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Reasons Why Your Website Might be Losing Traffic

Reasons Why Your Website Might be Losing Traffic

To sell your product or service online, you need to drive traffic to your website. Because of this, you may go into panic mode if your site starts to lose traffic. We know it’s easier said than done but try to stay calm. There are many simple explanations for a lower volume of traffic and many of them have easy fixes. In this article, we explore some of the reasons why your website might be losing traffic and discuss how to fix them.

You’ve Made Changes to Your Site

Making changes to your site is the most common cause for loss of traffic. You would think that changes should increase traffic, so this can seem confusing. After all, if you revamp your design or company bio you hope that more people will find you.

Loss of traffic doesn’t necessarily mean your changes were bad. However, it may mean that you forgot to integrate certain aspects. Many businesses forget to optimise their pages for SEO when they update them. If you completely redesign your website, it’s easy to forget that you need to optimise every page. No matter how great your new design is, you need to optimise your website for SEO for it to affect your audience.

If you want to increase your traffic, you need to make sure your new website is optimised for search engines. Doing this will help bring back that traffic and get more viewers to engage on your site. SEO includes building links, integrating keywords, cleaning up your coding and optimising your page speed. We explore some of these in more detail below.

Your Page Speed is Slow

Page speed is often slow after updating a site or changing the design. When you add new elements to a page, you need to make sure they are optimised. If elements like videos, photos or any large files aren’t optimised, they will slow down your page speed. Slow loading pages can cause users to bounce. They don’t want to wait around for a page to load; instead, they want the information or content instantly. This means that slow-loading pages can affect your traffic.

Thankfully, you can fix this by changing your page speed. Testing your page speed will help you to figure out what is affecting your speed and how you can fix it. You can do this through Google PageSpeed Insights. If you don’t feel confident making the changes yourself, you can employ a digital marketing company to make the changes for you.

You Have Links to Outdated or Deleted Pages

Over time, you will redesign your site, restructure it and move pages around. While this can benefit your business, it has the potential to hurt it if you don’t fully update your pages.

When you redesign your site, you may move pages around or restructure them and move them to different places on your site. If that page was linked on another page, the link becomes broken. Instead of directing users to the page, it will direct them to an error page. This can cause your site to lose traffic because you lose credibility. Users don’t want to click on a link that doesn’t work.

To fix this, the best thing to do is check all your links. You can do this through a broken link checker, like Dead Link Checker or Online Broken Link Checker. Once you’ve figured out where the broken links are, you can update them or remove them if the page no longer exists.

You Aren’t Earning Backlinks

Backlinks are an important part of search engine optimisation. To boost the ranking of your site and reach more leads, you need to earn backlinks. If you’re not earning backlinks, you may experience a loss of traffic.

Backlinks help to bring new traffic to your website. They bring in leads that are interested in your product or service. Unfortunately, you need to consistently earn backlinks for this to be effective. You may see a drop in traffic if your competition starts earning backlinks and you do not. This is because they will rank higher than you on SERPs and take some of the traffic.

The best way to solve this issue is to start earning backlinks. To do this, reach out to authority sites and ask them to link your page. The easiest way to get authority sites to link to your page is by creating quality content. You can then share the content with them and ask them to give it a read. If they like it, they may use is as a resource on their website. As well as earning backlinks, this helps you to build a relationship with authority businesses.

Your Site Dropped in Ranking

The ranking of your website has a huge impact on its level of traffic. On average, the top search result of Google has a click-through rate of 30%. This number drops significantly for the second result. This means that if your site drops in ranking, you may see a decrease in traffic. Your site may drop in ranking if your competitors are taking actions to improve their site which cause them to rank higher.

If you’re not sure why your ranking has dropped, analyse the sites that are ranked above you. See if they’re doing something that you are not. For instance, do you see any elements that help boost their ranking, like images or videos? When you analyse your competitors’ sites, you may find that they are doing something that your business isn’t. To improve your ranking, you need to figure out what this is and make changes to your site.

So, there you have it – reasons why your website might be losing traffic. If you’ve experienced a drop in traffic, try not to panic. Instead, stay calm and consider the points above. If you make the necessary changes, the traffic should be back before you know it.