For any business visible online, having a big website traffic volume is important. The more your website has visitors going in and out of your site, there will be more outlets and opportunities in making your brand awareness grow to your visitors.
Whenever your site drops its website traffic, it means there will be losses and lower sales for your business. Whenever this happens, you need to look at why you are experiencing a drop in website traffic. It is very helpful to use website analytics tools in finding the main culprit of the problem.
There are free tools that you can use from Google such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to analyze your website traffic. If you want to know Analytics further, you can always search the internet for Analytics guides for beginners that can help you understand why Analytics is important.
Before you get to analysis, it is important to learn how to diagnose website traffic drops. On this post, we will give you five different factors that may contribute to your loss of website traffic.
Algorithm Update from Google
Google is always evolving every single day to make the experience on their site the best one yet. There will always be updates to imply the changes Google want to happen. However, if there is a sudden decline in your website traffic, you would want to look if Google’s algorithm updates are directly affecting it.
If you want to know if there is any movement in the Algorithm, Moz’s Mozcasts search weather report is very reliable on this. They note disruptions and turbulence on search algorithms day-to-day. Though following reliable websites like search engine watch and search engine journal could update you also about algorithm changes.
Complete Revamp of your Site
Any big changes to your site, whether it be a redesign, migration, or a content clearout, your SEO may suffer because of it. If you encounter a random traffic dip, make sure to monitor the direct effect of your changes closely. Usually, it is issued regarding indexation and crawlability that are overlooked and is the cause of the decreased traffic.
To fix this, you can go to Crawl > Crawl Errors in your Google Search Console (GSC) and take a look at the graphs and see if there are any significant changes after your site update.
If there are broken URLs found by GSC, you can opt to use WebSite Auditor to track them down. The app does an in-depth crawl of your site within just a few minutes. In the All Resources tab, use a Quick Search filter to find the URLs. Do a quick scroll to the bottom to the Links to Page section to find the broken links.
In GSC, you can head over to Google Index > Index Status to see if the number of indexed pages has significantly lessened. In case you might have accidentally disabled anything, Website Auditor can do a recrawl your site for Googlebot. Under All Resources in the Robots Instructions column, you can find the directives from your robots.txt, page-level restrictions (X-bots or no index tags) and how they apply to each URL.
Brand New Links
Sample website’s traffic
Having new links in your website domain can negatively affect your website traffic volume. The impact of these new links can affect the overall image and trustworthiness of the website.
A lot of these brand new links can be unnatural links that lead your viewers into suspicious sites. These links are most likely to be connected on one page only wherein it can give a massive loss in traffic.
To check if your links are contributing to the betterment of your website traffic rate, you can use backlink tools such as Ahrefs and Majestic. These apps are giving you the ability to look into links that just popped recently. If the links are unusual, most likely these links are not contributing. Another way to look at this is by conducting a link audit which is done by exporting a copy of your link graph and analyzing it from there. You need to fix this issue as soon as possible because the risks of this situation can grow in the long run.
Competition
If you find that there is a moderate traffic drop or if it is only specific to a few keywords, it might be a result of a lower ranking in the SERPs. You can confirm this by checking the SERP History tab in Rank Tracker. You’re now higher ranking competitors may have enabled answer queries via Featured Snippet, Knowledge Graph or Answer Box. You better step up your game before you find yourself at the bottom.
It is normal to have your competitors outrank you in one way or another so the best thing you can do is see how you can improve yourself to be better or at least at par with them, which makes spying on your competitors important. Try reverse-engineering the highest ranking pages and see trends in their strategy. Did they switch up their content or maybe they optimized for mobile? Did they get new backlinks or did they use a separate tool to make their content appear more? As the saying goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. The more you cover them up, the stronger your company becomes.
Your competitors may also start a PPC campaign and target your highest ranking keywords which causes traffic to drop from the top organic results because SERPs see the ads. If the keywords are important to you, you may consider outbidding the competitor, or you can target other keywords.
Backlink Lost in a High Domain Authority Site
Links from highly credible websites is one of the big factors wherein your site will perform well in the search engine results page. Whenever this high domain site stops in providing you links, it can significantly drop your website traffic rate.
You can start fixing this by combining results from various tools you used in analyzing your backlinks. The main goal of running a scan is if your site has suffered a link drop or a specific link affected a particular page or groups of pages.
After that, you need to regain those lost backlinks. You may start by contacting the site owners in case they might have mistakenly removed the links. But if they did not do it intentionally, you can update those affected pages by replacing the lost backlinks to further improve your website traffic.
