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5 Reasons Your Website Traffic is Down and How You Can Fix It

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As a business owner that wants to make money, you will be worried if your website is not giving the desired, or projected outcome.

Low website traffic translates to low business visibility, this will have a negative impact on your bottom line.

If you are worried about the reasons why your website is down then keep calm, relax yourself, grab a drink and go through this articles on reasons that might be causing it and how to fix that.

There are several reasons for the drop in website traffic, I will tell you about the Five (5) reasons you should immediately look at and respond to the consistent drop in your website traffic.

You can reach out to me if you need immediate assistance, I will thoroughly analyze your website and help you fix the problems.




Five (5) reasons you should immediately look at and respond to the consistent drop in your website traffic.

 


1. Search Engine Algorithm Update.

Frequent update of search engine algorithm affects many websites and it is the most common reasons why both small and large business websites suffer low turn up of traffic.

Let’s get deeper on the problem;


THE PROBLEM

Search engines don’t care about your business, there only focus is to provide online users with the best experience because of this, they are always looking for a new and better way to improve the search engine experience to make online users happy and satisfied.

One of the ways of making online users happy is by providing them the best answer to their search queries.

The more they visit the search engine to solve their problems the more search earn loyal users.

That is the reason search engines like Google, and Bing update their algorithms frequently.

However, an update in the search engine algorithm can negatively affect your website visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

It the update does not improve your website rankings and visibility; it can impact it and cause your rankings to go down.

Google is a search engine with the highest online users and market share.

An update in their algorithm can cause you to lose your website traffic by more than 50%.

If your website moves from page one to page five for your industry competitive keywords it will affect your traffic substantially.

The reason for this is because majority of online users don’t view more than the first three page of the search results.


How to Fix it:

While you can’t bribe the search engine or do anything about its frequent algorithm updates.

You can align your online advertising strategy to cater for these upcoming updates.

Having a cross-channel advertising strategy will help your business to gain traffic from multiple online sources.

Examples of other online sources that get you traffic include;

  1. 1
    Paid Ads
  2. 2
    Social Media
  3. 3
    Email

If your website organic search engine traffic drops because of algorithm update, you can use paid ads like Google ads, remarketing, share your blog posts on Social Media, or send emails to your email subscribers about your new blog posts to increase your traffic.

A good blog posts posted on social media can earn you more shares and also gain you new online customers.

If you need to have a custom cross channel marketing strategy, you can schedule a 30 minutes consultation call with me to fix your business advertising issues and set up for success.




2. Your website is not Secured.

An unsecured website will also likely experience drop in search engine organic traffic due to the fact that it might be flag as a spam site by the search engine.


THE PROBLEM

It is important your website is secured with a Secured hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) so as to keep the information of those visiting your website secure, especially if at one point your visitors will use their credit card on your website.

Your website must be encrypted to protect customers data and information from been hijacked by hackers.

Let’s go back in time a little bit; In 2014, Google notify business owners and SEOs that HTTPS would be used as a small ranking factor for its search results algorithm.

It is also important to secure online users from hackers phishing for their information and data this is the reason why web browsers like Google chrome alert online users if they visit a website that is secured.

Google Chrome go as far as creating a full-page notification to stop and encourage user not to visit the site but to go back to safety.

Your website must be using the HTTPS and HTTP. HTTPS is a signal for a safe and secured website, while HTTP means it is not safe and secured hence the website should not be visited.

Using a non-secure protocol on your website will cause you to lose substantial organic traffic from the search engine due to the fact that online users will not feel safe to visit your website after their web browsers notify your website as a Danger Zone that can not be visited.


How to Fix it:

If your website traffic is down and your website uses HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS. Then you need to fix it and redirect your domain from HTTP to HTTPS.

If your website uses HTTPS before, and you check it now and see it change to HTTPs it means that your SSL certificate might have expired so you will need to renew it.

To renew it you need to contact your domain provider for support, or get the help of a developer.

It might also be that your website has an SSL Certificate but need to be attached to your domain to get it secured.

If you can’t fix it yourself you can Hire an SEO Professional to get it done for you and restore your website lost traffic, but if you will like to do it yourself you can follow the steps below:

  • Contact your domain provider and acquire a dedicated IP address for your website.
  • Log in to your dashboard and install the SSL certificate on your domain if you have one.
  • If you don’t have a SSL certificate then purchase one. It is usually yearly.
  • After you have purchase it you should activate it with your website hosting platform.

NOTE: Activation and Installation of website SSL certificate take few days before it reflects.




3. Your Content keyword strategy is not Up to date.

If your website keyword strategy is not frequently update it will also hurt your organic traffic and you will see a continuous decline in your website search engine traffic.

Let’s look to the problem;


THE PROBLEM

If you experience consistent decrease in your website search engine traffic you need to evaluate your keyword strategy and come up with a better one.

If you a novice in online marketing and you don’t have a keyword strategy for website ranking then you need to review your website content and check each of your page ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Online users are people with different needs and at a point in time change in need is expected.

Google search tool like Google Trends is a free tool that will show you what your target customers are looking for base on your industry related keywords.

Before apple launch iphone in June 2007, and eventual takeover the smartphone market, online users search for “cellphone.” But now, online users search for “Smartphone.”

If your business fails to adapt to the changes in market trends you will lose valuable traffic and qualified customers that are ready to make a purchase.

Your website should be able to reach the future before your customers and be ready to welcome them when they finally arrive.

Provide your website visitors with relevant and quality content that will be useful to them and get them to trust you.


How to Fix it:

Updating your website keyword strategy is a time-consuming process. It doesn’t matter if you are a large or small business owner, your website needs constant keywords update.

You need to invest time and evaluate your keywords strategy monthly.

Doing this will keep you update with your target customers need, which you will help them solve and in return increases your bottom line.

If you have the time to work on your website yourself, you should follow the below steps to get your website traffic back;

  • Audit your website keywords strategy, look for outdated keywords and replace it with updated keywords and content.
  • Perform a keyword research and come up with more new keywords that has high value.

If you discover new content topics from your keywords research you should take advantage of it to create better high value content that online users and search engine will love.

New and high-quality content will improve your website ranking in the search results and earn you more organic traffic.

High-quality content means content that is informational, and educative to online users.




4. Your Website’s Developer Doesn’t Know About SEO

If your website developer does not know about SEO it will affect the search engine ranking of your website traffic if you redesign it.

This is the reason why it is good to hire an SEO professional for your website re-design so the design doesn’t have a negative impact on your search engine ranking.


THE PROBLEM

It is good for your website to wear a new look, especially if your website design has been there for years.

A website with a new look will be modern and professional, plus it will be delightful to your visitors giving them the best user experience which can increase your business ROI.

A new website might be good, but you shouldn’t forget about the impact of SEO in your business if you want to re-design your website.

You might be thinking that all website developer knows about SEO, I am here to tell you that is not usually the case. Most website developers don’t know about SEO.

You shouldn’t just give your website out to any website developer without confirming if they have SEO knowledge or not.

When next you want to re-design your website you should consider hiring a website developer that have an SEO knowledge so as to consider your website rankings and not let it drop through the re-design.

As an SEO professional I want to let you know about the few website re-design mistakes that hurt website ranking in the search results;

  • Change in website hierarchy structure without updating the website sitemap.
  • Creation of brand-new pages for existing pages, without setting up a 301 redirect.
  • Non inclusion of Google Analytics tracking code in the website while redesigning it.
  • Replacing web pages content, including the HTML tags and meta descriptions with content that are not optimized for SEO


Website re-design should improve your ranking and increase your bottom line instead of harming it.

You should never forget about hiring a website designer that is knowledgeable about SEO in your next design, you don’t want to struggle for visibility in the search engine after website re-design.

Let’s take a look at how you can fix the negative impact of your new website design;


How to Fix it:

If you want to fix the issue yourself you should follow the below steps;

  • Optimize any new content you put on the website with keywords.
  • Update your sitemap.
  • Submit the sitemaps to Google search Console.
  • Set up 301 redirects.

These are quick fix you can do immediately to get your website running at its full potential, but the fix might also be more than the four steps I listed base on how your website was re-design.

The website re-design may require you to re-start your SEO strategy, and this will set you back for months before you can start to earn the kind of organic traffic you are earning before.

If your former website doesn’t drive traffic then you will also need to take a similar approach of executing a new SEO strategy.

Your SEO strategy will require you to create optimized content for your target audience.

If you don’t have an SEO strategy you can work with me to help your website search engine visibility, improve your rankings and increase your bottom line.

Reading this from my website now is a proof that I can set you up for success and increase your business visibility to your target customers online.




5. Your Website is Slow to Load.

If your website doesn’t load fast, it will badly affect your search engine ranking.

If online users visited your website through a webpage and your page takes forever to load, they will not be happy and will likely abandon your website to visit that of your competitor’s.


THE PROBLEM

Your website speed plays an important role in the success of your website.

If your website doesn’t load fast, it will affect your website search engine visibility and also affect your conversion rate.

Search engine will tank your website if it taking forever to load, this will affect your website ranking on the search engine and cause you to lose traffic.

Online users are engaged with lots of activities so they expected your website to load fast when they visit.

If your website is taking time to load it will frustrate them and they will have no option then to bounce out and visit other website.

This experience is a bad experience that will reduce your website traffic because a high bounce rate is a signal to google that your website is not providing online users with the best experience.

Website speed time is an important search engine ranking factor, your failure to maintain decent website performance will affect your website traffic and conversion.

Every fraction of website seconds count while loading, it will also decide if online users will like to stay long on your website or if they will leave your website immediately.

To increase your website traffic your website must load in not more than 3seconds, at most 5seconds.

Anytime longer than that will have a negative impact in your website search engine visibility.

If you want to increase your website traffic then you need to pay attention to the speed time of your website.

Your website speed can’t be ignored if you are having decline in search engine traffic.

A good place to start is to analyze your website speed with Google Pagespeed Insights.

Let’s take a look at the few factors that might be the cause of your website slow loading time:

  1. 1
    Your website images are not compressed.
  2. 2
    There are lots of large files in your website.
  3. 3
    Absence of Content Delivery Network.
  4. 4
    You have a low-quality hosting service.
  5. 5
    If you hosted your website on WordPress, too many plugins may be slowing your website down.

As the saying goes slow and steady wins the race, but it is not when it comes to online websites, a second delay in your website will cost you an enormous amount of traffic, and it will also decelerate your website search results traffic.

No matter the device that was used to access your website, it must be able to load fast and not waste online user’s time.

After you must have known few of the reasons your website may be slow, let’s take a look at how it can be fixed;


How to Fix it:

If you interested in fixing the issue really fast you should do the following;

  • Compress the images in your website using TinyPNG, while still maintain it’s quality. TinyPNG will help you reduce the file size of your images from megabyte (MB) to Kilobyte (KB) while still maintaining it’s original quality.
  • Host your server on Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare. If you don’t know what a CDN is; it is a group of servers spread across different geographical locations all around the world to enable a quick delivery of content in a website.
  • Remove some of the outdated large files in your website.
  • Remove plugins that are not essential from your website if you are using WordPress.
  • Don’t host any videos in your website. The better thing to do is to have a youtube channel, publish your video on your youtube and insert the link into your wordpress website. Youtube will take the heavy load away from your website and let it load faster.

Fixing your website speed is really important to the growth of your business, and search engine visibility.

A slow loading website is not good for your business because it will frustrate your target customers and cut you away from becoming visible to paying customers.

The truth is that no one likes a website that will take forever to load while they have other important activities they will like to attend.

Fixing your website speed will increase your organic traffic, rankings and conversion as both online users and search engine will fall in love with your website.


 

Work with me to Restore your website traffic and increase your bottom line.

I know for sure that as a business man you are not happy seeing your website traffic go down while your competitors are ranking higher than you and obtaining new paying customers.

It takes great deal of work to restore website traffic after it is gone or to gain more website traffic if you don’t have any before.

This is the reason why business owners work with me to provide them with the best SEO strategy.

Odebiyi Oladipupo

My name is Odebiyi Lateef Oladipupo, I am an SEO Expert with 5+ years of marketing experience in developing, and executing performance-based online marketing strategies that will enable small and medium-sized businesses to improve their website organic traffic, conversion rate, drive more qualified leads, and improve their return-on-investment (ROI) on their marketing investments.

Schedule a Strategy session!

Right now I am available to take in new clients. Schedule a strategy season with me, let's discuss your business goals and see which SEO plan is the right fit for you


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