Why Your Website Traffic Has Dropped and How to Fix It

Your website plays a big part of the promotion and identity of your business. So if your website traffic falls, this is a real problem.

There are many reasons why traffic may drop. Generally, we can group these reasons into one of three categories:

1. Organic factors
2. Paid factors
3. Direct factors

You may experience just one issue, or you may encounter multiple issues at the same time.

So how do you determine what’s going on?

Diagnosing the Issue

Google Analytics should be your first place to start. This will give you information on your traffic sources, so you can see which ones are performing well and which ones are lagging behind.

Google Search Console is another useful tool. It will help you recognize if there are any errors in your site structure or penalties from Google itself.

An SEO audit will give you further insight. You’ll be able to identify any technical issues that may be preventing users from reaching your page or resulting in a penalty from Google.

Fixing the Issue

Of course, once you’ve diagnosed the issue, you now need to fix it. But how do you go about this?

Well, this depends on what the problem is. Let’s take a look at some of the most common issues.

Most Common Reasons for a Drop in Traffic

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Problems

1. Changes to the Algorithm

The Issue:
Google updates its search engine algorithm to provide users with the best possible experience. Your website is not aligned with the latest guidelines, so it falls in the rankings.

The Fix:

• Keep an eye on credible SEO news sources to stay on top of algorithm changes, such as Search Engine Journal and Moz.
• Audit your site regularly to make sure it is fully compliant with the latest guidelines.

2. Content Changes

The Issue:
You remove high-performing content or significantly change it, and you experience a big drop in traffic.

The Fix:

• Content quality always needs to come first. Make sure all your updates reflect this.
• Monitor your content updates, and make sure you can reverse your changes if your ranking drops.

3. Manual Penalties

The Issue:
You make a manual edit that contradicts search engine guidelines, and you get penalized. Black hat SEO techniques — i.e., going against the grain of SEO best practice, with approaches like keyword stuffing and link farming — often result in ranking penalties.

The Fix:

• Review the Google Search Console for notifications of manual actions and edits.
• Find the action that has caused the penalty, and request that this be reconsidered.
• Always keep best practices in mind when making edits.

4. Indexing Issues

The Issues:
Your site isn’t being properly crawled and indexed, so it doesn’t appear in the search engine results.

The Fix:

• Review your code for robots.txt that may be blocking your pages.
• Check for changes to your page’s metadata, and make sure redirections and canonicals are properly implemented.
• Keep your sitemap up-to-date, and submit any changes through Google Search Console. Return to the console to check for crawl errors and fix them.

5. Loss of Backlinks

The Issue:
High-authority sites remove the links to your own page, resulting in a loss of SEO authority and decreased rankings.

The Fix:

• Monitor your backlinks with tools like Ahrefs and Moz.
• Get in touch with webmasters if they have removed a backlink.
• Monitor and fix broken links or temporary redirects (302, 307) on the website.
• Be proactive in pursuing high-quality backlink opportunities.

6. Technical Issues

The Issue:
A technical issue makes your site difficult to use and impacts your site’s search performance. Things like broken links, slow page-loading speeds, or problems for mobile users can all reduce your site’s search ranking.

The Fix:

• Use Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or GTmetrix to review your website’s technical performance.
• Fix any broken links, remove content-heavy elements that slow page loading, and optimize mobile usability.
• Keep in mind that in most cases, Google uses the performance on mobile devices for SEO, so use that as your benchmark.

Paid Advertisement Problems

1. Budget Cuts

The Issue:
You scaled back on your PPC campaign spend, and now receive fewer visitors.

The Fix:

• Take another look at how you allocate your budget, and allocate more budget towards high-performing campaigns.
• Increase your budget if possible, or redirect funds from low-performance campaigns.

2. Ad Disapprovals

The Issue:
Your ad was not approved by the ad platform, so your campaign didn’t benefit from the expansion — or worse — even lost impressions and clicks.

The Fix:

• Review the latest ad policies and make sure your ads are fully compliant.
• Regularly review your ads’ statuses to make sure they’re up and running.
• Adjust and resubmit your ads that were not approved.

3. Keyword Bids

The Issue:
You got outbid for one of your most important keywords, so your ads aren’t appearing where they are needed.

The Fix:

• Keep track of your bids, and increase them if they are not competitive.
• Deploy an automated bidding strategy to stay competitive and optimize your ad spend.

4. Targeting Issues

The Issue:
Your ads aren’t targeted to the right audiences, so you aren’t achieving the right traffic.

The Fix:

• Audit your audience targeting settings.
• Combine as many targeting criteria as possible, as long as they help you to hone in on your target audience (Pro tip: did you know that you can use targeting criteria from LinkedIn within Microsoft Ads? Ideal for B2B and account based marketing!).
• AB-test multiple audiences to see which ones perform better.

5. Ad Fatigue

The Issue:
Your audience is seeing your ad too frequently, and they just don’t click it.

The Fix:

• Add multiple ad assets and creatives to avoid banner blindness.
• Add daily and weekly frequency caps to avoid spamming.
• Try out different formats, messaging, and visuals to lift engagement.

6. Quality Score Decline

The Issue:
Your ad’s quality score falls, so it becomes less visible and more expensive to run.

The Fix:

• Improve the relevance of your ads by focusing on high-quality keywords.
• Group semantically relevant keywords and include these words in the ad copy, to increase ad score and clickrate.
• Optimize your landing page to improve user experience. The longer people stay engaged after clicking on an ad, the better it is.

7. Changes in Ad Copy or Landing Pages

The Issue:
You modify your ad copy or landing page, reducing its effectiveness.

The Fix:

• Use A/B testing to find improvements to your ads and landing pages.
• Test everything: headlines, forms, buttons, copy, imagery. The trick is to decide which change will have the biggest impact.
• Test all changes incrementally, and monitor the impact of each.
• Make sure you can revert to previous versions if your performance falls.

Other Factors Behind a Drop

1. Seasonal Variations in Traffic

The Issue:
Your traffic might not remain constant throughout the year and fluctuate with seasonal trends.

The Fix:

• Plan and adjust your campaigns to accommodate seasonal trends. Google Trends is a great way to spot seasonal demand.
• Increase your budget to capitalize on peak season.
• Focus on SEO outside of peak season to maintain a presence in your audience’s mind.

2. Servers Going Down

The Issue:
Your servers go down, taking your site offline.

The Fix:

• Deploy monitoring tools like Pingdom and UptimeRobot and get notifications on server issues.
• Consider changing your hosting service to a more reliable provider.
• Utilize a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare to optimize uptime.

3. Social Media Traffic Drop

The Issue:
Your social media channels aren’t getting the right reach or engagement, and traffic falls.

The Fix:

• Audit your social media strategy, and increase the engagement potential of the content you post.
• Interact directly with your audience.
• Use analytics to find optimal posting times and content types.

4. Email Deliverability and Engagement Issues

The Issue:
Your emails are getting stopped by your users’ spam filters, or users are simply not clicking through from your emails.

The Fix:

• Use a dedicated service to send mass email.
• Authenticate your email with DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and BIMI.
• Use marketing automation to automatically block email addresses that no longer receive email (based on response code, e.g. 5.1.1.).
• Consider changing your email provider.
• Improve email subject lines and personalization. Avoid capitalization and “killer keywords” like “FREE”, etc.
• Optimize emails for mobile.
• Deploy user segmentation.
• Analyze user engagement.

5. Direct Traffic Drop

The Issue:
Changes in user behaviour result in direct traffic falls.

The Fix:

• Use web analytics tools like Clicky or Similarweb to analyze where your traffic is coming from.
• Check site and CDN logs to check for outages. You won’t find these in Analytics because the tracking script won’t fire when the site is offline.
• Use a tool like HotJar to analyze site visitor behaviour or perform random polls.

The Key to Strong Traffic: Monitoring and Maintenance

If there is one unifying key to keeping traffic levels high, it’s this — put monitoring and maintenance first.

You need to be constantly keeping an eye on your performance. If there is a drop, you need to be able to act quickly to fix it.

If you identify an issue, make fixing it your priority. However, in the long term, make sure you stay on top of all your traffic sources and keep monitoring them to support lasting performance.

FAQs

1. How do I know if my website traffic has dropped?
The main indicator is a reduction in site visitors. Your analytics software will tell you.

2. What are the first steps to take when I notice a traffic decline?
The first step is to identify the source of the decline, using tools like the Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Once you know for sure what has happened, you can work to put it right.

3. How often should I perform an SEO audit?
You should perform a full audit every year. Limited audits should be carried out on a quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis.

4. Can social media impact my website traffic?
Yes! Social media is a traffic source, so if its performance changes, you will notice this within your overall traffic figures.

5. What tools can help me monitor my website’s performance?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are among the best tools for monitoring general web performance.

Understand and Take Control of Your Website Traffic

Here at 1UP Digital Marketing, we want to help you take control of your website traffic so you can develop and grow effectively.

To discover more about how this is done, and to set your business on the right track for the future, reach out to 1UP today.