The success of a website relies upon its traffic. Noticing the drop in your website traffic signifies that you have to work on your strategy to ensure a steady visitors stream. The subject is one to consider, and a Chicago SEO copywriting company points out possible reasons there might be a decrease in your website’s traffic.
Wrong Keywords
This issue usually affects sites that have been around for years. The keywords might be outdated since they first established their “right” keywords that have lost their relevancy in the meantime. Consider if the terminology in your industry domain is aligned with those your potential customers know and if they are familiar with them.
Also, Google has improved its natural language comprehension abilities to help people find desired results using their natural way of speaking. This considers a broader range of keywords, complete sentences, and other characteristics of natural language that users use in informal speech.
Google Algorithm
Google frequently changes its algorithm, meaning website owners have to pay attention to these swaps; otherwise, your website traffic and ranking can suffer.
Google makes daily changes to improve the user’s experience, and “core updates” and other significant changes occur a few times a year.
Informing yourself about algorithm changes and adjusting is the best practice for preventing a decrease in website traffic.
Manual Actions
Besides the Google algorithm, your website can also be penalized by manual actions. One of the indicators that your website has suffered from penalties is a continuous good ranking of your website in other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Opera. Also, you can look in the messages menu and the Manual Action section for signs indicating that the penalty has occurred. But the best way to comprehend if your website is under Manual Actions penalty is inside your account in Google Search Console.
Low-quality Content
Most website owners are aware that content is a crucial factor in attracting visitors. However, many of them get carried away by producing a high quantity of content and need to pay more attention to the quality aspect. But, as Google highly values quality content, it can “punish” low quality and deter users from websites whose content has a low word count and is irrelevant to users. For this reason, it’s imperative to have a strong content marketing strategy that supports SEO principles. Thus, content audit and removing useless content is a way to satisfy Google’s criteria.
Bad Linking
Link building is a strategy that contributes to website traffic. On the other hand, internal links can also harm the traffic, such as if they are irrelevant or no longer relevant, outdated and broken internal links, as well as PBN backlinks. With poor linking, Google can penalize your website and remove it from search ranking. These Google norms suggest examining the pages with doped traffic and finding out if the cause of these occurrences are expired or unreputable links.
Nofollow/Noindex code
Although this feature helps you prevent content duplication and has a few more benefits, this option also prevents Google from indexing your webpage. Checking the noindexing option can be intentional but also accidental, so it might be the reason for webpage traffic dropping that you are not aware of.
Tracking Codes
Tracking codes provide critical tracking information of performance, such as website traffic, measuring clicks, and other analyses of other activities of users. Understanding the importance of website traffic analytics and tracking codes is crucial to improving website performance and identifying any issues that may arise.
As tracking code must be placed in a particular section of webpages HTML code, you must pay attention to constant changes in code placement propositions—a misplaced tracking code in HTML results in a drop in traffic. Consider and examine if your tracking code is placed elsewhere than in the appropriate part of HTML.
SERP Layout
Search engine result page optimization is crucial for Google ranking. Optimizing a webpage to SERP layout considers rich snippets, graphs, images, and other features that Google prefers. Today, having the right keywords is not enough to please Google SERP, so consider implementing changes that are aligned with the new SERP layout:
- Apply bold text in direct answers to users’ questions
- Use bulleted lists
- Implement relevant images and graphs
Slow Speed
Website speed is crucial for providing a good user experience. However, it is also a website characteristic vastly preferable by Google. This implies that the website traffic will decrease if users and Google find your website speed poor. To be sure that your website speed satisfies the users and Google standards, run a speed test and test your website speed on various devices too.
Internal Navigation
Navigation on your website is essential for users as it provides them with a way to find desirable information. If your navigation is overcrowded and confusing, users will have difficulty finding what they are looking for, and it will take too much of their time, which will often result in users abandoning the site. On the other side, Google will probably stop crawling your content if it’s deeply buried in your website.
Make your navigation structured in two or three levels deep the most, narrow, clear, simple, and logical.
Final Thoughts
Besides the ten reasons above for a drop in website traffic, there are many more. Maintaining traffic is a challenging task and takes a lot of effort. As search engine algorithms constantly change and competitors improve, you need a comprehensive approach to obtain steady traffic. So keep informed about the best practice for increasing ranking and attracting traffic and supervise the latest updates.
