As the world is rapidly moving toward digitalization, each business today is now focusing on building a strong online presence. According to Statista, online e-commerce sales touched the $5.2 trillion mark globally. There is a great possibility that websites made these sales by bringing traffic via paid channels.
However, rapid growth is primarily due to organic traffic coming to your website. These customers invested their time and effort in finding your brand. Hence, they have a higher chance of converting into sales. Nevertheless, there can be times when you might witness there is a decline in organic website traffic.
If you’re a website owner or content marketer experiencing a decline in your organic traffic, then there is no need to worry. Instead, you should sit back and try out the following five fixes to resolve this issue.
1. Look for Technical Issues and Fix Them
Not focusing on or neglecting the technical issues of the website can cause a decrease in traffic. While these technical issues might seem small, they can stop the search engine from indexing, rendering, or crawling your website. For instance, you might have duplicate or low-quality content on the site.
As a result, poor-quality content could negatively impact your Google search rankings. Hence, checking your website from time to time for such technical issues is imperative.
While website owners or content marketers might have their own sites, they might not have certain technical skills. Therefore, identifying and solving such technical issues can be challenging for website owners. Nevertheless, there are many website design and development companies to help you out. Service providers like WebFX or BANG! Web Site Design can help you in dealing with such issues.
2. Check for Changes in Google Algorithm
Another reason your website is seeing a decline in organic traffic is because of changes in Google’s algorithm. According to a few reports, there are around 600 changes within Google each year. While most will be nominal or minor, some major changes can wreak havoc on the website.
Therefore, staying on top of the developments in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) space is important. Having marketing skills only isn’t enough to maintain consistent traffic on your website; you need to stay ahead of such changes.
Go through different resources and learn about the reasons Google has made changes to its algorithm as well as find out the things they are penalizing. After obtaining all the relevant information, you can take the right course of action to increase your website’s organic traffic.
3. Improve Your Content Quality
Poor content quality is also another reason many website owners might experience a decline in organic traffic. If you continue to post content on your website that isn’t relevant to users, they might stop visiting it. This will ultimately lead to lower traffic.
At this point, you should improve your keyword research and then work on your content calendar. Additionally, if you’re posting lesser content or posting at a slower pace, then Google’s web crawlers will visit the website less often. So, it can also contribute to a decrease in organic traffic.
Furthermore, content with grammatical mistakes and typos might not resonate too well with your audience. Even small mistakes in the content can be why readers might not visit your website; always make sure to produce high-quality content.
4. Changes in Customer Preference Due to Seasonality
A lot of content marketers and website owners might not know but seasonality can also contribute to declining traffic. There are different ways that can help you find out if seasonality is impacting your traffic performance.
The best one is to compare the year-over-year using the Google Analytics tool. It helps you compare the date ranges; from where you can see changes in traffic from the year before. If the trend for the last and current years is the same, you can note this change as a seasonal factor. But if you don’t see the same pattern as last year, then seasonality might not be the culprit here.
5. Check Your Tracking Code
Lastly, unreliable data can also be the reason behind a decline in site traffic. The most common place where this issue can occur is your website’s tracking code. Any change to your website code can result in problems with tracking code and consequently, you might see issues with analytics reporting. Review the site’s tracking code first before trying out anything else.
Wrapping Up
If you face a situation where you experience a decline in your organic traffic, taking a step back to analyze and evaluate where things are going wrong is a great place to start. It can be a scary sight for website owners to see a downfall in their website rankings. Nevertheless, maintaining composure and dissecting the problem will play a pivotal role in getting your website back on track.
