15 Reasons Why Your Organic Traffic is Dropping

At Brainpulse, I quite frequently recommend my SEO consultants keep watching metrics to get the timely pulse of SEO traffic on our brand websites and clients’ portals. The practice keeps us updated and vigilant. We understand how drastic its impact could be on your sales and revenue forecasts. SEO traffic drops are alarming and need quick review as soon they come to notice. Did you recently notice a drop in organic traffic? Listed here are 15 reasons why your organic traffic is dropping drastically. Dive deeper into them to fix the mess.

At Brainpulse, I quite frequently recommend my SEO consultants to keep watching metrics to get the timely pulse of SEO traffic on our brand websites and clients’ portals. The practice keeps us updated and vigilant. We understand how drastic its impact could be on your sales and revenue forecasts. SEO traffic drops are alarming and need quick review as soon they come to the notice.

1. A Recent Google Update

A recent Google algorithm update might have wreaked the havoc that resulted in an SEO traffic drop. Google is known for rolling out ranking algorithm updates time and again to improve searcher’s user experience and weed the spam out. It’s however difficult to ascertain the type of Google update that just happened. Usually, Penguin and Panda are two penalties that Google levies on websites. To note, Penguin ideally hits out at link farms and Panda is designed to strike out content spam.

2. A Segment is Hit

After Penguin 4, Google Penalties became granular and real time.>That means, now penalties (whether Panda or Penguin) don’t affect the entire website but a segment that violated the Google guidelines. It may be a page, category, or website section. I would recommend that when you look for the overall search traffic, find segment(s) that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This could be the first thing to do to track down the root cause of the issue.

3. Website Recently Changed

It even may be the case. A small change in the website sometimes leads to a traffic hit. In case you have recently changed website URLs (or migrated them to another location), moved to a different JavaScript framework, updated all your title tags, or altered your navigation menu, you could see fluctuation in your SEO traffic. All these or a few of these might be behind the massive fluctuation that you noticed.

5. Recent Changes in Google SERP

Take advantage of Moz’s SERP features report to find out if Google has made any material changes to its SERP. Google is known for making quick changes to how its search results are being shown. It’s done by showing relevant queries directly in search results, displaying an image carousel on them, or by adding a local pack. Take note, all of which would likely drop your organic search traffic.

6. Ranking Pages Dropped Off Index?

This may be the case that some of your well-ranking pages dropped out of the Google index unknowingly. Go to your search console account and check for its Index Status Report to make it clear it clear if suddenly some of your website URLs have been out of index. If it found to be true, you might have accidentally disallowed or no-indexed URLs (through robots.txt, Meta tags on the page, or HTTP headers. If this is the case, fix these errors ASAP.

7. Drop in Referring Domains and Backlinks

It’s also possible that a good chunk of your website backlinks have been removed for specific reasons. And that led to the traffic drop. Moreover, it may also be the case that some of the backlinks are no longer accessible. To have a bird's eye view of what went wrong with your backlinks, go with Ahrefs. It can be a great tool to determine if you’ve lost backlinks and refer domains from where you’ve lost them.

8. Pages Optimized for Wrong Keywords

Targeting the wrong keywords in pages and posts could be disastrous for your search engine rankings. This is something that could sabotage your SEO strategy. Before even starting to do keyword research, you have to have a deep understanding of your audience and what they’re looking for online. Have a look on these two keywords- “Gadgets for Sale” and “Buy Gadgets, they are two different keywords that symbolize different user intent.

How To Fix?

For better and more precise keyword research, I would suggest you go with tools like Ahrefs to determine which keywords are worth targeting and which aren’t. They will help you identify keywords, check/recheck keywords, and evaluate the competition. It’s recommended to keep the keyword metric checked multiple times to ensure that you’re investing in the right keywords.

9. Poor Content

There is no doubt about it. Poorly written and spammy content kills your website search rankings. A content piece is said to be of poor quality if it doesn’t offer any value to the readers and is vague in all its forms. Quality content poses multiple qualities. It’s informative, accurate, insightful, analytical, and unbiased.

If your content lacks at above qualities, it’s compromised. Some of the instances of poor content include thin content, spun content duplicate content, etc.

Thin content

Google’s Panda update was launched to tame websites with poor-quality content. A website is said to be the possession of thin content if it contains less content, a high proportion of navigation/image/dynamic elements excessive blank pages, and ad-stuffing. All these elements together hurt the overall user experience.

Auto-generated content

If your website is found to have instances of automatically translated content, scraped content from Atom/RSS feeds, or search results, your website could be punished under Google Panda. All the above content types are referred to as auto-generated content.

Duplicate Content

If a content piece appears on the Internet in more than one place, it’s called duplicate content. They don’t technically invite penalties, yet, impact search rankings.

Content with Keyword Stuffing

Google flags ‘Keyword Stuffing’ if you randomly and repeatedly put your exact-match keywords within your content to manipulate search algorithms. Keyword stuffing hurts your content quality and rankings as well. Google has inbuilt algorithms and guidelines to track instances of keyword stuffing and punish the spammers who try to rank their websites through this black hat method.

How To Fix?

Keep your content quality upright and intact. Use keywords moderately and at an extent so that the page readability should be intact. Avoid having to use spun or auto-generated content pages.

10. Ill-Optimized Pages

Gone are the days when your websites started ranking just because you included the right keywords at the right place in your website content. Now the fight is getting fiercer. Not only the keywords but also the page’s Meta description and title tags will also have a significant impact on on-site SEO. Despite all your efforts, if your website rankings dipped, there might be a chance that you inadvertently left your Meta title and description un-optimized.

Meta Title and Description

Meta Title and Description tell searchers what your content is all about. Even Google considers them to define what the rest of your content is going to explain. Based on that, Google presents your content to your appropriate audience. If you leave the site’s Meta description and title unattended, you can miss a great search engine optimization opportunity.

Broken Links

Too many broken links make your website cluttered. The more outgoing links your website contains more the chances of broken links start to appear. If a website that you linked to, deletes the pages or makes changes to it, broken links appear. If Google finds you in possession of too many broken links, you’re taken as one who doesn’t keep his website updated, which Google doesn’t like.

How to Fix

Therefore, you need to regularly audit broken links to either fix them or remove them altogether. To get each of your website pages ranked on Google, you need to optimize the Meta title and description of the pages for the right keywords.

11. Weak Link Strategy

Linking, whether inbound or outbound impacts your page’s search position. When site ‘A’ links to site ‘B’, it simply passes along link juice from one site to the other. The more the external pages are linked to a page on your website, the more valuable becomes your site in the eyes of the search engines.

Similarly, internal pages of your website too can pass some of their link juice along to another internal page within the website. For instance, if you interlink your homepage with a product page, your homepage is lending some of its search engine trust factor to that product page. It helps you build the authority of some of the deeper pages on your site. Go with our link-building services to fix that mess.

If you outrightly pour irrelevant links into your content, it will hurt your content quality. Moreover, if they’re irrelevant to the content of the page they’re on, they will kill your rankings.

How To Fix?

While linking pages internally or with external websites, make sure that the anchor text you’re using rightly aligns with the actual topic of the page that you’re linking to.

12. Your Website Takes Ages to Load

Slow-loading websites kill user experience, reduce user interest, and give them a reason to switch over. Even Google takes note of the websites that load slowly. Sometimes it hurts domain authority as well. The reason is pretty obvious. If your website takes longer to load, visitors are more likely to bounce off your website. Eventually, a spike in bounce rate leads to a bad user experience and a serious dent in its overall authority. It’s worth noting that even milliseconds are crucial when it comes to ranking on Google.

How To Fix?

Tools like GTMetrix help you find your current website speed score. The tool offers comprehensive statistics on your page speed metric with various factors that are hindering it. Following are a few tweaks that you can implement to boost the site speed.

• Minimize HTTP Requests
• Reduce server response time
• Enable compression
• Enable browser caching
• Minify Resources
• Optimize images
• Optimize CSS Delivery
• Prioritize above-the-fold content

13. Your Website Images have Un-optimized Alt Tags:

Images play a significant role in your SEO efforts. However, marketers quite often forget to even consider it. If your images are optimized for SEO, users can find them when they search through the images tab.

Image optimization is a simple process. Just add alt text and a file title to each image on your website, and you’re done. It would be better to include the targeted keywords in the ‘Alt’ and ‘Title’ fields. It will help Google to rank you for the searches your target audience looks around.

One more advantage of search-optimized images is that people will be likely to link back to your website if they want to use your image in their content.

14 Negative SEO

Your nearest competitors might go at any extent to destroy your search ranking and malign your online reputation. They use negative SEO as a tool to hit your website metrics badly. Technically, Negative SEO is a set of activities aimed at competitors running to lower other competitors’ rankings in search results. Some of the key activities performed in the negative SEO are building unnatural links, hacking the site, and modifying its content.

Link forms

Creating Link forms is the core of any negative SEO campaign. To hurt your search rankings, your competitors build links from a group of interconnected sites, or link farms using the same anchor text in most cases.

Scrapped Content

To ruin your rankings, scrapers scrap and copy your content across other sites. In case a content piece is found to be duplicated across multiple sites, Google takes action against the stolen version of the content.

How to Fix?

To avoid the threat, use tools like Copyscape to find instances of duplication. You may report it to Google and can also request the webmasters to withdraw that scrapped content from the website.

Getting Your Site de-indexed

If your competitor manages to make even a small change in robots.txt, it could wreak havoc on your entire SEO strategy. Just a disallow rule and your website would be out of Google’s index.

How to Fix?

Regular ranking checks will help you know if your site gets deindexed. If a ranking drop happens across a big number of keywords, check the crawl stats in Google Search Console to see if it’s due to penalty or de-indexation.

15. Your Backlinks Strategy Backfired

Incoming links could be integral and important to your SEO strategy if achieved moderately with a plan in place. If incoming links to your website can help your website rank better and become a brand, they can hit it badly too. While making backlinks keep the following in mind:

• Avoid building too many links too fast. Go slow and steady.
• Avoid using keyword anchor text links.
• Don’t direct all your links to your home page. Keep the links diversified across the website
• Don’t indulge in buying or exchanging links and never participate in any link scheme.

Conclusion

SEO takes time to show results. If you think that a website, a few pages in it, and a bunch of targeted keywords will altogether bring humongous traffic, better to take a break. SEO is a comprehensive process that always helps you gain big if you ensure that you’re not making some big mistakes that could sabotage your overall strategy.

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