Traffic fluctuations are a normal part of having an online presence. Most businesses will see traffic dip over a weekend or holiday or on any given day or week without a particularly good explanation. However, a sudden or steady decline in traffic should never be ignored as it is typically a symptom of one or more issues with the company’s web presence. This post describes 10 common explanations for a dip in organic traffic.
If you’ve recently updated your website or switched analytics tracking platforms, there may be an issue with the analytics tracking code. Double check to see if the code is placed on every single web page and there are no typos in the code. Check the guidelines for the platform you are using to see if the tracking code needs to be placed in a specific place on the page. For example, it’s best practice to place the Google Analytics tracking code right before the closing <head/> tag.
If you have multiple tracking codes placed on a site, such as a CRM and Google Analytics, be sure that both codes are firing correctly. In order to have two Google Analytics codes record a pageview, one of the tracking codes must be altered slightly. If one of these situations applies to you, have your developer test and debug all tracking codes on the site.
A website migration or major redesign can create a host of SEO issues from minor and temporary to major keyword ranking and traffic losses. Some common causes of a traffic drop after a major site overhaul include:
In order for a website to be included in the Google index, it must be easily accessible and crawlable. You also have to ensure that you’re sending the correct signals to the bots. Common issues that fall under this category include:
Google will penalize websites that it believes are not relevant, useful or safe. A manual penalty is issued by an actual Google employee, and can be given to any site or portion of a site that doesn’t follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. You will receive notice of this in Google Search Console including why you received the penalty. Once you’ve taken steps to clean up the issues, you can request a review to have the penalty removed.
Google also incorporates factors into its algorithms to prevent spammy websites from ranking. The Google Panda update focuses on content quality. The Google Penguin update focuses on poor link building practices.
If Google detects a spam or security issue on your website, it will give you a warning in the “Security Issues” section of Google Search Console. If this issue becomes widespread, it can lead to a manual penalty.
Many businesses will see a drop in traffic due to a decrease in search volume or following a time of heightened interest in a business or product. For example, some businesses see a steep decline during the month of December. These kinds of seasonality changes can be accounted for by comparing year-over-year traffic or by looking at Google Trends.
A loss of keyword rankings if often a symptom of many of the other issues laid out in this post. However, an isolated drop in keyword rankings (not a de-index) could indicate several things:
Marketers love to debate whether a blog should be placed on a subdomain or subdirectory. However, there are numerous case studies, and we’ve seen with our own clients that moving content (such as a blog) from the main domain of a site to a subdomain can cause a significant loss of traffic. How Google actually sees subdomains is somewhat murky, but for the most part, a subdomain will not share the same authority as the domain, making it less likely to rank and get organic traffic.
Removing a subdomain can also result in a traffic drop. If the subdomain has built up a substantial backlink profile that then passes authority to the main domain via internal links, removing that content could impact the main domain. Failing to redirect content on the subdomain to the main domain would also likely result in a loss of keyword rankings and traffic.
Many companies are choosing to switch from HTTP to HTTPS thanks to Google’s indication that it will boost keyword rankings. However, if this transition isn’t handled carefully it can actually result in a traffic drop. On top of all of the best practices for a site migration- 301 redirects, updating canonical tags, updating internal links- be sure to submit a second property to Google Search Console with an updated sitemap.
Publishing or republishing content to a 3rd party site isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, if the 3rd party has significantly more authority than your website, the 3rd-party content may end up ranking instead of your content. Publishing all content on your website first, using canonical tags, and linking from the 3rd party back to your site are all good practices to prevent this issue.
A major rebranding requires significant planning and attention to detail to not impact organic traffic. In addition to everything listed above under website migration/redesign, consider the following:
As these explanation show, a drop in organic traffic is far from a mystical problem. By knowing where to look, you can recover a traffic loss and in the process will likely discover opportunities to attract more traffic than you were before.
