What to do if your Website Traffic Goes Down – SEO Tip #037

If you’re like most businesses, you rely heavily on organic traffic to your website. So what do you do when that traffic starts to drop?

First, don’t panic! There could be any number of reasons why your organic traffic is down, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that your business is in trouble.

Here are a few things to check if your organic traffic drops:

1. Check your analytics to see if there’s been a sudden drop in traffic to specific website pages. If that is the case, then see if anything changed on those pages, like your meta tags, content or keyword usage.

2. Do an on-page audit to check your website for any technical, configuration or security issues that could be causing problems.

3. Go to Google Search Console and check the following sections for any issues:

• Page indexing

• Mobile Usability

• Manual actions

• Security issues

Fix any reported issues you find. If some of these are a little too technical for you, don’t be afraid to outsource the tasks.

4. Check your keyword rankings. The most common cause of organic traffic drops is the drop in keyword rankings. Going from page #1 to page #2 can greatly reduce your organic traffic.

If you notice ranking drops, here are some things you can do:

• Check if there was a recent Google update. When that happens, it’s normal for rankings to fluctuate, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just wait a couple of weeks for everything to settle down.

• Ensure that content, keywords and meta tags have not changed on the pages targeted by your keywords.

• Check Google Search Console (same items as step 3 above)

• Check if any new competitors are ranking for your keywords, which may have caused your rankings to drop.

If you are not tracking your rankings, try out KatLinks. We have an awesome rank tracking tool that will show your rankings and also help you spy on your competitors.

It’s not cool when your organic traffic goes down, but the above tips will help discover the cause so you can get your site traffic back on track.

~ Roberto