When your site loses organic traffic, there could be a host of reasons – website or technical change, a transition to HTTPs, a Google or Bing algorithm change, your competitors have changed tactics, or perhaps paid ads are taking over those search results listings.
If you’ve been trying to determine why your site’s organic traffic is decreasing and how to reverse the trend, it’s best to get a second set of eyes on your data.
Our traffic loss assessments outline the reasons for your traffic decreasing and most importantly, you will receive a prioritized set of recommendations to start improving your site’s organic traffic.
Our investigations look at the following areas:
Web analytics and ranking data
By looking at your web analytics and ranking data, we can see if your site was hit by a search algorithm update, whether your organic traffic loss is just Google or all engines, and whether it’s mobile-specific or not. We can also pinpoint whether it was due to a technical change on your site.
We will evaluate all the potential causes and use the information to direct you toward traffic remediation solutions.
Keyword rankings
There are a variety of things that your keyword rankings can tell us about how or why you lost traffic.
Your traffic decrease could be based on specific pages or keywords that lost rankings, or a decrease in search volume for certain keywords. Often the searcher’s intent of keywords changes (along with how sites are being ranked), or there could be new Knowledge boxes, instant answers, ads, etc pushing down the organic listings result in a drop in click-through volume.
We will look at specific samples of keywords and provide the next steps for adjusting your organic campaigns.
Historical backlink check
The good news is that sites are no longer penalized for unnatural links (outbound links that might appear deceptive to Google to inflate page rank) and for the most part sites don’t need to disavow links. However, it’s possible that a website that had been linking to you might have redesigned or shut down, resulting in a huge loss of inbound links to your site. A significant decrease in inbound links can also affect your Google rank and traffic.
We’ll look at any of the issues inbound links that may cause and provide you with recommendations for improvement.
Content quality review
Obvious areas of thin or low-quality content or bad outbound links could be causing problems. Depending on your site, we also review whether you are meeting Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content quality requirements and whether you have displayed enough EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) signals on your site.
We will document and provide recommendations for content improvements.
Usability issues
Did you know that a negative signal about your site is sent to Google if your organic landing pages frustrate your users and cause them to bounce back to search? This is also the case if your competitors’ mobile sites load faster than yours.
Google will also penalize for full-page ads on mobile. Not providing enough supplementary content to satisfy the user’s intent for the target keyword will also penalize your site.
We will look at all the usability issues that may have caused a traffic loss and outline remediation options.
Competitor review
In this section, we will look to see if your traffic loss is driven by competitors who are now outranking you with keywords. We will outline what they are doing that is winning them more organic traffic and what you can do to outrank them and remain competitive.
Final deliverable
You will receive a .pdf report with all the findings, along with a one-hour consultation call to walk through any questions you may have about the findings. We will also be available for a week via email after the delivery of the final assessment for any additional questions you may have about the assessment.
