Is Your Organic Traffic Falling? Here’s What to Do
In a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, the ideal result is a steady, ongoing and reliable increase in organic traffic — meaning the measure of the number of people visiting your website after finding it in organic searches. At some points, you might reach a plateau where your organic traffic levels off and refuses to increase further; this is generally temporary and acceptable, a natural effect of the long-term landscape of an search engine optimization Knoxville, which has hundreds of factors at play. Here are some takeaways: Check for a manual penalty: First, you’ll want to check for a manual penalty. It’s rare and highly unlikely that you’ll face a manual penalty from Google, but it’s the most identifiable root cause of the problem. If you are facing such a penalty, your organic traffic will steeply and instantly drop, and you’ll receive a notification in Google Search Console saying that your site has been penalized. Pinpoint specific traffic drops: If you aren’t facing a manual penalty, your next step is to determine the main areas of your traffic drop. Though your entire site may be experiencing a cumulative drop, it’s more likely that the drop can be traced to a handful of specific pages, or specific keyword terms.
Examine the competition: To do this, examine your search positions for various keywords, and see where you’ve experienced a drop in rankings. If you have, are there any new competitors that have emerged on the scene to displace you? Have some of your older competitors recently stepped up their game, with better content and new inbound links? Audit your link profile: The quality and quantity of links you have pointing to your site has a direct bearing on how highly it ranks in organic search results. So, a sudden, unexpected change in your link profile could cause a drop in rankings, and, therefore, in organic traffic. Audit your on-site content: If you’ve decreased your content budget, or are publishing too much content that nobody is reading or sharing, that too could cause a similar drop. The solution here is long-term: You’ll need to root out any low-quality content and start investing in higher-quality material. Make corrections and improvements: Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes for a drop in organic traffic. However, there are some straightforward ones; sometimes, removing enough bad links or building new, strong ones is enough to correct the problem, but it usually still takes weeks to months for Google’s search index to reflect your changes.
