Getting more and more organic traffic is a goal for the vast majority of online businesses. Here we have seen how there are different ways to lose organic traffic in a short time. Most of the problems can occur within the web, so they are fixable.
Others may depend on third parties, such as they may link us to pages from other countries, so we will have to act differently. To act differently, we need to know what changes we should bring. Check this article to know 6 effective ways to grab more traffic.
If you have recently suffered a loss of organic traffic, it may be due to one of the following points. Check out these points and fix them.
Page Redesign
It is possible that when a web design change is made, it ends up verifying that there is a loss of visits just after republishing the new website.
It is possible that with the new design, the structure of the original web has been changed: main pages, URLs, categories of the page, etc. and this directly affects its organic positioning.
If the structure is changed, the links that point to these URLs can be lost. We can detect and correct internal links, but external links are more difficult to redirect.
When a website is restructured, “gaps” can be created that cause the site to drop positions, and the organic traffic achieved to collapse. Another point to take into account when changing the design of the web is usability and navigation.
Incorrect Redirects
It is possible that when we redesign a website, old URLs will be changed for new ones, even better optimized for SEO. It can lead to a drop in traffic due to mismanagement of permanent or 301 redirects. Try to redirect all old URLs to new ones. It can be done through the .htaccess file.
If you think this may be your problem, check out the google manual on moving a website and changing URLs. As a general rule, 301 redirects should be maintained forever, especially if links point to the old ones.
404 errors
Many times, you change from CMS; for example, you go from having a website at blogspot.com to WordPress.
This change can result in hundreds of 404 errors if 301 redirects fail. If you want to take advantage of the Link juice of a site that has been working correctly and all its URLs, you must make the corresponding permanent redirects. Moz also analyzed the A to Z about 404 errors here.
Google says about 404 errors: This means several things:
– Having 404 errors is not directly proportional to a penalty (unless there are many).
– Ideally, you should personalize this page with links to other vital parts of the web.
– If you have 404 errors, the crawling time of the page runs out on these pages, which can lead to a loss of organic traffic.
– You can have a loss of tracking the number of pages, which affects the ranking of the web, because there may be fewer pages indexed than there could be.
– You can check the 404 errors that you have within your Google Search Console tool.
Low Time On Page
Since 2011, Google announced that it would prevail on websites that offer quality content adapted to user needs. And Google Panda takes care of this.
The Google Panda algorithm acts as a filter on Google results to minimize the pages with low-quality content as much as possible. This means that if your website offers imperfect information, you will be able to see a decrease in visits and a drop in the positions of your keywords.
Have A Large Number Of Non-Relevant Pages
This scenario occurs when you have many indexed URLs (blog posts or products) and a high percentage of them – they do not receive organic traffic. A page that does not accept any visits is NOT relevant to google, so we have to act on it.
We can start with detecting those NOT relevant pages. To scrape all the pages and identify those that do not receive traffic we can use this tool: urlprofiler.com
Once identified, we must make a decision, such as:
– This page has inbound links, but the content is outdated – we can update the content or do a 301 redirect to a more relevant page.
– This page has no inbound links, but the content is current: improve that content by adding more text.
– This page belongs to an outdated but well-positioned product: do a 301 redirect to a new one.
– The page is from an outdated product and is far behind in the ranking (50-70): remove the product.
– Poorly positioned blog post and no one knows why: improve the title, add text and images, and re-index it.
As we can see, each case has a different solution. You have to first review and think about what to do before sending a page to the trash.
