Digital marketers manage a wide scope of technical and creative responsibilities. There is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes that help sites win organic traffic through a high page ranking on large search engines. However, one of the most challenging responsibilities is diagnosing a decline in organic traffic and page ranking. Here is a basic list of potential factors that could be costing your site in organic search traffic or page ranking:
- Bad Backlinks
In recent years, link building has become an essential practice to earning organic traffic. To major search engines like Google, these backlinks to your site are a strong indicator of content authority, giving you a higher placement in relevant searches. However, losing inbound links can have the opposite effect just as much severity.
Sites with few backlinks will see decreases in their search placement and inbound traffic when the links are removed or unavailable. This can happen for many reasons:
- The hosting page is unavailable
- Backlinks to your site were removed
- Search engines penalize your site for “unnatural links”
Regularly analyzing your site’s link profile will keep you updated on linking activity. When a large drop in placement or traffic takes place, you may want to individually check your links to ensure the page is accessible.
- Poor Content Relevancy
Some industries like tech and entertainment have markets that ebb and flow in search trends throughout the year. It’s rare for industries to experience extensive periods of inelastic demand, leading to searches and keywords that lose interest overtime.
Conducting a search analysis on your site’s keywords is an SEO best practice in evaluating the quality of content. Falling behind on these trends can be detrimental to the content quality of your site as information and product offerings become obsolete.
- Search Engine Algorithm Changes
If there’s one constant about search engines, it’s that they’re always evolving. Recently, the events of “mobilegaddon” changed the search landscape as sites tanked in rankings because of algorithmic changes that forced them to be mobile friendly. Although events like these are rare, they serve as a strong reminder that search engines are constantly evolving and sites need to optimize to the new standards.
In recent years, massive search engines updates have been more spaced out and subtle. Most of the large SEO blogs have detailed information concerning the latest updates. Tracking industry traffic trends and your search rankings across different search engines can help determine if your site is optimized to the latest major search engine algorithm change.
- Forgetting to Redirect Pages
Important pages that are inaccessible to search engines is a major cause behind a drop in organic traffic. A page is only accessible through a search engine after its been indexed. When the address or state of a page is changed without a 301 redirect, the page comes inaccessible to search and its potential traffic is lost. This is especially common for sites that have gone through a redesign or major changes have been made to its content.
- Missing Basic Page Elements
There are so many elements that go into a page, it’s easy to overlook applying some of the most basic best practices. Basic elements like uploading tags, formatting content, forgetting to link pages, and neglecting to create analytics tracking codes can all lead to a loss in organic traffic data and ranking performance.
Of the most basic elements listed, tags are some of the most missed that can adversely impact a page’s ranking. Tags are used by search engines like Google to index pages based on its specific keyword relevance. There are some instances where you’d want to avoid indexing a page, such as a “Thank You” page that follows a conversion. It’s a best practice to have frequent crawls that check for active tags, ensuring that your site is properly indexed.
The cause of your site’s loss in organic traffic or drop in page ranking can come from a combination of factors. However, these 5 factors are a good place to start if your site is experiencing a drop in traffic or rank.
Having a dedicated SEO specialist on your digital marketing team can help ensure that your site is competitive and gaining quality traffic. To learn more about how our search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, and content development services will help you reach your digital marketing goals, fill out our form and an expert will reach you soon!
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