A drop in organic website traffic is nothing new – everyone who owns a website has experienced it at least once before.
However, it is not a pleasant experience to have. You go through the usual feelings of confusion, panic, and disbelief, and feel utterly let down by Google. But, here are the top 10 reasons you may be losing organic website traffic, so you’ll know where to start checking first.
Algorithm changes Organic Website Traffic down
Google is constantly updating its algorithms, changing, tweaking, and making sure the end results for the customers are increasingly improving. The bad news is that Google does not announce the update or the change, so it is up to you to try to figure out what happened.
Luckily, there are tools to diagnose website traffic loss, allowing you to see the timestamp your website traffic started declining, then you can check the date Google updated its algorithm.
Tracking the wrong rankings
The same keywords that have been relevant years ago are not the same ones that are searched today. If your website has been online for a number of years, your old posts may not be as relevant today as they may have been back in the day. Google’s natural language comprehension has been improved substantially, so that a more natural language can be typed in, and you will get results. If you keep your content in plain language, it will be easier to rank up.
Relying on organic SEO traffic
A smart move is to disperse your traffic multiple ways. If you are solely relying on organic SEO traffic, and Google changes its algorithm, your website may be jeopardized. With SEO constantly changing, evolving, improving, you will want to be prepared for any outcome, so, increase the variety of visitors to your website. Links from other websites, directories, forums, email newsletters, guest blogs, comments, and social media can all be sources of referral traffic.
You should have a strong and consistent stream of alternative web visitors as long as you don’t spam too much.
Geolocation
Google remembers your searches, your locations, and even your ratings. That’s why, when you log into your Google account and search for one sentence or term, and then log out and search for the same thing, the results will not be the same.
Because of these discrepancies, if you only check your ranks in one area, you’ll need to check them in numerous others to obtain a more exact and accurate picture of your rankings.
Bad quality content
Naturally, if your website is full of badly written content, then prepare to be penalized by Google. With its improvements, it will not allow bad content to get to the end user. And why should it? If you are searching for something, and you get offered a poorly written piece, full of grammatical and other errors, you would not be happy, right? Google has an algorithm that removes bad posts from the search, making it inaccessible to the end user.
If you want to rank high, make sure to produce quality content that will serve a purpose to the users, instead of just advertising.
No new content
Similar to the bad quality content, if your website’s last post was some years ago, it will not be visible in a search, simply because it is not relevant anymore.
Because Google loves new content, the more you upload, the more visible your website will be. But it matters what you upload. It cannot be just anything. It needs to be first, quality text, then informative, constructive, helpful to your customers, and fresh.
Poor link building KW
Bad links will definitely get you on the bad side of Google. If you use unnatural, spammy, or even outdated links, Google will penalize you. However, don’t fret, because google penalty removal is not as difficult as it may seem, so relax, and work on creating stronger link building strategies.
Too many keywords
Using too many keywords is another way to be penalized by Google. Even if you did not do it on purpose, Google flags down the content overflowing with keywords, and removes it from the search, making you lose organic traffic. Tone down on the keyword placement, and that’ll to it.
Broken pages and links
Sometimes, the links you are outsourcing in your text disappear. It can be due to them not being natural content, and being flagged, and penalized by Google, or sometimes links change during a site upgrade. Whichever it may be, you can always redirect those links to other, working ones, or edit them into something more useful to your content.
Page speed
The page speed has an impact not just on your rankings, but also on the user experience of your website visitors. Bounce rates are greater when pages take longer to load because people rarely want to wait to view your content.
Google changes constantly, and those changes affect everyone. If you are not careful enough, it will affect you too. Hopefully, these tips taught you how to stay on Google’s good side.
