SEO: Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped
Recently, Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal posted an article “5 Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped” and today we’re going to summarize what she’s pointing out to you in the article.
The main reasons why your Google traffic may have dropped are probably related to one of these situations:
- You’ve been penalized.
- Your site has been hacked.
- Google is tweaking its algorithm.
- Overall (seasonal) change in searches.
- Your competitors increased their promotional efforts.
If in fact you have been penalized by something that you did then you will need to work hard to figure out what exactly it was that you did on your website that Google did not like. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion. If you pass a human review, then you should be forgiven.
The second likely option is your website being hacked. If your website has been hacked and this is a common scenario here lately, you will need to figure out just what they did. Some red flags that you have been hacked are Google webmaster tools showing you that some of the terms that you were found by recently are not relevant to your website as well as getting an increase in traffic for keywords not related to your website such as casino or hotel. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion.
The next item that could have caused your rankings to drop was Google making changes to their index. They are always going to continually update their datacenters to weed out spam and whatnot.
Obviously, if you sell Christmas trees and it’s only June you’re going to see a dip in your traffic simply because nobody is searching for Christmas trees in June.
The last option is that your competitors increased their promotional efforts based on your website outranking them. Always keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing while continuing to improve your on-site SEO.
If you need any help with understanding why your competitors have passed you by in the organic rankings, the Support Team at Regency Interactive can assist you with getting your website back to where it was previously in the search engine listings.
