As Bloggers, we all subscribe to some form of a newsletter and I do subscribe to a few one such ones is sitepronews and receive their monthly newsletter with and found this article very interesting. The article was written by Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum. Not very often I read something I felt very compelled to share with my readers. As a blogger who believes in networking and the sharing of information, I will share this with my readers. This a very long post so I will break it into two part her is part 1.
Here are 9 steps you can take to diagnose the cause of lost search engine traffic:
1. Determine what type of traffic loss you’re dealing with. Many people look at Google’s overview page, see a loss of overall traffic to their website, and assume that they must have lost their rankings in Google and the targeted traffic that comes with it. This may or may not be the case. Be sure to check for search engine traffic, and even more specifically Google non-paid traffic.
2. Look at the extent of the traffic loss. Your research will be very different depending on whether there was a gradual decline in traffic or a sudden, drastic drop. I reviewed a site last week that lost all of their Google unpaid traffic overnight! This sort of loss is typically a technical issue such as a robots.txt file or a no follow a directive that keeps search engine spiders from indexing your pages. Sometimes it’s not actually a loss of traffic at all – your analytics code could have been inadvertently removed from all or most of the pages, making it appear like a traffic loss. I have seen all of the above more times than I can count in just the last couple of months!
3. Compare apples to apples. Many businesses are cyclical or seasonal. A gift site may see huge spikes in traffic the months leading up to Christmas or the weeks before other holidays. This means that comparing any month to the previous month may not tell you the whole story. A drop in traffic in January is probably fairly normal for a gift site. If you’ve got more than a year’s worth of data, you’ll want to compare this month’s traffic to the same month in previous years. Ideally, you’d, of course, want to see a growth in traffic. And if you don’t, then you may very well have a problem on your hands. If you don’t have data that goes back that far, you can compare month to month, but be sure to take the data with a grain of salt.
4. Review and filter out “brand” traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who’ve typed some version of the name of their company as their search query. You’ll want to note whether those visitors have significantly increased or decreased. If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising. Once you make note of the brand traffic, you’ll want to filter it out so you can study actual keyword traffic, which is what real SEO traffic consists of.
That’s is it for the first part as mentioned it is very long so will share part two with you now share your thoughts have you lost any traffic recently?
Great post bro :).Loss in traffic i don’t think so on the contrary i find in an increase of my traffic from search engines.
You are right sis i seems to be getting lots of traffic of late and the share from search engine is getting much better according to my google analytics report
Thanks for sharing this! It is valuable information for everyone!
Thanks again!
Gary, I’m with you and Shabnam on this topic. Fortunately, my search traffic has been steadily increasing. 🙂
I think lots of people panic at the first sign of decreasing traffic when it can be something as simple as a technical problem. There is usually a good reason for a sudden loss of traffic and it should be investigated.
Great article and I’m looking forward to part 2.
It does happen to my blog so often. And one of the reasons for the same is that I never write for these search engines. I never go for any keyword research. So, I face this loss of organic traffic so often. Google is still the top traffic provider on my blog whereas no such support from yahoo and bing :((
Anyways, traffic is greatly affected by the freshness and quality of your content. If you have fresh content then obviously you will see a rise in the organic traffic. This again depends upon your SEO efforts, how well you have optimized your content for the search engines and what all offpage optimization techniques you have followed.
Also, there are occasions when you have nothing left to ponder over as it is very natural. Like on weekends, traffic tends to keep low like anything and as you pointed out on your post, the seasonal breakdown…it is all very natural. Nothing much can be done in such cases.
Best would be keep these things aside and concentrate more on the content part. It will be much more easier then to fetch traffic provided you have maintained the quality and followed right marketing strategies.
Sometimes loss of traffic might also because of Google dance so it’s not the matter panic in this case i think. The above tips are useful for other cases. The most important is being patient and finding the right cause behind that.
hello bro 🙂
since im new to this bloggin arena i feel this post of urs will hlp meÂ
a ton….nice share….hav a gr8 time… :)keep bloggin……
Very helpful to me, I have much more to learn about traffic, so I appreciate the post immensely! Looking forward to the next one.
Thanks for stopping by jenny its been a very long time and glad to know that you are back up and running and we will see you posting again thanks for the mention on your blog looking forard to your future posts.
I have been loosing traffic and gaining some at the same time. All in all the level remains the same although if I can find some solutions to regaining those that I have lost I would be in a much better shape. thanks for these tips and btw, I meant to let you know that you should keep a look out on your “adbrite” ads. Some of them are way to hot for your audience 🙂 Though you might want to know