Why Did My Web Traffic Drop?
From updating old blog posts to using a detailed content calendar, here are seven answers to the question, “What are some reasons web traffic may have dropped?”
- Posting and Ghosting
- Website Redesigns and Changes
- Product Seasonality
- Unsatisfactory Search Intent
- Credibility Marker Attribution
- Poorly Timed Content SEO
- Keyword Cannibalization
Posting and Ghosting
Neglecting your old blog posts may signal to search engines that your content is no longer relevant or up-to-date, especially as newer posts from your competitors get noticed.
Always go back to your older blog posts every few months to give them a nice facelift with new imagery, updated information, and fresh copy.
Check out your Google Search Console analytics to see what keywords you can add or optimize to the article, and always make sure you include the date of your latest revisions in your article.
Once your updates go live, submit the URL to search engines so they can see that you have refreshed your content.
Caitlin Strempel
CEO, Rising Ranks Digital
Website Redesigns and Changes
Redesigning your website or implementing other on-site changes can be beneficial for long-term SEO success, but it can also lead to a temporary drop in traffic. Changes made on your website require Google to re-crawl and re-index pages, which can cause a delay in your rankings.
Use caution when making modifications, as they can cause technical mistakes, dead links, and other problems that have a damaging effect on user satisfaction and search engine rankings. To ensure you keep search engine optimization in mind, make sure you are communicating properly with the designers and developers of these projects.
Sydney Wess
Senior SEO Specialist, Clutch.co
Product Seasonality
Some products and topics are naturally seasonal, and websites that provide these products, or information on these products, will see different levels of traffic at key moments throughout the year.
Some examples of websites that will be subject to significant seasonal fluctuations are gardening blogs (more popular in summer, less popular in winter), ski blogs (more popular in winter), and travel booking sites (most popular in spring and summer).
Sports sites will also receive more traffic when a season is in session, or close to the end of a tournament. Corporate sites receive less traffic during weekends and holidays. Seasonality is a normal and predictable aspect of many websites and businesses.
Claire Ransom
Content Strategist, Copywriter, and SEO Expert, Aloha Life Digital LLC
Unsatisfactory Search Intent
User intent is one of the most critical elements of SEO and UX. You can have the catchiest headline, the slickest web design, and the most convincing CTAs in place, but if your content doesn’t satisfy intent, searchers will bounce. Now, sometimes intent changes.
Maybe the term you once ranked for no longer has the same intent. When that happens, you’ll drop rankings in the SERPs and lose traffic. Analyze the SERPs and use your favorite keyword tool (like SEMrush) to identify the intent of your target keyword and the content that satisfies that query, and ensure your content satisfies searcher intent.
Dan Ansaldo
Owner and SEO Expert, CopyTrends Marketing
Credibility Marker Attribution
In the age of AI, Google is turning to credibility markers enshrined in E-E-A-T to validate content authors’ contributions. If your traffic suddenly drops, first ensure all your content attributes to an actual human. Ensure that humans have a deeply detailed biography on your site that outlines exactly why they are a credible topical authority.
Include direct mentions to link the deep biography to all the sources across the internet, including other biographies, social media accounts, and websites.
Consider this project like building out their entry for Wikipedia on your website, so this page becomes the most robust source of truth for the individual available. Then, don’t forget to list all their content contributions to your site beneath, like blog cards. Truth, transparency, and clarity will win every time.
Brant Soler
Technical SEO Expert, The SEO Consultants
Poorly Timed Content SEO
One of the contributing factors why website traffic may have dropped is because of the content, and this is classified as content SEO. A rule of thumb with content SEO is to remember that users are searching for information, and if your website doesn’t deliver information within a 2-3 second time frame, they will leave.
That is why I advise that short 30-60 second explainer videos on relevant pages can get the user’s attention. That same video can advertise across different marketing channels, such as email, social media, YouTube, and optimize the video with a backlink to your website.
Website owners shy away from videos because they don’t have the resources to make the video; however, by introducing AI text-to-video tools, what was once a huge production can be done in minutes.
Think about it this way: would you prefer to read through paragraphs of long or short-form content, or would you prefer it to be delivered in video form so you can get information instantly?
Molly Youngblood
Digital Marketing Director, Design Right 4 U
Keyword Cannibalization
This happens commonly to sites (e.g., online publications and e-commerce sites) with large amounts of content. Businesses need to be very strategic with their content and shouldn’t be publishing any type of content they want just because they want to, or just because others are doing it.
If we publish too much content without intent, we can easily lose track of what topic we have already covered. As a result, you end up with multiple pieces of content that target the same keyword.
Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on a website target identical or closely related keywords, leading to internal competition that negatively affects the site’s organic performance.
To avoid this, marketers need to use a detailed content calendar to keep track of the various topics they will cover, as well as the keywords each page is targeting.
Nigel Seah
Co-founder, Writing Wildly
Submit Your Answer
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