Factors That May Affect Organic Traffic
Fluctuations in organic traffic are normal. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to point the root cause. That’s because an organic search has unique challenges in finding the real cause of traffic and conversions.
When diagnosing your organic traffic, you may try looking at these factors.
Not Indexed
To know whether or not Google has indexed your site, perform a quick Google search by typing in “site:yourwebsite.com.” If you notice that some critical pages do not appear on the result page, it is likely that your robots.txt file blocks some important pages of your site.
You must also check your site’s no index tag.
Did you update your site?
Updating your site, such as removing pages or migrating sites without redirects, can cause a decline in traffic. That’s because Google has to re-crawl and re-index your site’s pages. Now, if you changed the URL structure of your site, you should use the 301 redirect strategy to preserve its link equity.
Bots
They, too, can affect your organic traffic. Typically, they mimic real user behavior when they enter your site’s home page and throughout your site. One sign of traffic from bots is a highly visited page with a high bounce rate, a low conversion, and a low average time on the page.
You can start by implementing a generic bot filter. It is also vital that you filter out your IP address.
Outranked by resellers
It is a factor that you can’t control. Having several resellers can provide your brand with maximum exposure. But when your resellers have more traffic, they can easily outrank you for using branded keywords.
Of course, this factor does not derail your revenue. But it is a factor that would cause traffic loss.
URL confusion
If your site does not have a clear keyword map, then it can negatively affect organic traffic. It is particularly the case if there are one or more pages optimized for the same search term.
Doing so will cause those pages to compete against one another on the result page. As a result, it will reduce your site’s ranking for these pages.
To alleviate it, you may want to access a keyword tracking tool and look into the breakdown of the URLs that Google chooses to rank for a search term.
All of these factors may affect your organic traffic. However, there are still others that you need to investigate. If you work with an SEO agency, you can pinpoint the exact cause of your site’s waning traffic. The company will explain the real reason of why your traffic is down.
