SEO

5 Reasons Why Your Website Traffic Dipped So Badly in 2020

Reasons Why Your Website Traffic Dipped So Badly in 2020

Reasons Why Your Website Traffic Dipped So Badly in 2020

Website visits mean different things for different businesses. If you have a media site, traffic could imply revenue from ads, while for e-commerce sites, traffic translates to sales. Again, some websites may not sell products or services, but traffic means eyeballs on the web pages, and that matters much to such brands. It is building brand awareness.

According to an article published on Searchenginejournal, traffic means customers, and when it comes to search engine perspective, ranking equates to traffic that is equivalent to customers.

No matter whether you are an SEO expert, digital marketing professional, stakeholder, or webmaster, it is your onus to understand why your website ranking dipped and what you need to do to address the problem. Here are five reasons why your ranking was pushed down the search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2020:

  1. Your website has lost links

You need to do a reality check whether your website has lost links for quite some time using tools such as Cognitive SEO, Majestic, or Ahrefs. Lost links lead to a drop in rankings in the SERPs. You need to ask a few questions concerning lost links. These are:

  • Are all lost links found on one page or similar pages where noticed rank drops?
  • Is the issue is happening for your whole website?
  • Are you noticing link drops to those pages that link other web pages with poor rankings?
  • Is there a decrease concerning inbound links to your web pages that lost rankings?
  • When your inbound links are lost or broken, figure out where precisely those links come from, and the reason why they are broken.

Many times links change or break due to website updates and in such cases, you need to persuade the website owner to restore the lost links.

If the links are removed intentionally, it means those are unnatural links and therefore, marked and penalized by the search engine giant Google. There is no point in keeping such links.

If you find that the links were replaced with new ones to another source, you can link to this new source.

You can keep watch on lost links by investing in link monitoring tools for tracking lost links actively. It is the correct and proactive way to take the right steps before your website loses its ranking in the SERPs.

  1. Monitoring the incorrect rankings

When you have your website designed for several years, the keywords (KWs) are no longer relevant because things have changed significantly. If you are still using industry terms that do not match with what your prospective customers want now, your site’s rankings will dip. Many users look for different variations for the same topic and fail to find the right results. That is why Google engineers worked on natural language understanding skills to a considerable extent.

These days, online visitors type more natural language to get apt or relevant results and it becomes easy to rank for such things provided your web copy is lucid and simple. Google is also ranking web pages depending on complete sentences instead of depending on a couple of KWs. Therefore, monitor rankings and ensure you implement the right SEO strategies. You can get useful insights from a website performance report to figure out what is working and what isn’t. If you are using generic or old KWs or phrases, update your KW strategy immediately.

  1. Manual actions matter

If you have noticed a sudden and considerable dip in your SERP rankings, of late, it means Google has severely penalized your website. When it comes to manual actions, they are applied manually and not due to algorithm updates.

When you see that your website ranking on other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo, it means Google has penalized your site, doubt about the same. No matter whether the penalty is automatic or manual, you will need to resolve the issue so that Google removes the penalty. The best thing to do is look for the notifications right from the Google Search Console account.

Make sure you keep an eye on warnings in the messages menu as well as the manual actions part. In these places, you will notice that a Google employee discovered that particular web pages are not conforming to Google guidelines. You will find information and recommendation about resolving the problems.

  1. Normal changes when it comes to search

There are chances when you will see a dip in Google rankings and the drop is not because of factors associated with your business website. The search engine giant has frequently altered the kind of results depending on visitor behavior. Let us explain this point with the help of a suitable example.

For instance, if you find an unexpected boost in search for a particular topic, the search engine might show up newer results on top, pushing static content deeper down in the SERPs. Therefore, you need to update your web pages with new and unique content to avoid loss in search engine rankings.

We recommend that focus on Google Trends to determine whether there exist any changes to explain the drop in rankings.

  1. Improvements done by your competitors

You are following the SEO rules and yet losing significant traffic and consequently, rankings in the SERPS. The reason is that your competitors are doing something far better. Therefore, you need to monitor what your competitors are doing concerning SEO, link building, content marketing, and social media strategies.

You can use tools such as Versionista or Wayback Machine to determine what changes your business competitors have implemented, of late. Use backlink tools to figure if those had an inflow of new backlinks. Your competitors may be using a new SEO campaign they thought of their own.

It is, therefore, imperative to understand what your competitors are doing, and once you figure out that, you need to make the necessary changes when it comes to your website SEO.

Conclusion

You will need to work on your website SEO and it involves hard work and effort. You need to invest your time without rushing into the process. There is no shortcut to the same.