Traffic can be a major indicator that something is wrong on your website. While it is normal for it to go up and down over time, even cyclically, it is not necessarily normal for huge spikes, or for huge drops without a reason. Huge spikes may indicate that there is spam traffic if there is no other reasoning for it, which can be noticed due to drops in pages per session, as well as increases in bounce rate. Similarly, if we are looking at it from a huge drop standpoint, you will be seeing massive amounts of users dropping in order to be worried. Let’s take a look at some of the things that can help you determine why this may have dropped.
Search Console
Search Console can be a massively helpful tool when it comes to determining why your website may have less traffic. One of the things that you can do to determine this is by looking at the crawl errors. There are a few specific ones that you will want to be on the lookout for including Not Found pages and Error 404’s, as this could be an indicator of a bigger problem.
Duplicate Content
Typically you would know if you have duplicate content on a website, but that is also something to look for because that can decrease your rankings pretty quickly in search engines. There are a lot of different tools that you can use for this issue, such as Grammarly, etc. and you can also run your content through it beforehand to ensure that it is not duplicate content.
Backlinks
Backlinks can be a huge issue for a website. While building links is important, buying them from link farms is actually one of the worst things you can do. If you are doing this, or notice that there is a significant number of odd-looking links to the back end of your website, you may want to do a little more digging into the situation.