Regardless of how long you have been using SEO, you’re aware that there can be fluctuations in your organic traffic. While you’re aware of this, you may not know exactly where they come from. There are obvious spots to check, like Google Analytics, but other places can be more difficult to identify. Below is a list of basic and more complex issues that can affect your organic traffic:
- To ensure that your website pages are being indexed by Google, use “site:yourwebsite.com”. If you find that your important pages aren’t showing in SERPs, this could be your issue. If this is the case, check your robots.txt file to see if there are any pages or directories that are being blocked.
- If you have recently revised your website, you should expect a decrease in your traffic. When you rework your website’s content, Google needs to crawl and index your pages again. If you change any of your URLSs, make sure to use 301 redirects to prevent any traffic loss.
- If you don’t have a clear content strategy, you may find yourself optimizing two pages for the same keyword. This will cause your website pages to compete against each other in search results. It can possibly cause the ranking of those pages to decrease.
- Keep an eye on your rich snippets to ensure the correct information is being pulled in. If you change any content on your website, make sure it doesn’t change the snippets.
- Since Google removed some of the right-hand ads, some companies are seeing their direct traffic being taken over by paid ads.