Top ways to turn around declining website traffic

It is typical for your website to have a certain amount of fluctuation in traffic. However, when you see a major drop in traffic, the initial response is typically to undo the latest change you made. You should in fact do the opposite and not make any further changes whilst the change in traffic is analysed and monitored.

If you have seen a sudden drop in traffic then make sure it’s not just an incomplete dataset. So if you are looking at the present day traffic, you should know that not all of the traffic for the present day will be reported on.

You should then check with your IT department (if you have one) for technical changes implemented recently.. You need to rule out if your website has had any downtime or is loading very slowly. Also there could be a possibility that you or your webmaster may have accidentally deleted the tracking code from pages or the entire website. This will seem like you’re not getting any traffic at all even though nothing has changed.

However, if you have confirmed that this is a drop in traffic that isn’t caused by technical or external issues, then below are our top tips on boosting your falling website traffic;

Penalties

You may get a manual penalty from Google where you will see an immediate drop in traffic either on a specific page or your overall rankings. For most cases the drop in traffic aren’t usually related to a manual penalty from Google, so to confirm whether or not you have one is good. You can check for notifications on your Google Search Console.

However, if you do see the notification then it is probably for the tactics or content you have used that might have been classed as black hat, it could also be content that may seem like spam or has been plagiarised. If your business is working with an SEO company then you will need to speak to them about why they would use tactics that are penalized by Google. Furthermore, you also will need to rectify the mistake in order to get rid of the penalty and regain your traffic.

Traffic Source

When it comes to traffic, it can be really helpful to find out what kind of traffic is dropping on your website. Whether it is paid traffic or organic, if it is paid traffic then you should consider to stop investing in recent campaigns or change strategies.

You should look into and compare your brand and non-brand traffic. When it comes to your brand traffic, you can see the website traffic from people who already know the brand rather than being driven by a product or service. A drop off in branded traffic may be influenced by external factors, out of your control.

Rankings

If your website has lost out to competitors or you may have just seen a general drop in website traffic, you can try to boost your rankings to make up for it. You can do this by creating content around your desired keywords that users will appreciate and find valuable.

Backlinks

By checking Google Analytics, and you have found that your referral traffic dropped, then it is time to look into your backlinks. If you have seen that a few pages have dropped in traffic and they also happen to have lost backlinks, you may have found your problem.

Not sure on how you can get your links reinstated? Well you can simply just send an email to those who used to link to your website and ask what’s going on and if they can link back to your website. In some cases it’s just a matter of refreshing your content to stay relevant or that your competitor has won the link. It could also mean that the content that used to link to your website has gone entirely.

If your website traffic is down, then it is vital that you turn back to the core ways you build an audience by offering your visitors valuable content and focusing on providing great user experience. By doing so your website will gain the rewards in traffic over the long term.

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