There are times when you may find a decline in traffic to your website. This could be because of many reasons. It is important to look for ways that can help you to restore the traffic or improve it so that your website is back on track again.
Whenever this happens, monitoring your website traffic is the key analytic. It will show that people are finding your site and whenever used in connection with other website traffic statistics, you will find out who is having the access to your site and other details as well.
When the website traffic drops suddenly, it means that something has changed. Here are some of the things that you should check.
- Search Engine Algorithm Update
Google is one of the biggest search engines and it releases a number of updates every year to its algorithm.
These updates can affect the sites. Even worse, it can erase all the keywords and SEO factors that you were dependent on to help your website rank on top.
How to fix it?
Google does not release accurate details on its algorithm or any changes that it makes. There are just some guesstimations when these changes are made.
Therefore, some of the changes are confirmed by Google and other search engines. Besides that, some SEO and ranking factors can be fixed as well but other than that there are some long SEO games from updating the content to working with the keywords.
- Changes Made to the Website
If you have redesigned or revamped your website then it could be a reason why your traffic has been affected. For example, even a significant cull of the content may affect your website and lead to a drop in traffic.
How to fix it?
To know the abrupt changes that have been made to your website, simply go to Crawl in Google Search Console and check the Crawl errors.
This will also show you the broken links which you can fix anytime you want. In this case, you may need to use tools like a website auditor. This will help to remove the broken links and check what is being indexed on the website of yours.
- Manual Search Engine Penalty
It is easy to incur the wrath of Google bots and manual reviewers. Being hacked could be one of your concerns. Besides that, there are possibilities of other penalties as well that may have incurred which are easy to sort.
Types of penalties and ways to fix them
1.User-generated spam
It becomes tough for the users to generate content that is spammy with barriers like captcha. This can be simply prevented by getting rid of the content and placing a barrier.
2.Outgoing and sneaky links
There are paid-for links that you need to get rid of. These links earn your manual penalty points.
3. Duplicate contents
Pages that have a small number of texts like 250 words with 70 outbound links are not suggested for the quality you are looking for.
There might be many other types of issues that can cause you manual penalties from Google and other search engines. It is important to understand the algorithms so that your website is in shape and the penalties could be avoided.
- Keyword Cannibalism
The meaning of keyword cannibalism is when keywords across a lot of pages lead to a competition with each other. When your website grows and flourishes, this means there would be a lot of content posted every day.
It is important to check for the contents that are built unfettered and unmonitored as they can cause problems with organic search results. Try to make the contents great and useful in the first place.
How to fix it?
It is important to monitor your website and make sure that it appears in a good way in the search engines. You can prefer to use tools like Bigmetrics to know about pages that are competing and suffering from keyword Cannibalism.
This platform has a free trial and a paid version as well for the ones who are suffering from a larger problem.
- Competitors and SERPs Changes
SERP matters in the field of SEO. If your website has been experiencing drop-ins then it could be possible that there have been changes made in the keywords.
On the other hand, it could be possible as well that the competitors have become wise enough with your keywords and have staged a successful PPC campaign.
How to fix it?
It would be great if you could take back all the advantages you had over the competitors. This means you need to go for quick keyword analysis and knowing your rank by seeking help from platforms like RankTracker.
Time to Maintain the Position of Your Website
It takes a lot of hard work to bring your website on top. A sudden drop in the website can be frightening as well as startling.
There are ways which you can choose to get your website back on track and improve your position. It is important to identify the cause as soon as possible and make moves to help yourself.