Why Do You Experience a Drop in Your Website Traffic?
Even if you’re investing in paid ads, uploading insightful blogs, and engaging with your customers on social media, your website can still inspire conversions and generate revenue. Any unexpected drops in traffic should be a cause of concern for your business. The San Diego web design experts at Saba SEO discuss a few reasons website traffic drops.
Not Targeting Your Audience Effectively
Just because your keywords were a perfect match for your target audience when your site first launched doesn’t mean this will be the case forever. A simple way to target your audience effectively is to think like a searcher and see what results come up when you perform a search for what your business offers. If your site’s link isn’t showing up prominently on the results page after your experiment, possible issues may include:
• Using keywords/terms that are too technical for your audience
• Not using long-tail or conversational keywords (which are more popular with searchers these days)
• Using keywords that are either way too specific or too general\
Lost or Poor-Quality Links
Dead Link Checker, Ahrefs, DeepCrawl, and W3C Link Validator are some of the tools you can use to check your website’s internal, external, and anchor links. When evaluating links related to your site, pay attention to:
• Whether or not a spike in lost links correlates with the pages that have also seen a drop in traffic
• The relevance and quality of your external link sources
• Broken links that need to be removed
• Links that may be nonfunctional because corresponding websites have been updated or changed*
*You may be able to contact site owners to secure updated backlinks.
Issues with a New or Redesigned Website
You may experience a dip in traffic if you redesign your website. However, if the issue persists, the reason may be improper 301 redirects from your old site to your new one. XML sitemaps, canonical tags, and links have to be updated.
If you just recently updated your site, this could be another reason for traffic drops. Use stats from your original site as a baseline to compare metrics for your redesigned site and identify the specific pages that are affected.
Server Problems
Server issues related to your site’s markup or caching functions can prevent search engine crawlers from scanning your webpages correctly. To identify server problems, check your server logs and use the Fetch and Render tool to see how URLs are being crawled.
Manual and/or Automatic Penalties
Google has two ways to penalize websites: automatic and manual penalties. Automatic penalties are generated based on what crawlers are finding. Manual penalties are site-specific issues discovered by Google employees. Accumulated penalties you haven’t resolved can affect your website’s performance. If there are issues, make an honest effort to fix them and you’ll likely see a return to more desirable traffic patterns.
Other Potential Problems
There are a handful of other issues that could also be affecting your website’s traffic in some way. In some cases, a combination of factors could be making your site less visible online. Possibilities include:
• A website that isn’t optimized for mobile visitors
• Inconsistent or incomplete meta information
• Technical SEO issues (e.g. no HTTPS security, lack of a sitemap, indexing issues, missing robots.txt files, slow page or site speed)
• Duplicate content issues
• Poor internal navigation structure (may cause crawlers to stop scanning all content on your site)
If you’ve ruled out significant issues with your website, reevaluate the offsite steps you’re taking to steer traffic your way. Are you sending inconsistent or mixed messages with your email, social, and blog content? Do your paid ads have links to relevant landing pages on your website? Are you active on platforms your intended audience frequently uses? Also, consider how well you’ve been keeping up with Google’s latest changes, especially anything related to mobile activity
Increasing website traffic can be a difficult task. If you need help boosting your online visibility and conversion rates, turn to Saba SEO, a San Diego SEO company you can trust. For over ten years, we have designed customized and highly effective search engine optimization strategies for businesses all around the world. Our experts rely on a variety of white hat SEO tactics to enhance your brand image, encourage conversions, and mitigate the effects of bad publicity. Whether you need a review of your existing marketing plan or an effective SEO strategy from scratch, give us a call at 858-277-1717 today.