by author
