Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is widely liked, mainly because it is the primary source of steady traffic for a longer period. If you are following the basic SEO guidelines given by major search engines like Google, then you are 90% risk-free, but if you have any doubt about the legality of your SEO practices, then you can face a sudden fall in organic traffic. There can be hundreds of reason behind this sudden fall of SEO traffic. Let’s discuss these factors which can be the cause of this decrease.
Check if Your Site is Penalised
The very first thing that you must check if the organic traffic falls is Google Webmaster Tools where you can see some notification if Google has found some violation and penalised your website. If this is the case, then you are in some real trouble.
There’s rare chance that your website was manually reviewed and penalised by Google. It is the rare but worse case, but here you get a chance to correct the action. Most of the times it happens for something which was undetectable by the Google Bot.
Pinpoint Exact Area
After getting sure that your site is not penalised, the second step you need to take is to pinpoint the exact reason for the sudden fall in organic traffic. Google Analytics, Google Webmaster, and any other third party analytics software can be used to find the exact reason. Check the pages which were getting a significant chunk of traffic. There you can find something which can be the primary cause of the sudden fall in organic traffic.
Keyword report may reveal the other side as well. While checking the keyword positions, you may find some main keywords which were higher in rank are now no longer at their positions. The fall in ranking can be the primary reason of fall in organic traffic.
Check if the Competition is Tougher than before
This reason is correlated with the previous one i.e. keyword ranking. Sometimes there enter some new competitor in the competition which makes the competition more difficult. This tougher competition may result in fall in keyword ranking and hence fall in organic traffic. Keep an eye on your competitors; see how they are investing and which activities are making them stronger than you. If you can counter those campaigns and activities, go for it and get your position back in competition.
Audit Backlinks of your site(s)
Backlinks give you site good ranking, but bad links can destroy this ranking. So, keep an eye on the quality of backlinks pointing towards your website. If you find any bad link, submit it to Google so it may not harm the ranking of your website. Keep backlinking practice as natural as possible, without using any blackhat technique. Choose only quality backlink because quantity isn’t the matter anymore, but the quality is.
Onsite SEO Audit
You win half the SEO game if you fulfil all the On-page SEO factors. A strong on-page optimisation gives you a strong base to stand firm in SEO competition. So, if you are facing a fall in organic traffic then most of the times you get back that traffic by doing onsite SEO audit and by making little changes. On-page SEO is 70% of total SEO so pay good attention to on page SEO if you want to win.
Well after taking all the above-mentioned steps, you will get your organic traffic back.
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