Identify the reasons for the decline in traffic

 The previous wave of algorithm updates has affected many people's websites to some extent. Reflected in traffic, it is a natural decline in search traffic, causing many users to doubt whether the website has been punished by search engines when they see a slight change in traffic. So today's article will briefly discuss how to identify the reasons for website traffic decline.

In fact, to understand the reasons for the decline in traffic, one basically needs to understand three questions. They are: which traffic channel experienced a decline in traffic, when did it occur, and what factors caused the decline in traffic.

First of all, which traffic channel has experienced a decline in traffic.

It should be noted that the source of website traffic is not limited to natural search traffic. Sometimes, direct access traffic, social media traffic, and other channels can all be important sources of website traffic. So finding a way to figure out which channel's traffic is declining is very, very important.

Basically, just look at the GA analysis software for this part of the data. There are detailed data reports presented inside, and we only need to look at the trend of data changes in each traffic channel. After reading it, we can have a rough idea of what is causing the decline in website traffic.

Let's take the decline in natural search traffic as an example and continue to explain the following two questions.

The second question is when website traffic will decline. You can quickly figure it out by looking at data analysis reports, as there is not much technical content involved. Another technical aspect is to understand what caused the traffic to decline at this point in time, which is the third question we need to discuss.

Generally speaking, the trend of natural search traffic mainly involves three points. They are the change in search volume for keywords, the indexing status of keywords, and the ranking of keywords

Firstly, the change in keyword search volume (i.e. keyword search trend) is an important reason for the change in website traffic. Imagine keyword A had an overall search volume of around 100000 last month, but this month it suddenly dropped to only around 10000. This situation will definitely lead to a decrease in website traffic, as the overall environment has deteriorated.

So if your website's traffic decline is due to this reason, then there is really no other way. After all, when we do SEO, we can only cater to the needs, not create them.

As for the indexing of keywords, that is, whether the page has dropped keywords. Because search engines are a dynamic and changing system, at some point in time, a previously indexed keyword may lose its inclusion and no longer participate in keyword ranking, which will naturally affect the overall natural search traffic.

So figure out how many keywords there are, and then optimize them accordingly.

The third point is that the ranking of keywords has decreased. For example, your content previously ranked first in the natural search results for keyword A, and this keyword can bring about 1000 natural search traffic per month. But this month, your content only ranks fifth in the natural search results for keyword A, so the search traffic brought by this keyword will naturally decrease significantly.

Find out how many such keywords there are, and then figure out the reasons for the ranking decline. Is it because your content is outdated, or because your competitors have surpassed you?

Basically, these data changes can be found in the Google Webmaster tool. If you have the habit of regularly collecting website data, these issues can be quickly identified and the cause can be located.

By the way, if you have screened all this information and still haven't found the reason for the decline in traffic, you may want to check the situation of other search engines.