Why Has My Google Traffic Gone Down?

For any business, a sudden drop in traffic can cause various emotions of panic and stress. Do not worry too much, as there is likely a reasonable explanation for why your traffic has declined.

As with anything in life, there are always those situations you have no control over. Sometimes it is a minor factor that can play the most significant role.

We will look at various ways your website traffic might have dropped, including solutions.

What Are Some Causes For The Drop?

There can be many reasons for your sudden drop in website traffic.

Below you will see a detailed explanation of everything that could have influenced your website traffic drop.

Did You Misplace Any Tracking Codes?

If you see there has been a drop in your site traffic, one reason for this can be because of unreliable data. Your website’s tracking code is a common area where this can happen.

For those of you that are unsure, tracking codes are lines of text placed within your website’s HTML.

It is then synced to Google Analytics to give you specific information:

• Tracking your website traffic

• Measuring your website’s click-through rate

• Tracking your KPI goals

• Analyzing any other activities that users might do that will influence your webpage.

When you are new to HTML or JavaScript, it is possible to accidentally place the tracking code in an unfamiliar place.

It is not always novice coders who make this mistake. Some of your more experienced coders can make mistakes like this.

Finding the problem in your code is essential because you want to get your website back to gain traffic.

What Are Manual Penalties?

You will be issued a manual penalty after a human reviewer at Google has been asked to look at your site.

A penalty will be issued if the reviewer finds that your site is not complying with Google’s guidelines.

What Type Of Manual Penalties Are There?

• Thin content

• Unnatural links

• Hacked Websites

• User-generated or pure spam

• Sneaky redirects

• Spammy structured markups

• Keyword stuffing or Hidden text

How Do I Fix Manual Penalties?

Fixes to manual penalties will be uncomplicated:

Penalty: Thin content

• Fixing it: You can add more content that is relevant to your industry.

Penalty: Unnatural links

• Fixing it: Do a full audit of the incoming links to your site. Ask spammy sites to remove the links they have of you. For links that couldn’t be removed, you can submit a disavow.

Penalty: Hacked website

• Fixing it: Do an audit of all the pages that have been hacked and remove them.

Penalty: User-generated or pure spam

• Fixing it: Look through your content, determine which classifies it as spam, and remove it.

Penalty: Sneaky redirects

• Fixing it: Inside your Webmaster Tools, you can use the “fetch as Google” tool to see how Google’s bot is reacting to your site. Remove any redirects that you feel can be seen as manipulative or unnecessary.

Penalty: Spammy structured markup

• Fixing it: Google has rich snippet guidelines which your markup should follow. Suppose your markups are hidden or misleading; removing them is the best. Google’s rich testing tool will give you a better insight into how your markups are doing.

Penalty: Keyword stuffing or hidden text

• Fixing it: If you see this penalty being issued, it’s time to look at your page’s source code. You can also look at the CSS to see if there aren’t any keywords hiding that you feel are being abused and remove them.

You can also look at your content and rewrite it. Take out the stuffed keywords and write with the user in mind.

Is This My SEO Consultant’s Fault?

It’s difficult to say whose fault it is because the reasons for manual penalties are diverse. That doesn’t mean you must trust the website editors in good faith.

You can always get a second opinion or do a self-audit on your website for any problems.

Are You Over-Optimizing Content?

Using duplicate content isn’t always considered malicious or deceptive. It is because Google sees large chunks of text on different websites or within the same website as similar or duplicates of other content.

Suppose your content is duplicated to manipulate your rankings and increase your traffic.

In that case, Google will penalize you because it thinks your content is competing for the same queries when there should be diversity.

When you get penalized, your ranking will suffer. There are cases where Google feels that you’ve been too manipulative; it will remove you from the index. They will not find you on the search console.

Did You Change Your Website?

Updating your website can do wonders, but there’s also the chance that it might drop in rankings.

It can fall in ranking because of changes when the meta robot tags have been implemented or the canonical URLs have been updated.

Those are more detail-oriented problems. It might be something as simple as a mistake on your website’s code or something worse, like someone who hacked into your website.

There is a solution to make your life easier and to identify the problem quickly. You can use Google Search Console to run a diagnosis on the status of your website.

If something is wrong, the platform will notify you about any issues.

If you decide it’ll be better to analyze Index Coverage Errors, this tool can do that too. It gives you a better, more in-depth understanding of what might be wrong.

What Is The Relevancy Of Your Content?

As mentioned earlier, your content’s quality and relevance can make or break your website’s organic traffic. Is your content up to date with what’s going on in your industry?

Is it answering the questions your customers are asking? Have the keywords changed, and if so, have you changed them? And lastly, do you feel like your content can do with a facelift?

Your headline title and meta description are why people click on your content. Those are the first things anyone sees.

So, saying it’s essential to have a title and meta description worth its weight in gold is an understatement.

If you have something people love, follow through with entertaining and informative copy. That can lead to link-building from outside sources.

Try to see if you can’t implement some use cases to make your content more visible when people go into the search engines.

Were There Any Algorithm Updates?

The most common issue for a decrease in website traffic is an algorithm update.

Search engines do this because they want to improve the user experience. When users are happy, market share and loyalty will increase.

When the search engine updates the algorithm, it can push your website from the first to the second page. It can be the result of something small, like a competing keyword.

Unfortunately, only 25% of internet users go to the second page.

It’s not uncommon for a search engine to do regular updates. The problem comes in; they don’t comment on any changes they make.

Your best bet will be to keep an eye on industry leaders for such news.

There isn’t much a company can do once an algorithm update takes place. If you want to improve your ranking, you will need to do a full audit of your website after the update took place.

For example, you can adapt your online strategy through cross-channel marketing to account for the updates.

Broken Redirects

If you have any structural changes planned for your site, like launching a new one or moving to a different server, you need a 301 redirect plan. Otherwise, your rankings will drop.

Broken redirects are a nightmare for every SEO agency.

Your XML sitemaps, links, and canonical tags have to be updated when using a 301 redirect. When you notify the web that you are changing your address, that is a 301 redirect.

It will tell the search engine that you are moving your website, so it should send visitors to your new website, not the old one. It is essential because it will help you not to lose rankings or get penalized for duplicate content.

Is Your Keyword Strategy Up To Date?

If you’re still using an old keyword strategy, you might not see an immediate decrease, but over time, you will.

Companies experiencing this slight decrease but who don’t have a solid keyword strategy can review their content. Review your content and see where it ranks in search results.

Your content isn’t where it used to be because people’s search habits change over time.

A fantastic free tool to use is Google Trends. It will give you an insight into how the search results for specific industries changed. A couple of years ago, people used to search for the term “cellphone”; nowadays, most people search for “smartphones.”

As you can see, you must adapt to any changes in your industry to avoid losing website traffic.

Even if your team is small, reviewing and updating your keyword strategy can be an intensive process.

Yet, the substantial return on investment will be well worth it when you see your search ranking improve back to the first page.

Keep Your Site Relevant and Updated

Your site’s condition is crucial to how viewers and users handle their time on it. If you have something user-friendly and inviting, users will probably stay longer.

There’s, of course, a lot more that goes into an excellent website, and this is just scratching the surface.

Let’s take a look at a better example. If you have a site that takes a long time to load, you guarantee no one will wait unless that person wants to be there. Otherwise, they’re gone.

You are hurting your ranking. People want to see and feel that you get them, and they want to feel special, and with a beautiful website, you can make them feel like that.

If you create content that makes everyone feel appreciated, you’ve got something special. It’s more than just a website; it’s an experience, and people want to feel entertained when they visit your site.

You can use tools to help with your videos and images loading faster. A content delivery network like Azure will help you with that.

Keep An Eye On Your Competitors

There is always the possibility that you didn’t do anything wrong. Your competitors just improved their strategies.

The chances of a considerable decline in traffic, in this case, are rare. But if you have dropped a few positions over some time, it is worth investigating your competition.

There’s a beautiful tool that you can use called Rank Tracker. Its SERP history function to see how your rankings have changed over time.

If things look a bit chaotic for you, like a bunch of new websites coming up with frequent shifts. It’s more likely you are experiencing something called a Google dance.

There is nothing to worry about; it is just high SERP volatility that only lasts for short periods because of minor algorithm tweaks.

Now, if you start seeing these same websites overtaking your position for a consecutive time. You might want to start investigating.

When you start seeing that your competitor has started overtaking you across many keywords. You can run their website through SEO SpyGlass.

You’ll be able to see whether your competitor is outperforming you in technical optimization or the quality and size of their backlinking profile.

For times when you see shifts across a couple of keywords, it means your competitors are doing on-page optimization. Do an audit of your competitors’ pages that you see are outranking you, and compare them to yours.

It will give you an idea of what you can do to improve.

Do You Have A Mobile Friendly Site?

More and more people are accessing websites through their cell phones. It is the reality of smartphones taking over the market, which is why your website has to be mobile-friendly.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re guaranteed to see an immediate drop in traffic.

It’s said that half of the global traffic that runs through the web is from a mobile phone. It is for this reason that your website's loading functions, as well as the user interface, are so essential.

When accessing the web from your mobile, you want quick results. If your website takes a second too long to load, you’ve lost that person.

There are two ways in which you are damaging your website if it’s not mobile-friendly:

• Half of the global internet is missing out on your website.

• Your ranking will also drop, affecting your traffic from the desktop.

Don’t make these mistakes; go mobile-friendly.

Final Thoughts

Any company that has ever experienced a decline in traffic knows how scary it can be. It means a reduction in visibility, followed by fewer conversions, which leads to less revenue. It feels like everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve is unraveling before your eyes.

It is for that reason that we’ve compiled this article for you. To take control of the situation and not panic. Take a step back and assess the situation while calmly going through all the possibilities. Then it’s time to get the game plan going and get those rankings back to where they belong.