Most businesses nowadays are gravitating towards having an impactful online presence. An online presence requires decent website traffic for customer visibility and reach. It is crucial to make an impression because that’s how your brand will be perceived. A good connection can result in long-lasting customer relationships that are integral to your product or service.
However, it is not all sunshine and roses in the virtual world. Sometimes websites suffer from massive losses due to a sudden decrease in visitors and often they do not realize it until it is too late.
We are here to fix that. You can avoid a low revenue and eventual shutdown. One way is to determine the causes of a drop in website traffic as soon as possible.
Here are 11 ways to Recover from a Sudden Fall In Traffic
#1 Branded Traffic v/s Unbranded Traffic
The advertisement that you stopped paying for? It might have just cost you some of the traffic on your website. If someone is visiting your site organically, then your branded traffic has taken a hit without being redirected by another site. If you aren’t using the brand’s names in any of your keywords, it refers to unbranded traffic.
This is a good time to update the keywords according to current and relevant trends.
You might need some rebranding and better advertising. Checking the falling traffic source is immensely helpful in finding the exact customers who have stopped visiting your site.
#2 Time To Find Your Backlinks
It is possible that the website that had the backlinks to your site is either down or that the backlinks don’t exist anymore. In this case, you will have to follow up on the same. This task can be tedious since you may not always be able to regain old backlinks.
Once you do, more customers will be redirected to your site through these backlinks. To do this, check the dropped traffic to find out specifically if your referral traffic has dropped. Then, update your existing content, republish it, and share it accordingly. Another way to do this is through bloggers. Blogger outreach is a great way to secure links, especially those who are leaders in the same industry that you are a part of.
#3 Are You Paying Enough Attention To New Competition?
Why aren’t people visiting your e-commerce website anymore? Is there a new competitor in the market? And is it offering better value for the cost than you are?
A few clicks and you are going to find out. The declining traffic may or may not have anything to do with you but a more valuable service available in the market. Highlighting your competitors and their growth might be a sign for you to focus on keywords, SEO, and strategies.
These can help you be better than someone else’s products and services.
#4 The Page Type
If your blogs are not receiving as many views as they used to, it’s time to revise and update your content accordingly. Are the keywords relevant? Check with your content marketing team. You might have to promote your pages more aggressively.
Similarly, check other pages like the home page, product pages, and category pages and compare the visitors’ traffic. The lesser the visitors, the more you need to improve SEO and site navigation.
#5 Chasing The Best User-Experience (UX)
A poor website design or complicated site navigation could also lower your rankings. If the visitor is not happy with the experience, they might not return to your website and head over to a better alternative.
To avoid this, it’s imperative to improve the UX from time to time. For companies with a website or e-commerce platform, redesigning the site with a new and improved look can improve your readership. Factors like having a mobile-friendly website, fast loading speed, text, and images all play a vital role in boosting your website’s traffic.
#6 Warning – Don’t Ignore Google Penalties
Your site could either get an algorithmic penalty or a manual penalty. A manual penalty is a severe penalty that is sent by Google employees.
Check for messages from Google under ‘Manual Actions’ to determine if you have received a penalty. It will inform you whether an issue has been detected or not.
The good thing is that you will get details on how to solve the issues and get your website back on track.
#7 Basic But Relevant – Identify The Keywords
The ‘Compare’ option in the Date Range section will tell you the exact performance of keywords for specific periods.
After clicking on it, check the impressions of the comparison between the keywords of a previous month/week to the current month/week.
It is no secret that Social media is all about content and communication. Every once in a while, the keywords should be updated as per connect and relevance with your audience. For this, you will need to find out the keywords that haven’t been performing well and need to be changed.
#8 Matching User’s Intent – What Do They Want?
If your site is selling cosmetics and apparel, it should fulfil customers’ demands and needs even before they click on it. This means that when a potential customer looks for cosmetics online, your site’s keywords and description should appeal to them. If they like what they see – they will click on your site and hence mission accomplished.
If you cannot bring in as much traffic as you want, you will need to go through your content to make sure that it is in line with the users’ demands. Add more details to make it customer-specific and focused on solving a problem.
#9 What Are The Latest SERP Features?
One way to do this is to look up your keywords on Google to check if an SERP feature is emerging.
You will notice a significant drop in the number of clicks (in your search console) where the impressions are consistent. One way to do this is to check impressions vs clicks for both cell phones and personal computers.
Find out what features your website is being hit by. With the help of this information, create a winning SEO strategy. The trend of Google SERP Searches is here to stay.
#10 The Dreaded – Negative Reviews And Publicity
No business is immune to bad reviews and negative customer feedback. That being said, there are plenty of tools that allow you to check for your brand’s mentions online. These social media listening tools also give you insights into what your competitors are doing.
You could also explore Live Chat to solve customer grievances as Live Chat has a much higher ROI than other communication channels.
Some unfavorable reviews could even kill your visitor flow. To avoid permanent damage to your reputation, it is advisable to act early and protect your brand’s reputation.
#11 Can’t Do Without ‘Em – Influencer Marketing
The current digital age calls for attracting potential users who can reach out to larger audiences. Your brand’s visibility and reach can be boosted with popular names and faces in the influencer and blogger categories. Although this might be expensive, when the influencer’s traffic grows, it is useful in improving your brand’s traffic too.
Conclusion
Here are our final thoughts – Your website is an important asset for your business. Dropping traffic numbers are detrimental to your website’s growth and the business’ bottom line. As we know, building organic traffic takes time, and you can do so through content marketing for lead generation. But a little boost in traffic with these hacks won’t hurt.
The way to do it is to identify the threat and fix it. Hope you learned something from all these different ways to recover from falling traffic and implement them!
Sahil Kakkar is the CEO and Founder of Rankwatch, a platform that helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever-growing internet landscape. You can connect with Sahil and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.
Leave a Reply