In our experience, most marketers and business owners keep a vigilant eye on their website analytics, carefully monitoring their incoming traffic. It’s always encouraging to see your site getting plenty of hits, but what about sudden drops in traffic? This can happen sometimes, and it may even cause a momentary rush of panic.

If you check in with your website analytics one day and notice a traffic drop, we’d offer two words of advice. First, take a deep breath and maintain a healthy perspective. Believe it or not, traffic drops aren’t always a bad thing; more on that in a minute. And second, take a few minutes to diagnose the problem. In determining the cause of your traffic drop, you can usually arrive at a practical way to get back on track.

Traffic Drops Aren’t Always Bad

Let’s start with a quick discussion of why traffic declines aren’t always bad. In fact, they can sometimes be positive. For example, what if you’re getting lots of visits but aren’t seeing any conversions? What if all your traffic is accompanied by a high bounce rate, and little time actually spent on your website? In these situations, it may be perfectly fine to wave goodbye to some of your traffic.

As a case in point, consider a client who noticed a drop in organic traffic. Upon a little digging it was easy to see that the traffic was coming from an organic YouTube video that was going viral and providing all sorts of traffic from across the world. The problem was that this particular client could only service people within their state in the US, so this global traffic was not only overinflating their analytics but was making them spend an exorbitant amount of time answering unqualified leads they could not service.

When the video’s virality tamed we saw a sharp decline in traffic, but business picked up because the client was spending more time responding to qualified leads from within their territory. This is a great example of how declining traffic can actually be healthy.

Consider Which Traffic Source Was Affected

Something else to consider when diagnosing a traffic drop is the source of traffic that’s been affected. When you see your website hits take a plunge, it’s easy to assume it’s organic search traffic that’s been impacted… but that’s not always the case. (Indeed, just consider our previous example, wherein the primary source of traffic was YouTube, not Google Search.)

One thing we see pretty often is that the affected traffic source was actually a PPC campaign or Display campaign. Say you’ve been spending a lot of money on ads, generating traffic for your website. If you exhaust your budget, that traffic might be abruptly curtailed. The point is, it’s always important to check the source of traffic that’s been impacted, rather than assuming the issue is with your organic reach.

Check Which Page Was Affected

After you check the traffic source that was affected, the next step is to look at your individual pages to see where you’ve lost incoming sessions.

If you see that all of your pages have seen sharp declines, that may be reason to worry; it could be evidence that you’ve incurred a penalty from Google, perhaps due to a recent algorithmic update.

This isn’t the most likely scenario, however. Instead, it’s more likely that you’ve got one page (usually one of your most high-volume pages) that’s seen a decline. Once you zero in on the specific page that’s been impacted, you can dig deeper into potential causes. Be sure to check your blog pages as well. Many times it has nothing to do with changes at Google, but a popular blog post on your site that was “hot” and the topic is now starting to cool down.

Confirm Your Rankings

If you do find that it is a specific content page on your site that has historically received high traffic and it is no longer providing results, then your next step should be checking the search engine rankings for the page in question. Investigate exactly when you started to lose traction. Has it been over the past few weeks or months? This will help determine if it may be because a particular search query has fallen out of fashion, or because a new competitor’s page has stolen the spotlight. Either of these things can be addressed with some adjustments to your SEO strategy.

Specifically, you may need to contend with any or all of these possibilities:

• Your page needs to be refreshed with updated information.
• A competitor has created a similar page that has better, more authoritative backlinks.
• You have lost some backlinks on your own page, causing your page to lose some of its clout.

Consulting with your SEO manager should provide some good strategies for revitalizing your page, whether that means rewriting the content or better optimizing the technical aspects of the page.

Moving Forward After a Traffic Drop

Nobody likes seeing a decline in website traffic, but remember: Traffic drops aren’t always a bad thing. And by investigating the underlying cause, you can often arrive at a good strategy to regroup and move forward. With any questions about any of this, don’t hesitate to contact enCOMPASS Agency at any time.