A successful SEO campaign is measured by a steady, ongoing and boost of organic traffic. This means that your website is gaining a number of visitors from organic searches.
There will come a time when your website’s level of organic traffic starts to decline and even refuses to increase further. But that’s normal and temporary; it’s a natural result of a long-term landscape of an SEO campaign, affected by many factors.
But there is frightening news that brings a more troubling effect with it - it’s when your website receives a steady decline. When that happens, you really need to find out what's going on. Read our blog to learn what to do if your website organic traffic is falling.
Check for Google penalty
It’s rare and very unlikely for you to check if you have been subjected to Google penalties, but it is the most ideal way to find the root cause of the problem. There might be a few updates you are not aware of that led you to this. Penalties are crucial to any SEO campaigns because it leads to immediate drop of traffic. Oftentimes, you’ll receive a Google Search Console notification to inform you of the reason you have been penalized for.
If there’s not a sign of any penalties, you're clear. But if there is, you need to fix the issue immediately; possibly on plagiarized content or spammy, black-hat strategies.
Check your competition
Examine your competition and how everything has changed in the past few months. If you are a startup in a new industry, you have to understand that this is very possible to happen.
Check your positions on keyword search and see where your rankings dropped. If there are signs of new emerging competitors, find out how they displaced you. Check their newly published content and inbound links.
There are two potential things that may have happened. One, your competitor has invested more on their SEO campaign, thus outperforming you in the process. The best way to handle this is to invest into tighter competition, and have more targeted terms so that you can avoid the clash.
Two, your website declined because of other reasons that made your competitors improve their positions. You can identify this by studying their performance both in link building and onsite content.
Check your link profile
The quality of links that point to your site can dramatically affect your organic search result, and a sudden change in your profile can cause a drop of ranking. The use of a link-profiler, such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer that can help analyze the links that point to your website.
First, check the spammy link sources and identify if there are new links you have built yourself or have appeared mysteriously on questionable websites. These spammy links are the possible causes why your website looks untrustworthy among search engines. Building strong links can help boost your site’s authority and link profile, so consider it as well.
Check your content
Content for your website will help your SEO! So think what you have done to your on-site content in these past days or months. Possibly, you have removed your top performing content, doing this could decrease the overall value of your website. Another possible reason is you have decreased your content budget or have published too much new content that nobody cares to read or share. Make sure that you are publishing content that your readers love. The solution here is to remove low quality content (what is low quality content?) and start investing in higher-quality content.
