In today’s brand-new episode of Ask an SEO episode 4, Brian Harnish dives into the reasons and scenarios behind certain traffic drops, and what you need to be on the lookout for.
When it comes to traffic drops, most SEO professionals must be constantly on watch for any signs because this can mean that keywords have dropped, user search behavior has changed, or the website was hit by an algorithmic or manual penalty.
If that happens, bad things happen to other metrics as well, including conversions and sales.
In this episode, Brian examines the following situations:
- What happens if you have a traffic drop every weekend?
- What happens if you have a drop every few months out of the year?
- What if you have a traffic drop of 100% overnight?
- What if you have a drop that’s less drastic than the above, but still significant?
Enjoy our latest episode! And please don’t forget to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
Ask an SEO Episode 4 Transcript:
Today’s question comes from Anna and she asks:
I have a website traffic drop. Should I be concerned?
Well, this is a real “it depends” question, right?
Because there are multiple scenarios and multiple solutions.
So let’s take a look at a few.
First scenario: you have a traffic drop happening every weekend or so.
And it doesn’t seem to ever end, right?
So what is likely happening is that you have an industry where people work Monday to Friday and they leave work at the office.
They go home and they don’t look at industry websites on the weekend.
In which case you kind of have to live with that unless you build an alternative traffic source where you can get traffic on the weekend in order to actually compensate.
And that could take some time.
The next scenario: say you have a traffic drop occurring for several months out of the year from July to August and maybe again in March and April.
Congratulations.
You have a web site that is seasonally based and relies on seasonal traffic.
There’s really no way around this except making sure that your business is viable enough to get through these seasonal periods.
The next scenario: say you have a traffic drop that drops 100 percent overnight. That’s pretty panicky, right?
Well, what this could be indicative of is a situation where you have your design team who had deployed a brand new site and they do not include the Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager tracking code when they did so.
And this can cause this.
So it’s going to be imperative that you find that tracking code and get that re-added to the site as quickly as possible.
The last scenario: user search behavior changes.
Say that you have a keyword where it was doing so well one month, but it actually is on the decline the next.
Well, this can occur through changes in user search behavior, especially if users decide that they want to search something a little bit differently.
So what you’ll have to do is figure out another keyword that is more viable if this happens to you.
The next thing is that you could have been ranking for a featured snippet for a certain keyword and that specific search result was wiped out in a recent algorithm update, in which case you have to find another featured snippet that would be equally or close to as viable as the last one.
That’s it for today’s Ask an SEO Episode 4.
This is Brian Harnish signing off. Have a great day!
