How to Check If Website Traffic Drop Suddenly

Sometimes, you may notice that your website traffic falls suddenly. If your site is listed on the SERP page at the lower position, you may need to go to the Google Index and check that the number of indexed pages on your site. This blog post will highlight some things to check if and when website traffic is declining at an unexpected rate.

To check if a website is at the bottom of the search engine results pages (SERP), you can check the website traffic statistics. Once you see that your website’s traffic has fallen, the top SEO company, in India will help you analyze the nature of the decline over a longer period of time. They now need to focus on finding out what the performance drop is.

While the high-level backlinks of your site can help improve its visibility in search engines, the loss of the same backlinks can damage your current search engine ranking, which can be up to 10% to 20% lower than it used to be.

SEO ranking in SERP can also be affected by a loss of valuable backlinks, as it will lead to a sudden drop in web traffic. Check all noticeable changes in your backlink profile, especially if most keyword pages are affected by traffic disruptions.

Analyze All the Facts Properly

Check your Google search console to see if the reason your site has fallen low in the SERPs is actually a penalty. Then, check for broken URLs and run a website audit to determine the reasons that affect website traffic. All in all, make sure that you fix all these problems in order to gain more web page traffic from search engines.

Similarly, one of the first things to check if there is a drop in traffic to your site is the search console. It allows you to detect any HTML problems or trends that hack your websites and affect website traffic.

Google Analytics is the gold standard for monitoring your website traffic, and if set up properly, you should check the notifications that are held in the search console as soon as the data is delivered.

If you find something is wrong and you need to make sure the tracking code is installed properly, go to the Google Analytics help page for some troubleshooting tips and contact your website developers.

Use the Best Tool to Monitor Traffic

Use a backlink tool like Ahrefs or Majestic to check if your links contribute to improving the traffic rate of your website. If you notice a drop in traffic, check the backlinks profile on the site to see what has changed and update the affected pages to replace the lost backlinks to further improve website traffic.

Use the Google Analytics tool to keep tabs on the backlink profiles of your websites so you can check if the loss of links is the reason for the traffic loss or something else, even if you didn’t do it intentionally.

If external links are the real reason for the decline in website traffic, you should be prepared for a long road to restoring the site, as Google still comes through the filters. If you are looking for possible reasons for the loss of traffic to your websites, it is best to check first if any data sources are affected.

Don’t Forget to Check Web Redesign Issues

If you recently underwent a website redesign or migration and have noticed a drop in traffic, you should investigate to see if anything was broken or optimized during the process. If you really haven’t lost any website traffic, you can probably see that it has improved since the implementation of the code. In this scenario, the top web designing company, in India will help you redesign an SEO-friendly website.

Things to Check If Your Website Traffic Drops

If you go through this checklist, you will have a better idea of why your website is seeing a decline in traffic and what you can do about it. Hopefully, you have something to do now if you suddenly notice that traffic to your website has dropped dramatically, but you don’t know the reason.

Modify your website

If you have made some major changes to your website, such as clearing the content, redesigning the look, or migrating to a new platform, it will have an unfavorable effect on the search engine optimization of your website. These measures affect the indexation and crawl ability of your site. Look for crawl errors after going to the Google search console.

If the drop in traffic occurs after the first changes, carefully examine the graph. Moreover, the Google search console will also assist you in track broken links. There are a lot of tools on the internet, and by using them, you can pinpoint these links.

Violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines

If websites violate the quality guidelines, Google utilizes human reviewers to verify. And you can be penalized if you have. There are many things that violate the guidelines, and these are described as follows:

Spam produced by users

The ranking of your website will be decreased if you permit users to produce content that consists of spammy links. You can easily avoid spam content by moderating comments left by using reCAPTCHA and users.

Unnatural links

The ranking of your website will be dropped if your website has sneaky, unnatural links such as by means of link exchange or paid links. It is very important that the sociable links from your website do not go to doubtful websites or are not covered. If yes, you need to throw away such links to get back your search engine ranking and traffic.

Lost Backlinks

Backlinks will adversely affect the ranking of the website and the organic traffic that comes to the website if, for some reason, you lose high-quality backlinks to your website. Take advantage of the best SEO agency to ensure that your website’s lost backlinks are restored.

When the SEO agency is connected with the website owners to make sure that your website regains those links, it pinpoints the lost links. This will increase your SERP ranking and also make sure your traffic returns.

Competition

There are many reasons to lose the ranking and traffic of your website. One reason for this is that your competitors have been rapidly expanding. You can solve the weak points of your website and make sure you get back the lost traffic when you find the weak points of your website in comparison to your competitors.

Don’t forget, when your competitors run PPC campaigns for the keywords that you are ranked high for, they will take traffic from your website and send it to the competition. If this is the case, you can bid higher than your competitor for the same keywords so that you can enjoy targeting users.

Bring Up to Date of Google Algorithm

Google keeps updating and, from time to time, changing its algorithms. The core updates make news, and you can find out more about them online. Although maybe you don’t know about it when the tech giant updates the specific algorithms.

Therefore, for your selected keywords, it is sensible to keep a close watch on the SERPs of your website. Your search engine optimization (SEO) agency is able to monitor SERPs on your behalf by using specialized tools. They will analyze it to determine the reason and after that take corrective measures if they find the ranking of human beings’ pages changeable quite a bit.

The Tracking Code

Sometimes, unreliable data is the cause of dropping traffic on a website. The tracking code of your website is one of the most common areas where this can occur. As analytics plug-ins can cause concerns and changes to your website code for the tracking code, problems in analytics reporting can occur.

So, double-check the tracking code of your website before anything else to save yourself the trouble of looking in more complicated areas. Do a favor by making sure that your tracking code is installed properly in the first place. Go to the tracking code section then find it at admin.

After that tracking information, look for the tracking code, and lastly, look for the status at the top of the page. It lets you know that the code is working as planned and that the data is being consistently read by Google Analytics. Head over to the analytics help page on Google for troubleshooting instructions or contact your website developer if you see that something is not right.

Google Search Console

You need to check your Google search console account tops this list for one, the reason behind it is that it tells you so much of what’s going on with the organic traffic of your website and beyond. That is why search consoles should be your default starting point for determining what happened to your website traffic.

Google Search Console lets you optimize the visibility of your website and check its indexing status. It’s ground zero for important information about the ins and outs of how your site is functioning. There are some of the things you can find by checking the search console: website errors, the list of external and internal pages that connect to your website, messages from Google regarding manual actions, and the keyword searches that assist your website in the SERPs. This data will permit you to do a few basic analytics.

Reasons Why You Have Seen a Sudden Drop in Website Traffic

One of the most common reasons for the sudden drop in website traffic is a recent search algorithm update. A lot of questions arise when a website’s traffic is down. A sudden drop in a website’s traffic happens to every site and often gives its owners sleepless nights. There may be many reasons why your Google traffic dropped suddenly and significantly. Numerous things to check to determine why your Google traffic dropped, so below is a list to start with.

Algorithm Updates

Google doesn`t hide the fact that it releases multiple updates throughout the year, some more significant than others. Trying to get solid detail of changes is quite frankly like trying to get blood from a stone. An easy way to gauge whether your site may have been impacted.

An algorithm update is used to keep a close eye on any significant changes made by Google. The easiest way to get information on algorithm changes is to make use of tools such as Mozcast from Moz.com. Algoroo is another free algorithm tracking tool available if neither of those takes your fancy.

Redirect Errors

Various sites, especially large websites will have redirects in place. Because they are most frequently added via a file if you are using WordPress. When you added a new permanent redirect to your site, highly recommend testing it before pushing it to live environmentally. Even more so if you are adding large quantities of redirects.

Make sure that redirects are still working as they are expected to. Simply use a web crawler and using the list mode paste my list of URLs that are being redirected. And crawl them, and then analyze the response code and final destinations.

Crawl Errors

Open up the index coverage report and check for any URLs that have an error by using the search engine console. If any URLs in the coverage report have an error associated with them, they won`t be included in the index. Some typical errors that are found in this report include:

• Server errors.
• Redirect errors.
• URLs that are blocked by robots.txt.
• URLs that are marked with a no-index tag.

Ranking Losses

Another exceptional reason for seeing website traffic decline is a loss in organic ranking. If you are tracking your performance by using a rank tracker, then troubleshooting this will be a lot easier. And if you are not then utilizing data from the search console will be your best bet.

Use the following process to get an idea regarding any ranking changes.

• Compare the changes in the positions
• Take an export of ranking keywords before and after the drop.
• Using excels and G sheets create a table and paste in the data side by side.
• Using Google analytics and search console and your preferred rank-tracking tool.
• Retarget dropped terms with keyword research and mapping.

XML Sitemap

As an SEO, you will understand that only URLs return a response. It is indexable and should be visible on your site maps. The reason you could be seeing traffic plummet is a change in your XML sitemap. Crawl the sitemap URLs and make sure they all return around 200 OK responses, as well as any new landing pages. If there are 200 URLs on your site and there are only 45 to 50 in the sitemap, You will want to regenerate and resubmit using the search console.

Manual Actions and Penalties

If one of the eagle-eyed human reviewers finds content on the site. That goes against Google’s guidelines, a manual action will be issued against your site. From webmaster guidelines, you can find more information. And you can see if your site has been affected by manual action by using the report of the manual actions in the search console.

URLs being de-indexed

Important URLs that are no longer available in search engine results can be a massive factor. When investigating sudden website traffic loss.

• Check the index coverage report in the search console for any errors.
• Using the URL inspection tool, make sure that important pages are at rest in the index.
• If not, use the request indexing option in the search console.

Keyword Cannibalization

Whenever you have created a lot of new content around a specific topic without considering the keyword targeting. You may have accidentally fallen victim to keyword cannibalization. It occurs when a website appears for a keyword with multiple URLs.

Let us take an example if traffic is being spread across multiple pages, you could be losing valuable organic traffic. The easiest way to highlight cannibalization errors has been through the use of biometrics and the cannibalization report.

SERP Layout Changes

A new change in the way Google and search engines display organic results. These results can have an impact on your traffic level. Making sure that you are adaptable and willing to make changes will go a long way. In particular, Google has made changes to the way results are displayed, showing features.

And in the screen above you will see that before you see any sign of an organic result. You need to complete with ads. Carefully analyze the keywords that you are targeting just because they once were not triggering a SERP feature does not mean that they don`t know.

FAQs

Q1: What is website traffic?

Ans: Website traffic refers to the total number of visitors who access your website or web pages. It is an essential metric that provides insights into your website’s performance, traffic source, locations, age group, and gender. Website traffic helps you understand the popularity of your website and the significance of your marketing strategy.

Q2: Why would my website’s traffic suddenly drop?

Ans: There can be multiple reasons why your website’s traffic unexpectedly drops. It could be due to technical issues like website errors or server downtime. It could also be due to changes in search engine algorithm update or a drop in total backlinks pointing to your website. Competitors’ websites may rank higher than yours, or there may be a drop in the overall demand for your service or product.

Q3: How do I check if my website’s traffic has dropped?

Ans: To inspect if your website’s traffic has suddenly decreased, you can use tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs and Google Analytics. These tools can help you track your website’s traffic and identify any sudden drops in website traffic. You can also monitor your website’s search engine rankings to see if there have been any significant changes.

Q4: What should I do if my website’s traffic has dropped?

Ans: If you see a sudden drop in your website’s traffic, the first action is identifying the root cause. Once you have specified the reason, you can take steps to address the issue. For example, if the issue is technical, you may need to work with your web hosting provider to resolve the issue. If the problem is related to search engine optimization (SEO), you may require to update your website’s content or backlinks to enhance your website’s rankings.

Q5: How can I prevent sudden drops in website traffic?

Ans: To avoid sudden drops in website traffic, staying on top of website maintenance and regularly monitoring your website’s traffic and search engine rankings is essential. Keeping your website’s content up-to-date and relevant to your target audience is also necessary. You can use paid or unpaid tools like Google search console, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. Finally, building a solid online presence with a robust backlink strategy and social media presence can help improve your website’s visibility and prevent sudden drops in traffic.

Conclusion

To determine whether your website’s traffic has been affected by having too many low-quality links. You need to perform a link audit, which can be done through a “link audit” by exporting the link graph and performing a deeper analysis. Try to find correlations between changes in the search algorithm and traffic to mitigate their impact on traffic. The best SEO companies in India will help you improve the traffic of your website.