7 Reasons Why Your Organic Traffic Is Dropping
Organic traffic is absolutely essential for a site to flourish and paying attention to these metrics will make or break your site! If you see a drop in organic traffic, it’s essential you diagnose and solve these problems – it could be that your site is not set up properly.
Table of contents:
- The Importance of Organic Traffic
- How Can I Track My Organic Traffic?
- Top 7 Reasons For a Sudden Drop In Organic Traffic
- Organic Traffic Is a Must
If you’re wondering, why is my organic traffic dropping, the answer could very well be the lack of optimization for your website! This article will walk you through the importance of organic traffic, answer the question of why did your organic traffic drop, and show you how to turn your site’s metrics around.
The Importance of Organic Traffic
Understanding what’s happening to your site is essential if you see a drop in organic traffic. Organic traffic is one of the most important aspects of your site, in fact – it should be the main focus for any content creator online and a prime metric to track for website health.
Having natural visitors to your site because of its quality is the prime motivating factor in longevity for any website. Although paid traffic is also a factor, the simple fact of the matter is that people coming to your website of their own volition will give you the best results – even if paid traffic can boost it after the fact. The basis of all website revenue, like ads, is grounded in your organic traffic metrics – this means it’s crucial to keep in mind!
How Can I Track My Organic Traffic?
There are a variety of ways to track your traffic and answer your question, why did my organic traffic drop? One of the most important ways to learn to track organic traffic is with Google Analytics. Google Analytics offers a comprehensive suite of tools that allow you to fully understand what’s happening to your website and it is the absolute best place to start trying to change things for the better.
Step 1
Head to the Google Analytics desktop and click on Audience on the left-hand side.
Step 2
Then, click Overview.
Step 3
While looking at the overview of your website’s userbase, click the “Add Segment” button, and start scrolling down the list of available options.
Step 4
Once near the bottom, you will eventually see “Organic Traffic!”
After adding this segment to the analysis, you will immediately be able to see how many unique visitors come to your site, with the options to delineate time frames and more. By carefully analyzing this data you can see if your organic traffic is coming to a halt, if it’s staying the same, or even if it’s increasing. Tracking this number is crucial to your site’s long-term health!
Top 7 Reasons For a Sudden Drop In Organic Traffic
So you’ve used Google Analytics and have seen that, yes, there has been a drop in traffic on your site. What can you do about it now? This is the most important part of the process – developing a plan to move forward will enable you to rectify the problem and move forward! Here are some of the top reasons why your traffic might be getting cut off.
1. Algorithm Changes
A very basic reason, but no less important for the safety of your website. Sometimes Google will update their algorithm and, for a variety of reasons, this will be the cause of a limiting effect on your traffic. Drops caused in this way are not your fault, but you will still need to rectify the problem in order to move forward.
Making sure you are in line with the current best practices in SEO, using the best website management tools available, and generally putting out the best content possible, will all help the site – regardless of any new algorithmic changes.
2. Technical Changes You’ve Made
Sometimes you need new infrastructure, a new address, new ways to deliver content, or a new layout. Any and all of these might potentially hamstring your organic traffic. It’s essential to continue running optimization efforts even after you’ve completed technical changes because you never know what was potentially lost (or gained!) in translation.
Migrating content to a new site, or even a complete redesign, can be massive issues if left untreated.
3. Not Following Trends or Demographic Information
Your site is an extension of an idea and that idea might be popular or not – from buying shoes to opinion piece essays, being able to track the opinions and interests of your core audience is essential to ensure that they keep coming back. Not only that, but website trends – in terms of content creation, layout, etc – can also have a dramatic impact on your site.
Keeping your finger on the pulse of your field is absolutely critical to maintaining good traffic.
4. Getting Penalized by Google
Getting a penalty from Google is a big deal and one that needs to be remedied immediately. Google penalty is a situation where your site will no longer be ranked, meaning that your site will see a catastrophic drop in traffic. Always make sure your content is custom-created for your site and has no plagiarized elements, never buy back-links, make sure your site is optimized for speed, fix site errors and broken links, and never stuff keywords. The way you run your site is always important!
5. Forgetting About Technical SEO
There are many aspects of SEO that constantly need to be maintained. Just like cleaning a house, you need to continually keep up with the daily operations of your website. When it comes to tasks like maintaining the robots.txt file, page loading optimization, potential UX issues that need addressing, mobile support, getting your site indexed, etc, you need to stay on top of them and ensure that they are as optimized as possible.
6. Boring Content, Boring Titles, Boring Descriptions
No matter what your website does, it has content and it needs to be optimized. If you’re thinking that you aren’t Shakespeare so you won’t need to worry about long-form content, you are forgetting that page descriptions, titles, meta tags, and summaries are just as important as any other written content on your site! Make sure that the written content on your site is concise, catchy, and informative. Always make sure the content is unique as well!
7. Lost Website Links
Understanding best practices for website link building is absolutely integral to long-term success and links play a major role in this. Make sure that you are using high-quality links, make sure to fix broken links, and make sure that the content linked to is informative, creative, and useful.
Organic Traffic Is a Must
There’s no other way around it – paying attention to organic traffic is the most important aspect of long-term website management. It is the factor that is most indicative of website health and the one that will ensure great revenue and engagement. When real people want to come to your site, stay awhile, and tell their friends about it, that’s the best way to grow and thrive!
Make sure you take care of your audience and consumers and they will treat your site well in kind – pay attention to the trends and optimizations and you will always have a healthy organic traffic rate.
