Not getting enough traffic? You know, it is not fair to blame Google and its countless penalties if your website is failing to generate enough traffic. Generally, many marketers try to navigate the world of organic traffic by hiring a good digital marketing agency. Although there is nothing wrong with this; however, this should not be your go-to method of dealing with declining organic traffic.
With that being said, here is a list of 13 things you could investigate in order to understand the organic traffic decline in a better way!
#1. Not Creating New Content
To keep the users engaged, you need to offer something of interest and great content just does that! Constantly serving fresh and engaging content will keep the users hooked which mean that users will definitely visit your page frequently.
On the other hand, not updating your website with fresh content would only result in low traffic numbers. Of course, why would anyone visit your website if they know they will not be getting anything useful?
#2. Ignoring Broken Links and 404-Errors
An active website with too many broken links or 404 error pages can impact your organic traffic. Often, individuals visit your website to gain information and if they get directed towards dead pages, they will abandon your website. This will result in the overall web traffic decrease.
Ignoring the issue of dead pages can also result in a penalty. To avoid this from happening, here is a free online link checker.
#3. Not Investing in a Mobile Version of Your Website
At this point, we can all agree on the importance of mobile design. So failing to invest in a mobile-friendly version of your website can prove to be a huge turn off for your online visitors and will remove its visibility from the search engines also as Google now follows the mobile-first index method.
Additionally, not investing in a mobile version means that you are not catering to the users coming from this medium. Also, since many individuals now use mobile to browse the internet, so this could be one of the reasons why you are not getting enough organic traffic. So, focus more on your mobile strategy for optimum results.
#4. Content Duplication
Content duplication happens when a single piece of content appears on the internet on more than one place. Duplicating content is not a huge problem; however, it also means that individuals are spending more time in duplicating than producing fresh content.
Users prefer uniqueness and fresh content, duplicating it would only hinder you from generating organic traffic.
#5. Experiencing Content Decay
Riding any content trend can go either way; it can last for a few years or can die within a few days. Although creating content in a trending niche can guarantee traffic, the interest in the trends does not last long enough to gain the loyalty of online consumers.
Moving on, if your website is built on a trend which is losing its spark, then you may have a serious problem on your hands. On the other hand, you may not face the same problems if your content was built around specific keywords that once had a spark. This is because you can easily ditch such keywords and optimize your content for fresher ones!
#6. Migrating to a Slow Host
Moving your website from one host to another one in hopes of saving money can have a dire impact in the long run. Cheap hosting may sound attractive and a cost-effective solution but it does so at the expense of your organic traffic. The end result is you not only losing your organic traffic but your overall revenue as well.
To know whether your website host is the culprit or not, you could utilize this tool as they come in handy when facing such issues.
#7. Problems in Analytics Tracking
Did you give your website a facelift recently? Or have you had someone new working at the back-end? If the answer to one of these questions is yes then the problem could very well be in your tracking pixel that is failing to maintain proper records of your online traffic.
If you are working with Google Analytics, you may want to ensure that your Universal Analytics are functioning properly across your entire website. Also, you could check it with the back-end programmers to ensure that they have not accidentally removed the tracking pixels from any specific webpage.
#8. Unnecessary Audit of On-Site Content
Not analyzing the quality of your content could also contribute to the drop in your overall traffic. For instance, if you have recently edited out a piece of high-performing content or if you are producing excessive content with no regards to its quality, you could be unintentionally causing a decline in organic traffic.
There are multiple ways through which you can keep this issue in check. You can carve out a high budget for your content needs or you can stop sharing too much content that nobody is reading.
#9. Website Lags or has Slow Load-Time
Online visitors prefer websites that fully load within a minimum of 3-4 seconds. If your website has a longer load time, then people would stop visiting your website gradually. Additionally, the internet is riddled with high competition, so if your website fails to load properly, visitors could always find something similar somewhere else.
A slow website not only causes the organic traffic to drop, but it also forces Google to penalize your website. So if you have not done anything about it, here a tool that can help you with it.
#10. Not Enough Focus on Media Spend
Another reason for the decline is that you do not have enough brand awareness, meaning that not many people know about your online venture. This is where media spend comes into the picture which is the amount of money that you spend on media to create brand awareness.
With that being said, you can invest in traditional media, digital marketing or into some other forms of advertisement.
#11. Subdomains and Main Domains
Moving content from your main domain to a subdomain could also result in significant loss of organic traffic. No matter how much money you spend on your subdomain, it will never share the same authority that your main domain has. Additionally, your subdomain will not be ranked better if it lacks authority meaning that you will not experience a massive increase in organic traffic.
The same goes for removing a subdomain. If you have built enough credibility through authentic backlinks and great content, then removing it from the online directory would result in a drop in organic traffic. However, you can redirect the visitors to your main domain to considerably solve this issue.
#12. Bounce Rate is High
If you fail to capture the attention of users through clever landing pages, what happens then? You get a high bounce rate! Although a high bounce rate does not directly affect organic traffic; however, it considerably impacts the metric that contributes to the loss of organic traffic.
With that being said, if your content is not up to the mark, you deliver substandard services, or your website fails to capture the attention of the visitors, they will bounce back! This will negatively impact the flow of organic traffic.
#13. Too Many External Publishers
Actively trying to produce fresh content for or republishing content on a third party website may not seem harmful. However, it could result in your website losing organic traffic. This is true especially if the third party website has more domain authority than your website. Also, with more domain authority, they have a better chance at search engine ranking which could funnel all the organic traffic towards their online venture.
You can deal with this problem by publishing the content first on your website. Also, canonical tags and proper backlinking strategies can resolve this issue.
The Takeaways
A sudden drop in organic traffic should never be considered as something mystical. This is because the above-mentioned explanations prove that this issue can be dealt with easily without having to look for Google’s penalties. By assessing your domains against these thirteen explanations, you will have a better idea of recovering your organic traffic quickly. So, this was our take on reasons that can cause a decline in organic traffic, let us know whether you found any of them helpful in the comments below.
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