Has your website seen a drop in organic traffic lately? It is very easy to panic if you lose significant rankings for your keywords, but in most cases the change is short-term and full recovery is often possible. More importantly, there are steps you can take to find out why your website traffic decreasing and rankings have also decreased. Once you identify the causes, you can come up with a plan to help you get back where you want to be.
So, here are five possible reasons for the organic traffic drop for your website:
1. Changes to Search Behavior & Trends
Google’s search algorithms are constantly changing. With these changes, there are additional changes to the way search results are returned to users. But that doesn’t mean things are completely out of your hands. If your website’s key landing pages have seen low organic traffic and rankings drop, it may be worth updating your keyword goals to make sure you are up to date with the sorts of things people are actually searching for. Google Trends is a good place to start, as it can help you assess whether your specific keywords have been declining gradually or sharply. In addition, you can also refer to Search Analytics data from the Google Search Console to get an up-to-date overview of what users are currently looking for to find your products and services.
2. Neglecting Technical SEO
It is fair to say that a lot of people are busy creating new content for their websites and thereby neglecting the technical basics of SEO. Technical SEO is a hugely complex topic, but here are some key points you might want to consider at the beginning:
- Do you have multiple pages that deal with similar topics or target the same keywords? Make sure these pages are properly canonicalized to point to the original page for search engines to return.
- Is your website optimized for mobile devices? Not only is it more for people searching on mobile devices, but it’s also one of the top ranking signals from Google.
- Are your pages loading slowly? Again, the page load speed was taken into account some time ago in order to determine the search ranking.
3. Uninformed Site Changes
In addition to the basics of search engine marketing, it is common for some developers to make changes to their website without informing their stakeholders and the marketing department. So, if you see a drop in organic traffic, it’s a good idea to check with your developer quickly to see if there have been any significant changes to the site. In addition to any unreported changes made by your developer, be sure to review any new content that others have added to the site that may conflict with key landing pages on your site.
4. Manual or Algorithmic Penalties
If your website has seen a significant drop in organic traffic, you may have been subjected to a manual or algorithmic. If your site is flagged as violating Google’s quality guidelines, a manual sanction will be imposed and your ranking will be penalized. Hence, manual penalties are easy to spot as you will be notified with a Google message in the Manual Action section of your Google Search Console account. Knowing if you have been hit by an algorithmic penalty can be difficult because you will not receive notifications like you would with manual penalties. So, if you’ve seen organic traffic decrease or are worried about why my organic traffic drop? check your website for any harmful backlinks you’ve recently acquired and identify any duplicate or misspelled content.
5. Lost External and Internal Links
When looking for a web development company, you shouldn’t just look for people who provide quick service and disappear. Ideally, the relationship between you and the agency of your choice should represent a lasting partnership through which you can support other business areas tomorrow, not just the website. In fact, the most important task of any web development company is to provide its clients with an attractive and powerful website. However, the viability of any website is only tested with collected data 23 months after its launch and depends on your marketing strategy. Therefore, when choosing a website development company, make sure that they are willing to establish a long-term relationship with you. In this way, your needs can be met not only at the beginning but also over a longer period of time, there could be any of the above reasons for drop in organic traffic.
If you need help with your website rankings don’t hesitate to contact us at 9326906669 or enquiry@finplus.co.in
