Reasons Behind your Sudden Drop in Website Traffic
Organic Search Traffic Drop
Has your website recently experienced a drop in website traffic? It’s all too easy to panic when you lose significant rankings for your key phrases, but in most cases the change is short term, and it’s often possible to make a full recovery.
Once you’ve identified the causes, you can work on a plan to help you climb back to where you want to be.
Reasons For a Sudden Drop In Organic Traffic
Algorithm Changes
A very basic reason, but no less important for the safety of your website. Sometimes Google will update their algorithm and, for a variety of reasons, this will be the cause of a drop in your website traffic. Drops caused in this way are not your fault. But you will still need to rectify the problem in order to move forward.
Making sure you are in line with the current best practices in SEO, using the best website management tools available
Technical Changes You’ve Made
Sometimes you need new infrastructure, a new address, new ways to deliver digital content, or a new layout. Any and all of these might potentially hamstring your organic traffic. It’s essential to continue running optimization efforts even after you’ve completed technical changes. Because you never know what potentially lost (or gained!) in translation.
Not Following Trends or Demographic Information
Your site is an extension of an idea and that idea might be popular or not. From buying shoes to opinion piece essays, being able to track the opinions and interests of your core audience is essential to ensure that they keep coming back. Not only that, but website trends – in terms of content creation, layout, etc – can also have a dramatic impact on your site.
Penalized by Google
Getting a penalty from Google is a big deal and one that needs to be remedied immediately. Google penalty is a situation where your site will no longer be ranked, meaning that your site will see a catastrophic drop in traffic. Always make sure your content custom-created for your site and has no plagiarized elements,. As well as never buy back-links, make sure your site is optimized for speed, fix site errors and broken links, and never stuff keywords. The way you run your site is always important!
Forgetting About Technical SEO
There are many aspects of SEO that constantly need to be maintained. Just like cleaning a house, you need to continually keep up with the daily operations of your marketing website. When it comes to tasks like maintaining the robots.txt file, digital page loading optimization, potential UX issues that need addressing, etc. You need to stay on top of them and ensure that they are as optimized as possible.
Boring Content, Boring Titles, Boring Descriptions
No matter what your marketing website does, it has content and it needs to be optimized. If you’re thinking that you aren’t Shakespeare so you won’t need to worry about long-form content, you are forgetting that page descriptions, titles, meta tags, and summaries are just as important as any other written content on your site! Make sure that the written content on your site is concise, catchy, and informative. Always make sure the content is unique as well!