5 Things to Check if Your Website Traffic Drops Suddenly

5 Things to Check if Your Website Traffic Drops Suddenly

Sometimes, you may notice that traffic to your site suddenly reduces. However, you may not worry as these things happen. However, any reputed SEO agency in Mumbai will tell you that the drop in traffic is not something you should ignore. That is why it is necessary to keep a close track of your Google Analytics so that you can ascertain whether the reduction in traffic is due to festive season, seasonal drop, or something more serious.

When traffic to your web property significantly drops, you need to check a few things to ensure you address the issues that are adversely affecting the traffic. Here are the five things that you should check when website traffic drops without a warning.

1. Changes to your website

If you have made significant changes to your website, such as migration to a new platform, redesigned the look and feel of the site, or cleared content, it will have an adverse effect on your site’s search engine optimization. When you take these measures, it affects the crawlability and indexation of your website.

You can go to the Google Search Console and look for crawl errors. Study the graph with care to see if the dip in the traffic occurred after the major changes. Google Search Console will also help you track broken links. You can pinpoint these links by using online tools like Website Auditor.

2. Violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines

Google uses human reviewers to check if websites violate the quality guidelines. If you have, you will be penalized. Here are a few things that infringe the guidelines stipulated by Google.

Spam Generated by Users: If you allow users to generate content and it contains spammy links, your site will be punished by a drop in ranking. You can easily rectify this problem by moderating comments left by users and using reCAPTCHA plugin to prevent spam content.

Unnatural Links: If your site has unnatural, sneaky links, such as paid links or through link exchange, you will be punished for them. It is imperative that the outgoing links from your website do not go to suspicious sites or are not cloaked. If yes, need to get rid of such links to get back your traffic and search engine ranking.

Duplicate Content: If you have plagiarised content across your website or even a single webpage, Google will punish you by dropping your ranking. This, in turn, will affect the organic traffic you receive. The same also holds true if your content that is not meaningful to visitors or your line of business. So, make sure that you do not have duplicate content and anything you post on your website should provide value to your target audience.

3. Update of Google algorithm

Google keeps changing and updating its algorithms. The core updates make news and you will be able to find out more about them online. However, when the tech giant updates niche-specific algorithms, you may not come to know of it. Hence, it is prudent to keep a close watch on your site’s SERPs for your chosen keywords.

Your SEO agency in Mumbai can monitor SERPs on your behalf using specialized tools. If they find the ranking of individual pages fluctuating quite a bit, they will analyze it to determine the reason and then take remedial measures.

4. Lost backlinks

If for some reason you lose high-quality backlinks to your site, it will adversely affect site ranking and the traffic the site receives. Get the best SEO agency in Mumbai to check the backlinks that your site has lost.

Once the SEO agency pinpoints the lost links, they will get in touch with the website owners to ensure your website regains those links. This will boost your SERPs and also ensure your traffic returns.

5. Competition

There are some instances wherein you lose traffic and ranking due to your competition. Under such circumstances, it is prudent to get your SEO agency in Mumbai to reverse engineer the up-ranked pages to figure out where your web pages are lacking.

Once you discover the weak points of your site in comparison to your competition, you can fix it and ensure you get back the lost traffic. Remember, when your competitors run PPC campaigns for the keywords that you are ranked high for, it will take traffic from your site and send it the competition. If this is the case, you need to bid more than your competition for the same keywords so that you enjoy targeted visitors.

These are the few things that you need to check if notice a drop in your website traffic all of a sudden. Consult the best SEO agency in Bangalore and Mumbai to help you through this issue in a hassle-free manner.

Staff Writer. Frequently covers tech, business psychology, social media, startups and digital marketing.