Is your website experiencing a drop in SEO traffic? Are you noticing that the pages of your site that used to enjoy good search engine positioning are generating less organic traffic? When a site suddenly experiences a loss of position on Google for important keywords, it can call into question all SEO efforts. But don’t worry, we’ll look at the causes of a drop in SEO traffic, how to solve the problem and solutions to avoid a drop in SEO traffic.
How do you track your traffic and its decline?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a traffic-acquisition solution that enables you to position your website in the SERPs over the long term. The aim of SEO is to optimize a site’s visibility in order to attract more traffic. Sometimes, however, you may experience a drop in traffic to your site. Why and how can you tell?
There are many reasons for a loss of traffic, and we’ll look at them later in this article. Let’s focus now on the SEO tracking tools you need to keep an eye on your site’s visits and detect any drop in SEO traffic.
You can, in fact, use :
- Google Search Console: formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, this tool provides important information about a site’s health and indexing status. It lets you track the keywords in web queries that link to your site. It reveals the number of impressions and clicks, as well as the CTR.
- Google Analytics: is another web analytics tool that lets you check your declining Google rankings. The platform gives you a complete overview of your SEO campaign.
You can detect a drop in SEO traffic with this tool. It offers event- and user-oriented data. It displays an analysis of user behavior, location and interests. Using this platform, you can understand your audiences, events and site conversions.
Aside from these tools, to track your web traffic, keep an eye on site content. Content optimization is important for SEO, and it affects natural traffic. So develop a qualitative approach, proofread your content and avoid duplicate content.
What are the causes of an SEO crash?
Seeing your organic traffic suddenly drop is frustrating when you consider the time you’ve invested in your site’s SEO work. But now is not the time to throw in the towel. On the contrary, set up a research program to understand the reasons behind the drop in SEO traffic. That’s how you can limit the damage, take the right SEO actions and get qualified traffic in the long term.
If you’re still wondering why your natural traffic is dropping, then you need to understand this. There are many reasons, but the main reasons for a drop in SEO traffic are :
- Technical problems
- Security issues
- Google penalty
- Changes to search engine algorithms
- Netlinking problems
- Problems related to changing user behavior
Seasonality is, of course, one of the reasons for traffic loss. You can’t have a site specializing in the sale of Christmas gifts and get a lot of traffic in summer. Let’s take a closer look at the points raised above.
Understanding SEO traffic loss: explore technical, security and Google penalty issues
First of all, traffic loss can be linked to technical blockages. If your site suffers, for example, from a faulty robots.txt file, this can give instructions to the crawlers that work against you. Have you restricted Googlebot crawling of certain pages without realizing it? To be sure, ask our SEO consultants.
They’ll help you detect whether your URLs are excluded or not, and then use SEO best practices to facilitate the indexing and referencing of the site’s pages. The help of an SEO service provider can also be useful in identifying and correcting technical problems linked to server failures, pages not found (404), site display problems, etc.
In addition to technical bottlenecks, a drop in SEO traffic occurs when there are security problems. If your website is subject to piracy or contains malicious software, Google can alert users. How does Google do this? It will send a button to users trying to access your page via search results. This way, they can return to the SERP and your natural traffic will decline.
The other problem that can cause your ranking, and therefore your traffic, to plummet is a manual penalty from Google. If you develop black hat SEO techniques that escape the filters of the Penguin and Penda algorithms, your site will nevertheless suffer penalties. Who’s going to punish you? Google’s Search Quality Team. These carry out manual actions capable of causing a drop in SEO traffic in the event of :
- Keyword over optimization
- Masked content
- Production and distribution of low-quality content
- Spam generation
- Fake link distribution, etc.
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The Google algorithm: A look at the updates
If you use SEO as one of your traffic sources, you probably know that algorithms are updated on an ongoing basis. When you ignore even the most minor changes, it can have a negative impact on the SEO of some of your content. As a result, you’ll lose rankings and face a drop in SEO traffic.
The web is constantly evolving. It’s not only the algorithms that change, but also the search behavior of users. This happens according to the seasons, trends and market developments. When web users develop new search habits and your queries are not aligned, your SEO performance declines.
Another major point that reduces traffic is the loss of important links. In SEO, popularity counts for a lot, and with quality backlinks, you improve your SEO and generate organic traffic. On the other hand, if you lose your links, you experience a drop in SEO traffic.
In addition to the reasons mentioned above, a drop in web traffic occurs when you :
- Make a URL change without including 301 redirects.
- Suffer a negative SEO attack.
- Have a duplicate content problem.
- Carry out a site redesign that has gone wrong, affecting site loading speed and making content inaccessible to robots and users.
- Unknowingly set noindex markup.
How to solve a traffic problem?
The best way to solve a traffic problem is to ask an SEO expert for help. At SEO.fr, we offer you the services of our experienced and caring SEO consultants. They’ll help you take the necessary action to manage a drop in SEO traffic, and set up effective SEO monitoring.
To begin with, they carry out a technical audit of your site, during which they evaluate loading time, security and ergonomics. They also analyze source code, accessibility, architecture, markup and user experience.
Next, they check your site’s coverage in the Google index with Search Console, then examine seasonality and search trends with Google Trends. Finally, they take the right SEO actions to resolve the loss of SEO traffic.
What can be done to avoid a downturn?
While every site project is unique, there are steps you can take to protect yourself from a potential drop in SEO traffic. Here are 7 tips to avoid a drop in organic traffic:
- Develop and implement a long-term SEO strategy, then produce quality content for robots and users. This will reduce your bounce rate and improve your SERP ranking.
- Remember to optimize the technical and semantic aspects of your website. By doing so, you’ll make it easier for crawlers to find your site, increase your chances of being listed and move up the search results.
- Avoid spamming, over-optimization and the acquisition of low-quality backlinks. In this way, you reduce the risk of a drop in SEO traffic.
- Use an SEO agency to keep abreast of algorithmic changes and your competitors’ actions, and preserve your company’s e-reputation.
- Make intelligent use of your content’s metadata, so that your site can gain visibility and appear in rich snippets on the SERP.
- Produce complete files and descriptions with useful information for potential customers, then use quality images to achieve good e-commerce referencing.
- Improve your site’s loading time and make sure your CMS is responsive for a better user experience.
