How to Diagnose a Drop in SEO
SEO is one of the commonly used marketing strategies by both small and grand enterprises. A good SEO strategy will grow your traffic, leading to more sales, profits and revenue. However, this is not always the case. In some instances, you may notice a significant drop in SEO traffic which can be worrying. There are multiple systematic ways to evaluate the drop in traffic, though.
What causes a drop in SEO traffic?
Numerous factors can cause a drop in SEO. If your site loses Google traffic or rankings, it’s best to hire SEO services from a professional SEO company. Some of the causes include;
- Analytics tracking error
- Missing code on a page
- Split testing error
- Duplicate content
- Algorithm penalty
- Normal Google fluctuations and more.
Here are ways to diagnose the drop in SEO traffic:
- Ascertain whether your website is working
This sounds simple, but it’s pretty prevalent. Nevertheless, have a look and see if your site is messed up. The things to examine include checking if your hosting or domain is expired. Also, your web host may not be publicizing your site, which could affect your rankings.
- 2. Check for website changes.
If you notice a drop in your SEO traffic, the first step would be to check the changes on your website. If you run a big corporation, keep a proper record and list the changes on Goggle docs or in Goggle Analytics. This makes it easier to identify changes on your site by others from other departments.
Examples of changes may include;
- New site theme
- New plugins
- Updates on existing plugins
- New additional pages
- Major URL structure changes
If these happen, they can hurt your SEO. To avert this, verify whether your analytics is correctly installed, for this could be an analytics tracking error. The issue isn’t to do with an analytics error. Check keywords, devices, landing pages, top search engines, and top areas that lost traffic.
- Have a look at your Webmaster Tools
A drop in SEO traffic can be attributed to your webmaster tools. If you suspect this could be the issue, check metrics like; site messages from Google for errors or warnings and the crawl rate. You may notice some crawl errors that an SEO agency can help fix. Also, there could be a tracking error depending on how you search for queries in the WebMaster tools.
- Check the Link Analysis report & Ahrefs.
Use third-party tools tool to get a better picture of your backlink profile. For instance, you can use the Majestic SEO tool to check the percentage of anchor text for a keyword. Also, check if you lost all the traffic for the term, indicating a Penguin Algorithm Penalty.
A quick wrap up
If you suspect a drop in your SEO traffic, the first step should be to verify whether your organic traffic is dropping. Also, check your analytics, then WebMaster Tools and website. If you can’t figure out the issue, seeking help from SEO professionals will save a lot of stress and time. The specialists will examine your website and fix the problem with ease.
