Business

6 Leading Reasons That Can Cause a Drop In Your Website’s Traffic

In modern times, the key to sustaining a successful business is to ensure a constant online presence. It is because of this reason that a good businessperson’s job doesn’t end after making a good website. Once your website has been designed and is out in the open, it is important to ensure that it constantly receives high traffic. This requires constant hard work and analysis.

In this article, we will list the leading reasons that can cause a drop in your website’s traffic, and we will explain the ways in which you can counter them:

  1.  Outdated Use of Keywords

 Keywords are the words typed by users on the search engines. Finding these words and then using them in the content helps in ranking the websites on the top. So they are a great tool in getting organic traffic for your website. However, many businesspersons misuse or overuse keywords on their websites and this causes a negative impact on their business.

Firstly, it is important to understand that users’ behavior is constantly evolving. So the searches they make are also changing with time. The keywords they use are becoming more elaborate and specific. These might not match with the keywords that you have targeted in your website. And this lack of usage of proper keywords might be affecting your traffic.

Also important to keep in mind is your content. Stuffing unnecessary keywords will not get you any audience like earlier times. Google has been evolving its algorithms to make them complicated enough to not rely simply on keywords. It can now catch websites which are mis-utilising keywords in unrelated content. Good content that is related to the keyword, and is not exploiting the keyword, is important to keep your SEO ranking high. Create content that is informative, engaging, and unique to ensure that your website traffic stays high. 

  1. Broken Links 

No user likes to be facebook with the 404 error on their screen. It is obvious to say that this mars their experience and in turn, affects your website’s reputation. Broken links can be caused when the linked page is selected when the URL is incorrect, or when the link is changed but not properly updated.

In addition to causing a poor user experience, broken links are also responsible for reducing your SEO rating. Search engines constantly scan websites for any broken links. And once found, they reprimand these sites. So even though broken links are very common, it is important for web developers to constantly keep checking their websites in order to ensure that their rankings stay high. 

  1. Slow Page Speed 

Page speed refers to the time it takes for a page of the website to fully load. It also refers to the time it takes for your search browser to receive the first byte of information from the website. In the past, Google has explicitly stated that page speed plays an important part in their algorithm for page ranking.Other search engines also give importance to page speed. Each search engine has a particular speed budget. If your page speed is slow, then search engines will be able to crawl and suggest fewer pages of user websites to their users. This will give you lesser traffic.

Different online softwares offer free page speed checking for websites. Ensure that you check your page speed using this software regularly. And then work on keeping your page speed high. This will ensure that you rank high on searches and will buy adult traffic for your website. It will also give your audience a better experience while using your website. 

  1. Website Domain Change 

Any changes that you have recently made to your website might be causing a drop in the traffic for your business. These changes can be of various kinds. Establishing a new domain is a very common one. If not done meticulously, it results in a drop in website traffic.

If you are establishing a new domain, ensure that you correctly redirect the links that lead to your older website to your new URL. Why? Because Google gives importance to external linking for SEO ratings. What this means is that if an external website gives a link to your website in their content, then your chances of ranking higher on search engines is more. So it is important that you maintain proper external linkages while re-engineering your website. How can you do this? Create a redirect for your .htaccess to transfer your content at a domain-name platform into your latest website. You can use Google Webmaster Tool to let Google know that your new site has been uploaded. Then your domain, as well as URL listings, will be up to date. 

  1. Poor SEO Management 

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It refers to the techniques used by web developers to ensure that their content ranks high on search engines. It is important to regularly keep track of the SEO changes made by the search engines to ensure that your site does not lose its traffic.

Ensure that your content has sentences of the right length. It is recommended to have less than 20 words per sentence. It is also important to have a variation in sentence length. Put your sentences in small blocks; use interesting subheadings to ensure that your content is not too long. Also, give a meta-description to all your pages. Meta-description is like an about for your page. It consists of a brief summary of what your page consists of. Keywords should be used in the headlines, sub-headers, meta-description, and content in a non-stuffy and natural manner.  

  1. Lack of Proper Layout 

Once a user visits your website, the amount of time she spends on it, and her experience on the same is defined by the layout of your website. She is likely to spend more time on your website and enjoy it more if your website is user-friendly. Search engines make an analysis of user-behaviors on different websites while making their rankings.

Make sure that your website is easy to navigate. You can do this by having a bar on top of your website that consists of all your important sections. This will enable the users to easily access all the sections on just one click. Your colour scheme and font should be such that your content is easily readable. To further increase accessibility, do an audit of your site and make sure that persons with disability can access it. This will make you rank higher in different search engines.

Nicole Hennig
Nicole Hennig is a freelance writer, content writer, blogger, and also a photographer. She graduated from the University of Caloocan in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2015.

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