Your website is usually the first and primary way to connect with potential clients or customers. Your website is where they go to get a glimpse of your brand, insight into your products and SEO services and the best way to proceed with the next step. It is essential to measure the amount of traffic to your website and other metrics such as a click-through rate or bounce rate regularly to understand how long visitors stay on your site and where you could lose them during the sales process.
What happens if you see an immediate decrease in visitors to your site? A decrease in site traffic and increased bounce rates place marketers in panic mode. If you’ve not made any significant changes to your website or advertising plan, then the next question is: what’s wrong? Many digital marketers complain about changes in search engine algorithms or minor issues such as malfunctioning URLs as the root of slowing site traffic. However, these are just a tiny component of the overall puzzle.
Analyzing year-over-year web analytics can assist you in determining the cause of any issues affecting the website’s traffic.
By having a comprehensive view of the performance of your website, it is more straightforward to identify areas where you can improve your digital strategy to reach more potential customers. If fewer people are coming to your website, here are five questions to help you identify the issues.
Is there a technical issue that is preventing users from accessing the website? Check your website’s analytics to find out if visitors have a pattern of behaviour. Can they get to the homepage but not access other pages or reverse? The most frequent cause of a drastic drop in website traffic is a technical issue affecting your website’s operations. Before you begin more in-depth troubleshooting, make sure that these vital functions are functioning correctly:
- Does your site have broken URLs?
- If you are using an online hosting service, Are they experiencing issues?
- Did you notice a recent change on your site’s code, and did the change cause an error?
Have you put SEO first on your list?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps make it easier for people to find your site and access your content. Without SEO, your site might not be ranked on search engines, and it’ll be more difficult for people to locate your site. If you’ve not prioritized SEO, you might notice a decrease in your website’s traffic.
The best SEO strategy is multi-layered. You must intersperse words and keywords in your site’s design and create content that incorporates them frequently. It is essential to combine both to improve your SEO rankings. You could also conduct keyword research to determine which keywords will be most influential to your business. Choose a few keywords and include them in your strategy to increase your rank. If you don’t notice any changes in your website’s visitors or search rankings in time, return to your study and consider using a different list of keywords. The bottom line is that improving your SEO strategy will take time and effort, but it can enhance your brand’s image and help you connect with many more customers.
Are your paid advertisements effective?
If your site’s traffic is slowing down or stopping, check your paid advertising strategy to determine whether there is a problem in your advertising campaigns. Many businesses rely on paid advertisements to bring customers to their websites. Therefore, a drastic drop in traffic could occur when paid ads cease functioning.
The success of the ads you pay for could be affected by various factors. You could use the incorrect platform or struggle to reach your target audience. If you don’t include a prominent CTA for your ads, your readers will not know where to go next, leading to less effective advertisements. If your site is getting fewer visitors and you’ve recently altered your paid advertising strategy, examine your advertising metrics to find out why your visitors don’t make it to your site.
Did this drop co-occur 0in the previous year?
Website traffic may be seasonal. The Christmas season is very busy for some industries, but then the interest in websites and traffic is reduced at the beginning of each year. If your site is experiencing unconfirmed decreases in traffic, check the metrics from previous years. Do you see any patterns in the behavior of your visitors? Before you overhaul your whole marketing strategy, look at your data year-over-year to see if you have steady declines or increases in the volume of visits to your site. This will help you solve the declining traffic problem and design an efficient digital strategy based on information about the potential customers you will be attracting.
Are you aware of the latest changes to search engine algorithms?
Algorithms are changing every day, much to the dismay of marketers. This could affect the search engine rankings, SEO strategies and the general impact of your site. Be aware of the changes to algorithms used by search engines so that you know how to optimize your site and digital marketing. When an algorithm has changed, review your digital strategies to decide whether you’ll need to adjust your strategy.
If you observe a change in the metrics of your site, Ask the following five queries to determine the problem. Be proactive in your approach to the management of your website by monitoring the most critical metrics, such as bounce rates, site traffic and many more. With more information available, it’s simpler to identify whether a shift in traffic is caused by seasonal changes or if something else is causing the issue. Take care of any changes to your website’s performance by studying the issue from a different perspective to see the performance of your marketing strategies over time.
