It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling stuff online or you maintain a website out of pure pleasure. However, this is more than a side activity for you. You want people to see what you offer, and engage with them. And to achieve that, there’s one main thing you are always aiming for: More traffic.
That’s why you care about social media marketing, content marketing, and paid advertising. Your methods and your strategies work when you see a boost in your site’s activity, but at one time or another, your target audience may forget all about you and the traffic numbers drop.
Why?
You keep doing whatever you were doing previously. Your strategies seemed to work, but now they yield zero results. The sudden drop is a severe symptom, so you have to look into the underlying cause.
Here is a list of 8 critical reasons why websites lose their traffic.
You’ve Been Under a Negative SEO Attack
We all know what SEO is: an attempt to rank well on Google through content development, backlinking, and user experience improvements. When you do something wrong during this process, it negatively affects your SERP rankings.
Your competitors engage in positive SEO techniques for their own websites. But when they want to beat your site, they may play few tricks that will affect it.
Here’s what Google has to say about that: “If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web: we don’t control the content of these pages.”
It doesn’t seem like they can do much for you in this case.
Your only choice is to understand these techniques and learn how to recover from a potential attack.
- First, you must identify the links that lead to your sites. If any of them come from websites with a negative reputation, you need to build disavow files. Google’s Disavow Links tool is pretty simple and easy to use.
- If competitors posted fake reviews about your brand, you’d need to work on improving your reputation. Consider asking your followers for honest opinions. The positive feedback will bring back the value to your site.
- If you’re getting a lot of comment spam, you need to add stronger spam traps. Akismet is an excellent solution.
Check out this infographic by Visually for more solutions:
You Shifted the Focus Away from Your Existing Customers
When you get obsessed with content marketing, you focus on the rankings. You develop more content, you target more keywords, and you try to attract more people via social media platforms.
Somewhere along the way, you forget you were supposed to focus on existing customers too.
If you focus solely on obtaining new leads, the traffic numbers will grow at first. But if you forget about your existing customers, you’ll be losing them, so you’ll lose the social proof they bring. Slowly but surely, the traffic rates will start dropping.
Make sure you’re focusing on your existing customers just as you are on attracting new ones.
- Offer loyalty discounts. Top-ranked proofreading services, for example, offer discount codes for first-time users but don’t forget their existing customers. They become part of a loyalty program, so they get increasing discounts with each new order.
You Neglected Your Email Marketing Campaign
Speaking of existing customers, the most loyal ones subscribed to your email list. They did that because they were interested in getting updates. If you haven’t been providing them with the content they expect, they stopped visiting your website.
It’s as simple as that.
Your email marketing campaign has to be on point!
- You need to personalize it. To do that, you may remind your previous customers of the items they abandoned in the carts.
- You may also offer new products based on the purchases they previously made.
- In addition, you’ll inform your existing customers about the new items that arrived at your store. Check out how Book Depository is doing it:
You Don’t Keep the Visitor’s Attention
Have you checked the bounce rates lately? Well, that’s the first thing you should do.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left the site right after viewing a single landing page. To understand how serious the bounce rate is, you need to know the average bounce rates by industry. Here’s a nice graphic provided by KISSmetrics:
You want a bounce rate that’s below the average for your industry. Why? – Because even though the time spent on site is not a direct ranking factor, it informs Google about the user experience you develop. If Google assumes you’re not offering good user experience, the rankings of your site will drop.
- To improve the time spent on site, you want to provide more value for the visitors. This means better content, so maybe it’s time to consider hiring a professional essay writer.
- Pay attention to the load time. If the pages take too long to load, the visitors will quickly bounce off.
- Offer suggestions for related content. If the visitor likes what they see on the landing page, you’ll get their interest by suggesting similar topics at your website. In addition, it’s important to include internal links throughout the content.
You Didn’t Optimize for Voice Search
How important is voice search, exactly? Well, you’ll appreciate knowing that two out of five people say that voice-activated devices were essential to their lives. Plus, 55% of teens use voice search on a daily basis?
If you haven’t optimized for voice search and your competitors did, they are taking chunks of your traffic away. You need to fix that damage!
- Use long-tail keywords that sound like real questions your audience would ask. Then, provide direct answers to those questions.
- To figure out what questions you need to answer, you can rely on Quora.
- You can also start typing a keyword in Google and see what suggestions you get.
If, for example, you maintain a website providing advice for people with anemia, you can type a random keyword related to your niche, such as anemia perniciosa. Google already tells you what people asked:
All you need to do is take those questions, use them as keywords, and provide direct answers.
The Quality of Your Content Dropped
Somewhere along the rush to produce more content and target more keywords more effectively, that more became less. If you didn’t expand the team of writers handling these tasks, you’re forcing them to do more work within the same time limit. Naturally, the quality of their writing drops, no matter how hard they try to meet your expectations.
If you’re the only one producing content for the website, the effects are even more damaging. Instead of crafting long-form posts, you probably post several shorter articles. More content is a good thing, but only when the content is good enough.
When you advance your content marketing campaign, you have to bring more talent to your team. You can easily attract quality if you develop a great website and invite guest bloggers to contribute to it. But you still need to produce great content yourself. At that point, you should consider hiring some of the finest writing services. Here are a few suggestions:
The Meta Tags Are Not Good
Google pays huge attention to meta tags. They inform the search engine what your content is about so it can determine its relevance to the user’s query. However, they also inform the user about what they are going to find at your page.
- Check if you or someone from your team accidentally removed meta tags or forgot to include them in new content. That happens really frequently.
- Improve the quality of your title tags, headers, and meta descriptions. Make sure they include keywords placed in logical context.
Competitive Websites Are Better Than Yours
Is there a possibility for you to do everything well and still witness your traffic rates dropping? Yes. When a competitor improves their game, they take the lead. They may have improved their content marketing strategy. Maybe they offered something better to the same target audience.
There is a way to fix this issue and bring your reputation back.
- Constantly observe what your competitors are doing. If someone took over the keyword you were targeting, check their content. See what makes it better. Then, start targeting other keywords or improve the same content.
- Watch their offers. If you’re selling something and you see other brands offering better features for lower prices, you have to rethink your offer.
Conclusion
The eight points we listed above are pretty common causes of website traffic issues. If you noticed a drop in your traffic rates, those are the things you should first check.
Go ahead; you have quite a lot of work to do.