Quality and consistent website traffic is the heartbeat of any serious business. A sudden decline in the number of site visitors is always a cause for concern.

In this blog, we discuss issues that could impact your website traffic rankings and explain how you can quickly identify and address them.

Recently Completed Ad Campaigns
Website traffic falls off upon the completion of a pay-per-click or any other marketing campaign.

A decrease in website traffic after the conclusion of a campaign could be a promising sign you should restart it again or create another one of a similar nature. After restarting a successful campaign, remember to do periodical checks to ensure your traffic is going back up.

Broken Back-links
A site that was once linked to yours but no longer is may cause loss of traffic. If you see that a back-link which used to send plenty of traffic to your site has stopped working, do a little research as to why.

Another quick solution would be to email the person who published the back-link to your site, asking them to add it back or correct the error if the back-link became invalid for some reason.

You Removed Content That Drives Traffic
If you recently deleted some pages you felt were no longer useful to your site visitors, you might want to consider bringing them back.

Be sure to always analyse your content before removing anything to avoid deleting pages that attract traffic.

You Might Have Reduced Your Content Promotion Efforts
Reducing your site and content promotion efforts can hurt incoming traffic. Stopping adding links to your content in your weekly newsletter, for example, will result in a loss of website visitors.

To overcome this, you might want to pick up your content promotion efforts. You can do so by identifying well-performing social media posts or blogs and using them as inspiration to create similar new content to promote your site.

Not Enough Content Updates
Content on your site, including your blog and other pages, needs to be updated consistently. Creating a regular blog posting schedule will result in other pages on your site benefiting from the fresh content.

Aim to publish a minimum of one blog post a month. However, if the competition is especially fierce for your targeted keywords, you may have to increase that to three or four posts a week.

Posting new information gives your visitors added value from your website. The content will also be appreciated by the Google search algorithm thanks to an increased number of pages it has to index.

Moreover, Google views old websites with rarely updated content as stale. If that is the case with your site, you may not be appearing as high on Google search results.

Site Design Issues
Changes in the design and functionality of a website may degrade its user experience and user interface (UX/UI).

A poor user interface makes visitors unsure as to how to navigate the website resulting in them leaving in a hurry and never coming back.

To avoid such issues, make sure you apply established web design standards from organisations like The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) during the design phase.

Rather than making wholesale changes, roll them out in clusters, and test each change before making it permanent.

Your Site Could Be Victim To Google Updates
The Google algorithm is always changing, and this can wreak site rankings and cause a decline in the traffic to a website.

Google issues core updates four times each year, and you might want to find out about the latest changes and their effect on your website. With this knowledge, you will be able to make the necessary adjustments to bring back your website traffic.

Google Manual Penalizations
A sudden decline in the number of visitors to your site could be due to a penalty from Google. Websites can attract Google manual penalties if they have broken Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

To check for a manual penalty from Google, you will need to log into your Google Search Console and check for a notification. Any time Google gives out a manual penalty, they will notify the website via the Search Console.

Google also provides guidelines for site owners on how to bring their site back up based on whatever kind of penalty they gave out.

Once you’ve fixed the issue they penalised your website for, you will need to request a review to have the penalty lifted. Google will then allow your website traffic to start flowing normally again.

Restrictions From Your Web Host
Your web hosting company may limit site speed, the number of visitors, and other vital features. Take a look at your error logs and consider taking up a suitable hosting package that allows for greater speed and higher traffic volumes.

Competitors Could Be Taking Your Website Traffic
Your website could be losing traffic because you are no longer ranking above your competitors. If that’s the case, you need to revamp your SEO strategy to ensure no competitor is taking away all the traffic.

Get The Experts On Board
There is never a one size fits all solution for troubleshooting and solving traffic decline issues on websites. You can save yourself some trouble by trying out all the above solutions at once, but this can be complicated and time-consuming.

If that’s the case, you may need to call on the experts. The team at Out of the Box Ideas is here for you. We offer web development, maintenance, and support solutions that drive traffic and keep you ahead of the competition.

Send us an email at info@outoftheboxideas.co.za or call us on +27 (0)79 504-1297