Things to Check for When Your Organic Traffic Suddenly Drops

A large number of visitors on your site are impressive –but you should still focus on improving your content because not all traffic is good, and bad traffic can pull down your brand.

When you increase your traffic and the quality of visitors, it becomes easier to improve your web conversion and transform that traffic into loyal customers.

Things to Check When Your Organic Traffic Drops

When you start a website for your brand or online business, your priority is to attract as many people as possible to your site. That’s because you hope you can convert those visitors into paying customers. Sometimes website traffic remains stagnant or increases; other times, however, it drops.

If you’ve been experiencing a drop in your web traffic, consider checking the following;

1. Backlinks

Backlinks are essential in search-engine-optimized content. The loss of links can contribute to a drop in website traffic. Backlinks are crucial because they direct people back to your site to get useful information. It is an excellent way for new people to discover your site.

Backlinks are beneficial for your site because search engines, including Google, use backlink votes for ranking, which means that websites with many backlinks are ranked higher in organic search results.

Not all backlinks are equal and you can (and should) do a website revamp by focusing on valuable backlinks. High-quality backlinks are those from authoritative sites. A website with more authority can add value to your site through a backlink.

You can update your website by just focusing on quality backlinks. Google and other search engines consider links from trusted websites. Also, ensure that the links contain your anchor text with your preferred keyword.

However, you should not overuse your keywords. Google uses Google Penguin to filter out sites that utilize black hat link strategies, focusing on sites that use black hat links to create exact matching anchor texts.

If you’re still struggling with how to update a website using backlinks, you should ensure that the website linking to your site is related to your content. For instance, a fitness website can include links to a site dealing with exercise equipment.

So what is a reasonable bounce rate for a website? It entirely depends on the type of site.

2. Tracking Code

Sometimes, your traffic drops suddenly because of unreliable information, changes in analytics plug-ins, or site codes. These features can cause glitches, which can, in turn, cause problems in analytics reporting. It is, therefore, necessary to check your website’s tracking system.

Confirm that your tracking code is set up correctly; this allows you to see whether the system is working correctly and that Google Analytics can read data. If you notice any issues, install the tracking code properly.

This allows you to understand your visitors, and when you combine this with an intelligent platform that provides data based on customer preference, you can take your marketing to the next level.

To install Google Analytics tracking codes, ensure that you can edit your site via a Content Management Site (CMS). If this is not possible, you need to work with a professional to install the code. The next step is to access your Google Analytics code.

When logging in to your Google Analytics account, select the Admin button and choose your account and property and then select Tracking Info. Under Tracking Info, choose Tracking Code. It allows you to choose the Tracking Code for your site. Select all the lines of code and make sure you copy the whole tracking code.

To install the code, you need to log in to your CMS to access your website’s HTML code. Place the code at the top of your page before the head tag on each page you wish to track. You can also install a website traffic checker to make it easy for you.

3. Google Algorithm Changes

Google algorithm changes can affect your website’s traffic. Some changes are significant, and others are minor, and they take place regularly. These changes, whether big or small, can lead to a drop in your organic traffic.

It is necessary to be informed about developments in the SEO community to anticipate when Google algorithms change or to understand the actions to take when this happens. There are a number of resources available to help you understand the nature of the changes so you can fix whatever needs fixing and not lose traffic in the process.

If you’re running a successful business, you should understand the nature of Google penalties and what they are penalizing. You also need to know why they made such changes. Then create a plan for how to deal with penalties.

4. Migration

Sometimes, you might decide to change your website for different purposes without considering SEO. If you recently completed a site migration or redesign, you might have noticed a drop in your site traffic. This is another great reason to conduct an SEO website audit to see if you unintentionally de-optimized or broke any feature on your site during the migration.

For instance, you should check the speed of your site. You can use a website load test to check how fast pages load on your site. Google considers a website’s speed for ranking — and low speed means lower ranking and less organic traffic.

5. Website Content

The quality of the content on your website can attract or repel traffic. When deciding about your website structure diagram, you should consider not only the layout but also the information you provide. Google updates like Panda were designed to deal with bad content and prevent websites with low-quality content from appearing on Google search results. It is proof that Google prefers high-quality content over just any content.

How do you increase your web traffic? Please share it with us.

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*Photo by kaleb tapp on Unsplash