To ensure that your site experiences a real drop in traffic, go to the interface of your tracking tool.
You can review your traffic using Google Analytics considering it is the best-known web analysis tool and one of the tools we regularly use at DMT Lahore SEO agency. You can also check the traffic using the Search Console. To find out the sources of traffic, see the “Acquisition” report, “All traffic” then “Channels”.
There are 8 levers of web acquisition:
- Paid: traffic coming from advertisements such as sponsored links on search engines
- Display: traffic from banner and video graphic advertisements on the network of Google and Bing partner websites
- Organic: traffic from natural results coming from any search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo…)
- Social: traffic from social networks
- Direct: traffic resulting from sessions for which the user entered the website URL in the address bar of his browser or put it in his favorrites
- Referrer: traffic from websites other than search engines and social networks or visitors that Analytics cannot classify
- Email: traffic from emailing campaigns and newsletters (provided you have tagged them and put “email” for support)
- Affiliate: traffic resulting from advertising campaigns (in the form of advertising banners) managed by advertising networks
Then ask yourself at least the questions below:
- Is this an overall drop in your traffic or does it relate to a particular acquisition channel?
- Is it a sudden or gradual fall?
- Has it lasted for several days, weeks or months?
- Are there peaks of visits during the period?
- Is this a general decrease or does it only affect the part of your site (home page, category pages, product or service pages, blog articles, etc.)?
- Have you recently updated your site or your content?
- Does it lower the conversion?
- Are you seeing the arrival of new competitors on the internet?
You see a sudden and temporary drop in traffic
Server problem
An internal server error on your installation or at your host made your website unavailable for several minutes or even a few hours.
For some sites, such cuts can lead to considerable loss of traffic and therefore money. For example, a failure of the Amazon site in 2013 for 40 minutes would have made them lose $ 5 million.
> Solution: change host if server failures or slowness are recurrent.
You notice a gradual but punctual decrease
Your traffic goes down gradually for a certain period of time but after a few days (or weeks), it returns to its usual level.
Seasonality
Certain activities are subject to seasonality, such as Eid or Ramadan can affect users and they may not be interested in your services during this particular time. In addition, it is common to record a decrease in the number of visits during public holidays and long weekends.
To ensure this seasonality, you need to compare the traffic period (where you have seen a decrease) with the same period in previous years.
> Solution: Do you notice a seasonal effect? Do not panic. This drop in traffic is not worrying.
You notice a gradual and prolonged loss of traffic
The number of visitors to your website is slowly decreasing but this has been going on for some time.
Your site no longer meets the expectations of your users
An obsolete design, a bad user experience, unpleasant content or a site that is not compatible in a mobile version … your website may no longer satisfy regular visitors to the point of not coming back more or less often. In this case, the decrease in traffic mainly concerns direct traffic.
> Solution: perhaps consider a redesign of your website and update your editorial strategy.
Your competitors have overtaken you
New entrants in your sector that make the competition fierce or your main competitor who reaches the first positions of Google, occupied until now by you, on keywords with high potential can make you tumble in the classification of SERP.
According to a study by the DMT group, going from the first position to the second, you go from 35% click-through rate to 16%, or half as much.
> Solution: check the positioning of your keywords with an SEO tool like SEMrush or Search Console then set up a SEO strategy or intensify it if you already have one in place.
Your communication actions are close to nothing
You no longer publish on social networks:
For some time, you may have abandoned one or more social media. Remember, they are a real gold mine for your business, in particular by attracting Internet users to your site.
By being less or more active on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedln…, social traffic is directly impacted.
> Solution: regularly publish content, without abusing it so as not to tire your subscribers.
You have bracketed the production of content:
Do you publish blog articles less often? Do you write much shorter content? Have you changed your theme? These editorial changes can have an impact on organic traffic.
> Solution: regularly write original, interesting and relevant content for your targets.
You have stopped your emailing campaigns:
As soon as you stop sending email campaigns or newsletters (or if they are less relevant than before), email traffic drops.
> Solution: send emails and newsletters with subjects that interest your recipients.
Incorrect configuration of Google Analytics
You think your web traffic is dropping but maybe in reality, it is not and that it is your traffic monitoring tool that is problematic.
Perhaps you have incorrectly configured certain filters, deleted the tracking code, ill-configured Analytics following a redesign … the causes are vast.
> Solution: check your Analytics account, install the correct tracking code, configure your account and filters correctly.
You are the victim of a Google penalty
A sanction (manual or algorithmic) from the famous search engine is one of the main causes of a fall in organic traffic.
If you are penalized with a manual penalty, you will be notified in the “Manual actions” tab of the Search Console and you will know the reason: spam generation, the existence of hidden content, excessive use of keywords, presence of links. artificial to or on your website …
> Solution: if you have been the victim of a negative SEO attack, find the links in question, contact the webmasters to ask them to delete the links, update the link disavowal file. If your content has been plagiarized, contact the site administrator to ask him to delete or modify the content. There are other solutions but they will depend on the type of penalty.
Stopping or reducing online advertising
Do you advertise Adwords, Bing or Facebook? If you stop it or decrease it, you will necessarily experience a drop in traffic …
One of the great advantages of advertising on search engines is to benefit from a better positioning by hoping to appear above the natural results on the first page.
In return, you will understand if you stop, decrease or make poor optimization choices, you may no longer appear in the search results (or at least, not in a good place).
Your site has been hacked
A hack, an intrusion or a virus can make your web pages unavailable.
If this is the case, Google may display the message “it is possible that this site may have been hacked” in its search results (see print screen below) or in the “Security problems” section of the “Security and manual actions ”on the Search Console.
Suffice to say that if users see the message in Google’s SERPs, they will not seek to consult your site. In this case, traffic loss affects all sources of traffic acquisition.
> Solution: remove all traces of piracy and request a review of your site via the Search Console.
The redesign of your site was badly done
Unrealized redirects
Your URLs have been rewritten, some pages moved or even deleted, you have switched to https and since then, traffic has decreased. The provider in charge of redesigning your website may have forgotten to redirect these urls.
In all cases, if the urls of your site are not redirected to the news, your visitors will end up on error pages.
It’s a safe bet that if they land on these 404 pages, they will flee your website and go to visit those of your competitors without returning.
> Solution: ask your web service provider to carry out a redirect plan and redirect the old URLs to the new ones.
Unindexed pages
It is also possible that the developer has made certain content non-indexable by search engines by inserting the Meta tag “noindex” in the code or by deleting certain urls in the Search Console.
> Solution: use Google Search Console and inspect your code to find and correct errors
Access to search engines denied
Another cause is that access to Google, Bing, Yahoo or others is prohibited in your robot.txt file. If so, some pages or your entire site will not be crawled by search engines.
> Solution: use Google Search Console or a crawler like Screaming Frog to find and correct errors
The slowness of your website
Too large files, too long loading time and your visitors leave your site as fast as they arrived. Remember, Google does not appreciate the high bounce rates. Little by little you will lose visibility.
> Solution: test the loading speed of your site with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to find the exact cause. You will probably have to lighten your pdfs, images or videos in order to optimize the loading time of your website.
The loss of the important link (s)
It may be that your webmaster has disowned backlinks that brought you a lot of traffic so far. Another hypothesis is that the site in question has deleted the page or only the link to your site (for reasons that only he knows).
> Advice: using tools such as Majestic SEO, check that one or more qualitative backlinks have not been deleted from referring sites.
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