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Website traffic must be constantly increasing, or at the very least, remaining stable over time.

When your traffic begins to decline, what will happen to your business strategy?

Website Traffic:

Visitors to your website are counted as “traffic.” Having a higher amount of visitors to your site indicates that you have more opportunity to advertise, engage with your audience, and ultimately converting them. There are various types of traffic for website.  You can learn more from our content  of The Type of Website Traffic for Business 

Business losses and lower revenue:

Any business that has an online presence needs a lot of web traffic in opportunity to expand its brand, build relationships, and end up selling its product or service. Businesses lose money and make less money if their website’s search engine traffic drops unexpectedly.

For businesses, nothing is more alarming than learning that their web traffic has suddenly fallen. In general, lower levels of search traffic are associated with poorer profits, however this isn’t always the case.

The Importance of Website Traffic:

• The greater the number of visitors that visit your website, the greater the number of prospective customers you will have.
• Website traffic is one of the most essential key performance metrics for the majority of organizations.
• Traffic leads in queries and sales, and repeat visits from the same users result in returning customers.
• When your website’s traffic suddenly falls or its rating plummets, you will miss out on valuable conversion and sales possibilities.

Search engine algorithm updates are the most likely reason for a sudden decrease in traffic. Other legitimate reasons for a decrease in website traffic include penalties, redirection, erroneous robots.txt regulations, and ranking losses.

Common Reasons Why Your Site Traffic Dropped

For site administrators, it’s even more concerning when traffic dips don’t seem to have a specific cause. Even a slight decline in traffic could be the effect of a number of independent or codependent conditions that affect your site’s ranking and visibility.

There are a range of reasons why traffic to your site has been dropping, including technical issues, recent website modifications, Google algorithm updates, and poor optimization.

1. Website Design & Recent changes

Check for recent modifications in addition to detecting the obvious hosting difficulty.

Changes in design sometimes have an impact on load times, which search engines may not like.

 

Use Google Analytics to check if all traffic sources are dropping or just one in specific.

Finally, keep an eye on the SERPs (search engine results pages) and, if you haven’t already, start checking up on them.

A few things that keep an eye on are as follows:

• The 301 redirects have been properly marked out.
• All of the images are loading perfectly.
• There are no issues with the content.
• On your new site, the inbound link system is working.

Keep monitoring Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Page Speed Insights to see if any changes have happened in the traffic sources and to check for particular onsite issues.

2. Keyword Cannibalisation

A keyword cannibalization problem may have happened if you’ve lately published a large numbers of additional content on a particular topic without considering the keyword targeting.

When a website appears for a keyword with several URLs, it is refereed to as “cannibalization.”

Ahrefs.com, for example, has a lot of content about building broken links:

The term “keyword cannibalization” means the practice of having many pages on your website competing for the same search term.

 

As a result, you may have mistakenly optimized a number of pages for a keyphrase that is already being optimized for on another page.

3. Algorithm updates & trends

If you see a significant drop in your web rankings, an algorithmic upgrade may be to responsible.

For example, Google’s algorithm upgrades include changes to factors that help provide the most relevant results based on searches submitted, page relevancy, quality of content, and uniqueness. As a result, your website may have been penalised by Google.

Google has made several calculated adjustments to its algorithm (known as Panda and Penguin) over the last few years in an attempt to optimize the general quality of search results.

For example, Panda penalizes low-quality sites for their content, whereas Penguin looks at the quality of links and does the same for sites with unnatural backlinks. As a consequence of these updates, traffic may have dropped.

 

A situation in 2012, when multiple websites experienced great traffic losses as a result of an algorithm update, is an example of a website traffic issue caused to an algorithm upgrade. The Penguin Algorithm Update was launched in this year, and link-building techniques changed significantly.

Google Search Console is a good place to search for any notifications or warnings. You may also check Google’s Manual Actions area to see if your website has been penalized for non-compliance or breaking guidelines.

Focus on providing high-quality and useful material rather than using cheap or unscrupulous tactics to help avoid these difficulties.

4. The Tracking Code ( Tracking errors)

A change or issue with the site’s tracking code is one of the most neglected causes of traffic declines (supposing someone is depending on something like Google Analytics).

If you’re using an analytics plug-in or making adjustments to your website’s code, you may see differences in your analytics statistics. Before pursuing any other avenues of investigation, make sure the tracking code is accurate.

Although it’s an easy correct, you’ll miss out on valuable information if it goes undetected for too long, so the sooner you identify it the better!

Preferably, speak with your programmers and make sure the tracking code is in the right place and functioning properly.

5. Ranking losses

Drops in rankings and decrease in organic traffic can both be attributed to changes to your website’s code. Loss of organic ranks is a common cause of decreasing website traffic.

In this case, troubleshooting is made much simplified by using a ranking tracker. Google Search Console data will be your best option in the event that you aren’t.

In order to get a sense of any changes in rankings, perform the following steps:

• Use Google Analytics and Search Console or your favourite rank tracking tool to identify when traffic started to decline.
• Take a picture of the top-ranking keywords before and after the modification.
• Make a table in Excel and paste the data in one column after the other.
• Evaluate the change in positions.
• Use keyword research and mapping to re-target dropped terms.

6. Trends Over Time

Examine trends over time for total traffic and the associated segments while assessing traffic on client applications.

There are many factors to consider when determining whether or not a decline in traffic is normal.

As soon as the baseline has been determined, look for anomalies and isolate the problems with a cause-and-effect analysis.

7. Server Overload

In the case that a website goes down, web server overload should be the first thing to be addressed.

Many times, the website is overwhelmed by the number of users who attempts to enter it.  However, it may be that a Googlebot met an empty markup.

Check if the issue is with Google’s servers by using the Fetch and Render tool in Google Search Console. SEOs and webmasters can use this to see how a URL or page on their site is crawled or generated.

8. Competitors are steadily improving.

It’s possible that a decline in traffic isn’t attributable to any changes you or Google made, but rather to your competitors boosting their game.

Assess and analyze the actions, SEO methods, and content of your competitors. Collect data on their backlinking activities, keywords they’re utilizing, and other activities they’re conducting using competition analysis tools like Semrush.

Work with an SEO firm instead to swiftly establish what methods your competitors are using and how you may exceed them, as well as to have them carry out the necessary activities correctly.

Figuring out who is ahead of you in the rankings and how they are performing you will highlight what you need to do to exceed them.

9. Failed redirects

Broken redirects may be to blame for a decrease in your rating, especially if you’ve recently launched a new website or moved to the new server.

Make sure you have a 301 redirect plan in place. 301 redirects inform search engines that a certain page (or pages) on your website has been moved, and you’re requesting that all visitors be directed to the new address rather than the old one.

When you move a page to a new URL, it will take some time for search engines to detect it and rank it the same way it was earlier.

The use of 301 redirects is defined by your hosting site or server. Most platforms have solutions or plugins that make it simple to set up redirects.

10. Changes to the SERP layout

A significant update in how Google and other search engines display organic results could affect your traffic counts. As a consequence, making sure you’re flexible and open to change will help you a lot.

Google has made a lot of changes to the way results are displayed, like showing Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs, and increasing the prominence of ads, to mention a few, making life difficult for SEO businesses and professionals.

11.Page speed

Google’s new Page Experience update covers this very statistic under the Core Web Vitals, which affects the user’s experience.

A high bounce rate indicates to Google that consumers aren’t interested in your content when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Page speed is affected by a variety of factors, include large image files, inactive plugins, and the design of the website.

In order to see how your pages are performing, use PageSpeed Insights from Google.

If elements on your site are taking too long to load, consider fixing, updating, or deleting them. If you have a lot of large files on your site, you need to get rid of them.