How to diagnose why your SEO traffic is down

Are you getting less leads than you used to? calls, emails, sales and conversions down? Are you logging in to Google Analytics and seeing that you have a drop in your SEO traffic and rankings, but you’re not sure as to why or what to do about it even if you did know.

Below we have created a few possibilities on why your SEO traffic is down and how to maybe avoid it happening again;

Google Analytics

First, identify where the loss of SEO traffic is, you do this by checking your Google analytics platform. Whether you think your analytics is set up correctly or not, you should always double check because having a small issue with analytics setup is actually quite common. This could happen if you have given someone access to your website and they may unintentionally messed up the tracking code.

It could just be one simple problem within your website that could be messing up the traffic report, for example the blog section of your website. This may not have a proper tracking code placed. If you think this is the case then you can use a software that can check your Analytics. This would help identify any potential traffic issues, which can confirm it’s not simply a tracking issue.

Robots.txt

Secondly you should check your robot.txt because it may have changed over time, this could also be a possibility as to why you are seeing a drop in SEO traffic, even though your traffic from other channels has remained the same.

Whether your robots.txt has been setup correctly in the past or not, you should check the file for “disallow: /” or any meta robots tags using noindex in the head of a page’s source code. This is something that tells the Google search engine not to show your website in search result pages. So when you crawl your website, whether it may be frequently or once in a while, a ‘disallow’ or ‘noindex’ in the robots.txt file can kill rankings and your online presence.

Algorithm updates

When it comes to checking if the decrease in your SEO traffic is caused by an algorithm update, you will need to check Google analytics against known algorithm change dates. There are various tools that can help you do this easily.

If you have a tool that can do so then you should select the appropriate account, profile and view and select the correct timeframe to see if your drop in traffic matches up with any algorithm updates. However, if the decrease in traffic is not within 3 days of an official update, then the drop in traffic is likely caused by something else.

Keywords

Keywords are important to any SEO strategy and it just may be that the ones you are currently using are outdated or may just be over optimising content. Although searchers are typing more complete sentences rather than using keywords, it is difficult to get a lot of traffic just on the keywords alone.

If you are tracking generic keywords, then it may be about time to update your keyword strategy as this may be one of the reasons why your traffic is dropping.

There may be the possibility that you are over optimising, for example if your keyword phrases appear too often on any given page, then you’re using the keyword too much and over optimising your content. Over optimised anchor text on external links is usually the main problem when it comes to a decrease in your SEO traffic, which is due to over optimisation. With Google’s Penguin algorithm update, they will penalise your website for over optimised anchor text.

Are you still struggling to find the reason why you’re experiencing a drop in SEO traffic?  Contact one of our specialist to help you with all your seo services and increase your website traffic.