Is Your Website Traffic Down? Here We Investigate it To Determine the Cause

Do not panic! There are many possible reasons for this...and not all are horrible (honestly). In order to create a recovery plan that works, your data investigation should take place in a thoughtful and systematic manner.

The "investigation Process" boils down to the simplest steps:

Validate that your problem is not a traffic one.
Learn from your data: Where does the drop originate?
What is its magnitude and duration?
How is your site making an impression?
Identify the root causes, and then find the solutions.
Assess the situation and decide if it's worth fixing.
As needed, create a game plan.

This article will concentrate on the first three steps. Take a deep breath. Now let's get into it. You have it!

How to find out if website traffic has dropped

First of all, identify if this drop in traffic is related to a real problem with SEO or marketing.

Website traffic measurement can be challenging with many tools and platforms. Plus, there are tons of metrics to analyze and understand. It doesn't matter if you are using Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics directly on your website to track traffic. There are certain key areas you can inspect to check if there is a problem with tracking.

This may seem silly to some, but it is the core problem for approximately 15-20% the cases we are faced with.

Here's a list of some of the most common reasons we've seen tracking on client sites.

A GDPR compliance banner was not properly implemented by a client, resulting in the client losing 95% of their user data for EU countries.
A website update, or migration, caused the UA tracking number to accidentally be dropped on all pages OR the entire site.
A website migration led to an unpublished GTM Container that had previously used the GA tracking codes.
An incorrectly implemented GA event labeled almost all users "returning visits" for a customer who focused reporting on new traffic. The result was an inaccurate new visitor report.

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These indicators are the most important to know if your traffic issue is a tracking issue.

Traffic is falling from multiple marketing channels (or all of them) and not just one channel (like search engine traffic).
Conflicting data. If Google Search Console (or the Facebook Ad platform) reports flat traffic/traffic increases, your analytics tool (likely Google Analytics), reports that traffic is up or down for the same channel.
These tools track traffic in different ways so they may not always report the same information. However, large deltas and increasing numbers may be an indicator that something is going right.

Is traffic really a tracking problem? Take it easy! The sooner you do it, the better. After you have fixed it, you will be able to invest in your business again. Email Marketing Tips That Work in 2021-22

How to Analyze and Digest Your Web Traffic Data

The next important box to examine is: Are the declining traffic levels normal? The obvious contenders are:

Seasonal changes
Intentionally retired services, products, or subdomains

If the drop is sudden, you should first understand the time frame and magnitude of the traffic loss.

Magnitude: Slight Drop, vs Sudden Drop
Time Frame: Significant vs Gradual

A sudden or major change can indicate something "breaking"/ "stopping" in general. It has not been indexed on your site, broken tracking, or paused your advertisements campaigns.

Slow and steady drops can be associated with site quality issues, growing rivals, wrong audience/brand alignment, as well as other issues related to marketing optimization.

The next step is to examine the obvious ways you can "break down" data. This will allow you to identify if the issue is specific or a platform, section, device, or part of your site.

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How should you start digging in?

Diverse digital marketing channels can be used, including PPC. The obvious social media channels include Facebook and Twitter. ), email and referral traffic.
It works across mobile, tablet, desktop and laptop devices.
You can use the same landing pages or sections of your website.
Crossing different countries, towns, or other geographic borders.

Keyword Rankings

You can use the Keyword Footprint to determine your site's Keyword Footprint. For both your site's Keyword Footprint, (e.g.

Web vs News Image Traffic vs News News

E.g. If your site is moved to an outside CDN, it will lose Google image traffic, as that traffic isn’t going directly to your domain. WordPress and Finding the Best WordPress Plugins for Free

Competitors

It doesn't matter if they're direct or indirectly. Examples:
Google began to rank Clutch review websites for service terms instead of business services pages (indirect online competition in that you're competing to rank for the same terms).
A moving target is high search rankings. If you invest in content and link-building, your competition could be ahead.

Actual Search Result Pages

Search engines try new things all the time. You may see your free listing drop if you use "Featured snippets", "People Also Ask", or new ads and ad type.

Rapid (or slowly!) Changes in search behavior

Hello, Coronavirus.

Technical SEO Questions

One example is a crawling/access problem. Another example is an indexing issue. Another problem could be your pagespeed. With the Core Web Vitals algorithm update, the link between SEO and UX is even stronger.

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SEO Website Quality Issues

How to Find Out What Causes Your SEO Traffic Loss

At this point we know something is wrong. We should find out more about it and its impact. What now?

Understanding the WHY behind traffic pattern change.

NOTE That this process assumes that your company actually cares for traffic loss. It's well worth the effort to recover it. This is not always true. For example, you may lose traffic after you retire a service offering.

External Causes of Dropping SEO Traffic

Traffic drops due to external causes aren't caused by your actions... but could be the result your inaction. This is not a simple task. It takes a long time to solve these problems.

Algorithm update

You shouldn't be going "by book". That's fine. Google's continual efforts towards improvement can mean that even the most successful brands sometimes lose traffic. Quality is an ever-changing goal.

Google Core Updates, and algorithm changes to older ones, are everywhere in SEO news. They can make it easy (sometimes) to understand why your traffic was affected. Tools, such as Panguin, can help you visualize the above by overlaying your traffic update with known and suspected algo changes. Marie Hayne provides more information on the updates from.

A Google Penalty

While telling yourself it's OK, have you been secretly violating Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines while saying it's OK? Begin by looking at the Search Traffic > Manuel Actions section to determine if there has been a notification. If there are, you may still have a ways to go. Google has some helpful documentation on manual penalties.

SERP Modifications

Look at the SERPs of search engines results pages for key queries for which you are losing traffic. There may be a feature that you are unfamiliar with (on mobile or desktop) Google is constantly improving the search experience for users. Your SEO organic could be affected even if your keyword rank is static.

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Keyword Ranking Fluctuations

If you have experienced a drop in rankings, track the queries that led to it (via GSC), and find out if the problem is technical. Sometimes these are A/B test Google is running, other times it's an algorithm bug, or sometimes these changes are due to competition. If you're curious, see Google Webmasters’ Tweet.

Evolving

When creating pages and deciding on keywords to target, search intent should be considered. If your pages perform well but show a slow decline, this could be due to the user intent changing. It's important to know which keywords you should target to increase SEO organic traffic.

The Competitive Landscape

If you notice that your rankings are declining and you favor other sites, then check out those sites. What's changed? What can they do better than yours? How many new backlinks are they able to build? How can they be more aligned with the user’s search intent? (And please be objective!)