You may adopt different measures to drive traffic to your website. These may include running a PPC ad campaign, optimizing your site for search engine, promoting your products on social media, etc.
If you regularly monitor your site analytics, you may often note that there’s a drop in your site traffic. It can be a result of many things including a change in Google’s core vitals, the effect of a turning event (like the pandemic), and many more. Again, the loopholes in your SEO strategy may have also resulted in the same.
Here’s a checklist of the things you should pay attention to overcome or avoid a traffic/ranking drop.
Why Your Site Traffic Might Drop
1. Broken Redirects
If you are migrating to a new server, launching a new site, or introducing any structural change to your site, you may witness a drop in your ranking unless you don’t have a proper 301 redirect plan.
According to any top SEO agency India, you must ensure that the links, canonical tags, and XML sitemaps are in updated while using a 301 redirect.
The redirect will inform the search engine that a web page or several pages or even an entire website is moved to a different address. It will also lead web traffic to the new address.
2. Tracking Wrong Keywords
Keyword research is an important part of SEO. If you have newly launched your business and targeting commercial keywords that your established competitors are targeting, you may not drive visibility.
Also, targeting niche terminology of your business domain as a keyword won’t bring much traffic as common people may not know those keywords.
The best way to target keywords is by adopting the following measures:
- Target generic terms that common people may know.
- Opt for long-tail keywords that have less competition.
- Use related keyword phrase.
3. Failing to Optimize Your Site Technically
Technical SEO is an important aspect of optimizing your website. Google focuses on the user experience of the web pages before ranking. Ensure that your website is technically sound.
Some of the key considerations should be:
- Check your website’s loading speed
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
- Fix broken links
- Identify crawl errors
- Secure the site with HTTPS
4. Internal Navigation
Navigation of a website tells the visitors how to find the information on your site. It’s safer to have a narrow and flat structure. Ensure that your site’s internal navigation is two or three levels deep. If the visitors have to click many times to find out what they are looking for, they will leave.
This is all the more important when it comes to an eCommerce website. Since an e-store has lots of webpages, a clumsy navigation can ruin the user experience and increase bounce rate.
Let us tell you why a simple navigation is effective. Search engines may not crawl the content if it is buried deep in the website. It can lower the ranking and you may not receive traffic on important pages.
Adopting a logical internal linking structure will boost rank metrics like time-on-site. Also, ensure that the links are keyword-rich.
5. Server Issues
If your server is not ready for a sudden surge in traffic, it can be overloaded and crash. Especially, if your site belongs to a shared server, there’s a high chance that someone else’s site has suddenly received a traffic surge. And the result may burden your website once the server crashes.
Again, many hosting packages may not support your site if you exceed the bandwidth. If your site gets featured on a popular site, this can be a common scenario. If the site faces too much downtime, it will affect your rankings and traffic.
6. Poor User Experience
Poor user experience leads to an instant bounce or less time-on-site. These negative metrics contribute to ranking or traffic drop. Here are a few things that may result in poor UX:
- Too many ads clouding the content
- Jargon-filled content that is not easily understandable
- Keyword-stuffed content that affects the readability7. Improper meta information
Meta title and description are crucial for the search engine to crawl the intent of your site. These should include the theme of your site. Make sure to limit meta title within 60 characters and meta description within 160 characters.
Also, you should include the main keywords in the meta title and description.
8. Source of Traffic
Website traffic doesn’t only include the number of visits to your website but also the number of internal pages clicked and the amount of time spent on each web page.
There are several sources that can drive traffic including the following:
- Direct traffic who search your URL on the search bar
- Referral
- Email marketing
- Organic search
- Paid search
- Social media
Now, these sources act differently for each business. Keep an eye on the metrics to know which source is driving the most traffic to your website. Depending on the insight, spend your investment on the source and also try to improve your presence on other sources.
Conclusion
We hope that the handpicked information has helped you to take your digital marketing strategy to the next level and fix the loopholes on your site. Feel free to share your thoughts with us.
