Has the traffic on your site dropped recently, and you don?t know why?
That can be confusing and upsetting, but don’t worry: you can get to the bottom of it and get your site traffic back.
Here are several elements to investigate when your organic traffic falls.
Did Your Site Traffic Really Decrease?
First, you have to figure out whether the loss is related to SEO, marketing, or a more simple problem with the tracking.
Measuring your site traffic is complex because there are so many tools and platforms you can employ, not to mention the broad variety of metrics to wrap your head around! However, these are several of the essentials to examine in order to determine whether you simply have a tracking problem:
- An update to your website that caused a glitch with the UA tracking code
- Migration of your website led to issues with the GA tracking code
- Poorly executed GA event that lists most new visitors as returning visitors
You might have suffered a site drop due to tracking if your site traffic is simultaneously executed over several of your advertising channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Also, if you receive conflicting information from Google or Facebook about site traffic, tracking could be the culprit.
Google Changes
Google search rank is what it’s all about, but the search giant changes its algorithm as often as once every day. Some reports suggest that Google alters its algorithm 600 times a year or more.
Many of these are minor changes, but a biggie, such as Panda, can throw your website for a loop! That’s why it’s essential to stay on top of what’s going on in the search engine optimization (SEO) arena.
When you do, you’ll know when changes are coming, and can have an action plan ready when Google releases the update. Check SEO news regularly for information about pending Google updates and look for such critical points as:
- What the search engine may penalize you for
- Why Google decided to change the algorithm
- How you can mitigate potential penalties and maintain your search ranking
After collecting this information, you can take steps to make sure your website will stay in Google’s good graces.
Removed Redirects
Redirects will shift people and search engines from an old webpage to a new one. When you use a 301 redirect, this informs Google that your webpage has moved; the search engine should ensure that ranking metrics from the old webpage apply to the new one.
Sometimes, though, using several redirects at once can create traffic drops. So it helps if you keep a list of every redirect on your site to figure things out if your site traffic suddenly drops.
Lost Site Links
Your site may have lost some of its links, but you can check if that is the case using a lost-link tool such as Ahrefs or Majestic. If you did lose links, this would explain a loss in your Google rank.
If you find several broken or lost inbound links, it’s essential to figure out where they’re coming from and what broke them. You should check each link to see if it might have been intentionally removed.
If that’s the case, the link may not have been natural. Don’t worry about these, however, because they could be flagged by Google.
Another possibility is that links may alter or break when you do a website update. If that happens, you can contact the site owner and see if that individual will restore them.
To avoid losing links, it’s wise to spend money on software that monitors them.
Losing your traffic even temporarily can be unnerving, but you can usually get things back into smooth operation if you do some investigation.
