Websites are meant to be visited, but the truth is a bit more nuanced than that these days. Page visits mean different for different sites. For example, in media sites, traffic is a source of income through the ads, but for eCommerce sites, traffic has to redirect to sales. Whatever your concern, ranking equates to traffic in search engine terms, which in turn equates to customers. So, if you are a digital marketer, SEO professional, webmaster, or stakeholder, you might face a sudden traffic drop. And, at that point, it becomes vital to investigate the reasons for the decline in traffic numbers.
In the following section, we will look at some of the common causes of traffic drops, as New York SEO experts highlighted.
You might be tracking the wrong rankings
An older website will have several keywords that have lost all relevancies in the current market. If the industry and the niche terminologies do not align with potential customers, you need to strategize. You may also look for the best place to buy website traffic. People can ask different variations of the same question but not get answers which might be a reason for the traffic drop. These days searches are all about natural phrases, and keyword searches have changed from what they used to be even a decade back. Take a look at your keywords and phrases to identify the old and the generic. Make sure you aren’t tracking the wrong rankings.
Lost links
Another reason for traffic drops might be related to lost links. However, there are a few factors you need to investigate while figuring out lost links. It would help if you made sure of the following points.
- A sitewide link loss?
- Are the links all on the same page?
- Is there a drop from the inbound links?
Once you have figured out the cause and the reason for the lost links, you can either remove or replace them. However, make sure that intentional removal of links might be Google generated, which means you are okay with letting these go. In other cases, always ensure the replacement of old links with newer ones that work.
Broken redirects
During the launch of a new website or a switch to a new server, traffic drops can be commonplace without a proper 301-redirect. With a 301-redirect, you need to make sure that the XML sitemap, canonical tags, and links are updated. Keep in mind that the 301-redirect is vital as this sends the users to the new address and not the previous older domain. If you take care of the redirect, then you won’t lose traffic and rankings.
About manual actions
Penalties by search engines can be manual actions or automatic algorithm changes. If you notice that a particular page is doing worse on a specific search engine, then it might be the case of a manual action penalty. With penalties, you need to fix up as soon as possible to get it removed. Look for notifications in the search console account of the engine. Warning menus and manual actions tab will provide you with the relevant data as to manual and operative penalties.
With traffic, number drops, you need to rectify the situation as soon as possible through the best SEO strategies.
