Organic search, as opposed to its paid counterparts, can be a little complicated to analyse. There’s a distinctive set of issues that one might encounter when it comes to identifying a decline in traffic and conversion rates. Fortunately, there are places where you could gather insights, but additional circumstances are still tougher to find. This can range from simple problems to advanced issues to factors that are beyond one’s control. That said, allow us to present some of the most common factors that could affect a website’s organic traffic.
The Pages Aren’t Indexed
Aside from contacting a trusted online marketing agency in the UK to help in fixing an organic traffic problem, one of the basic ways to troubleshoot this issue is to perform a quick Google search using “site:yourwebsite.com.” Through this, you’ll be able to know if your website is actually indexed. In case that there are some pages that aren’t visible in the SERPs, then you have probably found the cause of your problem. Don’t forget to check the robots.txt file to ensure that the important pages and directions aren’t blocked.
Bot Filters
It’s also important to check if you’re excluding all the known spiders and bots in Google Analytics, because if you’re not doing this; this could be the reason behind the increased traffic metrics you’re not even aware of.
Although it’s highly advisable to generate a customised specification when it comes to transmitting out bots, making use of the standard bot filter is also an excellent place to begin with. Also, it’s imperative that you keep in mind that filters aren’t something that could be utilised retroactively. That said, for those who have just recently turned this feature on, it’s more likely that you’ll be receiving less traffic. It would also be helpful if you’ll double check and ensure that you’re transmitting out your own IP address and traffic.
User Experience
Organic traffic is heavily influenced by user behaviour data that’s why it’s very important to find out ways on how to increase organic traffic. Also, with the rising popularity and the importance of search marketing online, major search engines have become the main authorities in all search-related areas. Anyone owning a website should be aware that the user experience directly impacts the content strategy as it directly relates to SEO.
The user experience is more than just an afterthought, because it directly impacts how Google and other search engines would rank a website. That said, user experience has become one of the main factors to consider for those who want to enjoy organic traffic.
Site Updates
Those who have just modified their on-page copy, or experienced a website change, such as reordering the routing or removing pages, there’s a huge possibility of having a decrease in website traffic. After revamping your website content, Google would have to re-crawl and re-index the pages once again. Thus, it’s not unusual to experience unstable rankings for a number of weeks whenever there are site updates.
Those who have changed their URL structure or have extracted pages from their website, it’s extremely important to have a 301-redirect strategy in order to maintain link equity, while avoiding any loss of traffic or ranking.
Organised Data Mark-up
The implementation of organised data mark-up may appear like a one-time project for most. These people aren’t aware of the fact that the “set it and ignore it” mentality could actually be the reason that their website is not enjoying organic traffic. It’s important to monitor the overall look of rich snippets on a constant basis in order to ensure that you’re pulling the right information. When changing the content on the website, there’s a possibility that this action could alter the mark-up without warning at all.
Additionally, depending on the back-end merchandising setup, there’s a possibility that the products could be triggered to show “out of stock” schema if a colour variation is unavailable.
URL Confusion
Try to answer this question, is your content strategy in place, or does it seem like the efforts you exert are “off the cuff?” Failure to have a clearly defined keyword map could actually lead to trouble. This holds true, especially if two or more pages have been optimised for the same keyword.
This could lead to pages competing against each other in the SERPs, to the point that the ranking of these pages would also be reduced. Fortunately, having an access to a keyword tracking tool would allow you to monitor the day-by-day breakdown of URLS chosen to rank for a certain keyword.
Backlinks
When it comes to organic traffic, it’s important to pay attention to quality more than quantity. Backlinks from a website could affect the rankings both positively and negatively. For instance, quality backlinks coming from other websites would positively affect the rankings. Likewise, collaborating with other organizations or being a sponsor in community events could give you a quality backlink from another website. On the other hand, linking to a website that doesn’t have any credibility or relevance at all would just give a negative impact to the site.
Basics
Lastly, there are some old age factors that cannot be ignored. This includes the load time– this has been one of the biggest factors that affect organic traffic over the years and it still does. For those who think that their website is taking forever to load, hard to navigate, or it seems like it doesn’t have an easy flow, there’s a possibility that it’s also affecting your organic traffic. On the other hand, having a responsive layout that guarantees easy and seamless viewing would be of great help.
There you have it, these are just some of the factors that one should pay attention to. By focusing on these relevant factors, you’ll be able to improve your organic traffic in no time.