Traffic on My Website is Going Down

The reasons that people visit websites are many and hard to control. But if you've noticed that your traffic has significantly decreased there is probably something you can do about it. Of course, the first thing you need to do is find out why you have a decrease in traffic.

At The Click Depot, we regularly get phone calls from people who are suffering from this very problem - a rapid drop in website traffic. It appears everything on their website was going fine, but then the bottom seemed to drop out. When we investigate a website problem like this, we evaluate the site and come up with a complete list of possibilities for the decreased traffic. And then, we separate the list into two parts.  One list would contain "normal" reasons that you could have expected. Things such as a seasonal drop, or a change in the popularity of a specific product. There are ways to address those types of problems, but they are usually outside of the control of the webmaster.  It's the other list we should be concerned about.

First, let's cover some of the normal reasons that you might see a drop in your website traffic.  One very common reason is the seasonality of the product. If someone operates a website that sells snow removal equipment, the traffic will experience a considerable drop-off in the summer. Other products experience seasonal drop-offs that aren't so obvious but still might be the reason for the problem. Another common reason for such a decline might be that a temporarily popular product has reached its peak and is now traveling down its natural downward slope in the marketplace - the other side of the bell curve. These kinds of issues might be legitimate reasons that your website traffic seems to be taking a nosedive. 

Then again, the reasons for these declines in visitors might be something totally outside of the control of a webmaster. It could be a change in a marketing campaign, and nobody thought to tell you. Or perhaps the marketing budget has been reduced for a particular product, and you didn't get the memo. We could come up with dozens of possibilities, but once we can determine if those issues exist, they might explain the drop-off of visitors. However, if you perform a thorough investigation and there are no issues outside of the "website venue," you will need to dig deeper. Sometimes you will even need to look outside of your organization for the answer.

But before you move your investigation off-campus, you need to review all the recent changes to the website. Has the site been moved to new servers? Has there been a redesign of the site structure that affected the responsiveness? Has the company changed ISPs? Major changes such as these are often the cause for a significant decline in web visitors. If that might be the case, you need to investigate from the backend for internal problems. Then you need to re-test the website for ease-of-use, broken links, and overall readiness. While doing your investigation, approach it from both an insider's perspective as well as from the perspective of a new visitor to your website. If your visitors are often from other countries, navigate your site virtually from their locations. 

And finally, one of the most alarming reasons you may have seen this decline in visitors is because you have inadvertently done something to offend the Google web crawler. This penalty from Google can occur if some of the changes you made to your website have crossed the somewhat fuzzy line that Google has drawn with its webmaster guidelines. Of course, if you discover that this is the reason, correct it. But continue your investigation even after the correction, because there may be more than one cause for the drop in visitors.

Webmasters regularly offend Google search crawlers without even knowing it. You can offend the crawler without making any changes to your website. These offenses are because Google is constantly changing its search algorithm, and that can cause you problems. Maybe your site was compliant with Google's rules until they changed their algorithm. Essentially, Google moved the goalpost. These abrupt changes can be extremely problematic if their new algorithm bumps you down the search results ranking. You might get moved from the first page down to page two. Like many people say, page two doesn't even exist for the average user.

It would be in your best interest to regularly consult industry experts to keep informed of the changes in Google's algorithm. It's not unusual for Google to announce changes in its algorithm; these industry experts perform a considerable amount of research and are not shy about getting the word out. It's very likely that if you become aware of the changes in the algorithm, you would be able to adjust your website to avoid the decline in visitors.  The issue might be something as simple as changing the file naming format. Or, on the other hand, it might be something substantial such as the change in focus Google put on mobile devices with their Mobile-First-Indexing policy. Surprisingly, the Mobile-First-Indexing change caught a lot of people by surprise even though Google had announced this huge change well in advance.

While there's nothing you can do about Google and its constantly changing secret algorithms, there are things that you can do to reduce the impact they could have on your website. One of the most effective strategies that companies use to insulate themselves from this kind of issue is to utilize multiple strategies https://tcd.tcddevelopment.com/lead-nurturing-campaigns.html to bring customers to their websites. 

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing provides a great addition to an SEO strategy. Social media marketing does not depend on SEO for its success. Quite the opposite, SEO is helped by a successful social media marketing campaign. With social media marketing, you get to use powerhouses such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter to drive customers to your website. And there are other advantages to social media marketing campaigns then detaching yourself from depending on SEO for all of your traffic. 

For instance, with Facebook, you have access to very deep targeting and powerful marketing tools for your marketing - and they reach out to the largest community in history. Not only that, Facebook knows about the users of its platform, more than any company has ever known about their customers. And Facebook makes this knowledge available to his advertisers so they can reach out and put ads in front of the people that are most likely to buy their product. And these are customers that they would probably never meet without using Facebook.

Instagram is the same way. Facebook owns Instagram and makes the same kind of information available to its advertisers. You can also use LinkedIn for business-to-business marketing. Microsoft is the owner of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest business-to-business platform in the world and is a great marketing venue for millions of companies. 

Regardless of what social media platform you use, if you grow your local SEO strategy with social media marketing, you will insulate yourself from the possibility of visitor drop-off due to Google search engine changes. 

Sometimes you will run into a website problem that is too big to tackle alone. There are times when you need to call in the experts to hunt down an issue quickly. Or if you see the benefit of growing your current SEO campaign with a social media marketing campaign but don't have the experience to move forward with it, contact The Click Depot. We are experts at social media marketing campaigns. And we have been solving website traffic issues for as long as there have been websites.