A business’s website statistics offer a lot of insight into its customers’ behavior, and analyzing this data can help show what it is doing right or wrong online. If your traffic seems to take a nosedive, there may be several different reasons for the decrease in visitors. Diagnosing the issue can be a time-consuming process, and even more so if you’re not sure where to begin looking.
Understanding how online traffic works can eliminate some of the guesswork. Below, 11 experts from Forbes Agency Council discuss common causes they would suggest looking into if one of their client’s saw their business website traffic suddenly plummet. Once you find the problem, you can make adjustments as needed and watch as the number of visitors starts to climb again.
Forbes Agency Council members explore potential causes of a decrease in business website traffic.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Major Website Changes
Sometimes this issue is the result of a major change on the client side, and they come to us to solve it. If businesses aren’t careful, severe traffic drops can happen after website redesigns, relaunches, migrations and domain name changes. In such cases, businesses should ensure proper URL redirects are set as part of their overall transition plan. Traffic experts should always be a part of the process. – Patrick Dillon, WISE Digital Partners
2. A Nonfunctional Website
You should first check your website itself. A lot of times, when our clients lose traffic, it is their website that is down. The site can’t get traffic if it’s not working! If your site is working, continue your investigation into all your traffic sources: organic, paid and social. See if anything has changed and try to narrow it down to one, singular culprit. – Marc Hardgrove, The HOTH
3. Traffic Source Errors
Check your traffic sources. Typically, a sharp decrease will be due to one traffic source, such as organic search. Once you’ve identified the problem channel, dig deeper into web data to identify the specific root cause. For organic search, the cause may be a formerly prominent page or pages that slipped in search rankings, no longer ranks or no longer exists. – Wendy Covey, TREW Marketing
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4. Tracking Code Issues
First, check to make sure your tracking code is working properly on your website and for your paid media channels. Then, look to see if a paid media channel has somehow been compromised in terms of maxed-out spend and/or competitive forces. Next, look to see if your “brand” and “non-brand” organic search results have recently fallen. Finally, dive into the macro competitive landscape. – Kurt Kaufer, Ad Results Media
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5. Lost Backlinks And Human Error
Lost backlinks are the obvious culprit for a sharp decline in site traffic, but they’re not the only source. Often a simple human error is to blame, whether that’s accidentally removing a code, losing tracking codes or unintentionally blocking search engines from crawling. If you see your numbers falling, go back to your list of recent site updates and double-check your work. – Howard Breindel, DeSantis Breindel
6. Clickbait, Sales Landing Pages And Poor SEO
There are three potential reasons. The first is clickbait. Are the metadata and/or headlines for the content misleading, or leading the audience to dull, trite content that anyone can write? Second, are you sending your audience directly to a sales page rather than to more interesting content? (Hint: They need more than a listicle.) The third possible cause is poor SEO. Throwing keywords found on Semrush into your article isn’t a thoughtful strategy. Dig deeper. – Kevin Lund, T3 Custom
7. A Change In Offline Mass Media
There are many SEO and technical reasons that could cause this, but one often overlooked reason for a drop in traffic is a change in mass media. Television, radio and other offline media can have a huge impact on search volume and organic traffic. Make sure you haven’t had a spot bumped or any other changes to your offline media that might be impacting your website traffic. – Donna Robinson, Collective Measures
8. Reputation Risk
Watch out for reputation risk. Understanding what people are saying about your brand 24/7 matters. This is why listening tools are so important. When I was running PR for JPMorgan Chase in Asia Pacific, I had my agencies reviewing and translating online content daily across 18 countries. Our handling of any issue that popped up in a blog prevented it from spreading worldwide. – Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications
9. Problems With Google Ads
If I knew that they had a well-oiled advertising structure in a place that was built to deliver traffic, I would tell my client to turn to their Google Ads account. Sometimes a drop such as this can happen due to a payment issue, user error or other reasons, but can be rectified quickly. – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency
10. Google Penalties And Algorithm Updates
The first thing to do is check Google Search Console to ensure you don’t have any penalty messages. If there are no messages in Search Console, I would start looking into any Google algorithm updates, as a new update could also be the root cause of a traffic drop. – Scott Keever, Scott Keever SEO
11. Analytics Software Issues
Plummeting site traffic is usually a technical malfunction. The very first thing you can do is test the analytics software and make sure it is connected properly and that the site is still being indexed by search engines. You could attempt some test searches to see if the site appears on the search engine response page and what might be deterring users from continuing to the site. – Katie Schibler Conn, KSA Marketing
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
