Determine the reason for the decrease in the number of site visitors through Google Stats
Soon most sites have experienced the problem of a decrease in the number of site visitors at some point, and we discover this sudden problem when looking at the daily reports when logging in to Google Analytics and seeing an unexpected and noticeable decrease in site visits.
First, do not panic. I know you may be wary of Google stats to provide bad stats, but the most important thing at that moment is to find out the reasons for the low site traffic. By combining Google Stats features with Webmaster Tools, you can quickly and effectively determine the reason behind the rollback.
Want to diagnose why your traffic is declining? Read on and get site traffic back on track with the following key steps:
Step 1: Take a look at the beginning of a decline in site traffic
You might be thinking: “Of course I looked at the beginning of the decline in the number of visitors to the site! That’s how I knew my site had dropped in visitors! ”
Yes, but that means you should critically think about this question by asking yourself the following questions:
- “Is the decline in visits a sharp, sudden drop, or a slow, continuous decline?”
- “Did site traffic only drop for a few days?”
- “Does the traffic index seem to be starting to pick up on its own?”
You can give yourself 10 minutes to look well at the Google Stats line graph to put you on track to determine the reason behind the drop in traffic. For example, if the drop in visitors is sharp and sudden and still continues to decline, you may be suffering from Google’s penalty.
Step 2: Identify site-specific traffic sources
When visits start to decline, it’s important not just to focus on numbers. You need to search to get to the material that was affected by the percentage of visitors. There are 5 main types of visitor sources:
- Direct Traffic – Visitors who come to your site directly either by typing the site link directly into their browser’s search bar or by clicking on a bookmark they have saved to directly access your site
- Search results – visitors who access your site via search engines. In my experience with customers, Google is always the most popular search engine they get traffic from, and usually monopolizes about 90% of search users.
- Paid traffic – visitors who access your site through paid ads such as banners, Google AdWords, or buying visitors
- Referrals – Traffic your site gets by your “referral network”, which is any sites with links to your site
- Social media – users you get through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
Once you know which types of traffic sources have decreased, you can start exploring the reason for the decline. For example, if the majority of your traffic is “direct traffic” but its percentage has now declined, there is likely to be a change in the visitors’ location towards your site. A competitor site may have launched a campaign that has been widely spread and your visitors are heading to their site.
On the other hand, if most site traffic is normal, and now you notice a sudden drop, you may have been penalized by Google Penalty. These types of penalties can be devastating for your position in search results, and they will be very straightforward to see if the drop is sudden and significant. You can confirm whether you’ve been sanctioned by checking your Webmaster Tools account for penalty notification. Or check the search engine news section to see if there is an update from Google or not.
Step 3: Know who new visitors are vs. returning visitors
Equally important is knowing who the visitors are from where they came from.
Based on the type of visitor who was rejected, you can isolate some of the reasons behind the low traffic.
For example, if the statistics of new visitors were higher than the percentage of returned traffic, there could be a problem with how users search for your site, or how it appears on Google. This may mean that it’s time to do some new keyword research or it may indicate a penalty from Google.
However, in case there are poor results from returning traffic, it may indicate an issue with the structure of your site and the ease of use for users. Perhaps your site’s loading speed is too slow, so users leave due to a poor browsing experience. I advise you to use the site speed measurement tool.
Step 4: Review the statistics of the last period
I look forward to the past 6 months, or even last year’s stats, to see if there has been a drop in site traffic over a similar time period in the past. You can compare time periods using the comparison tool in Google Analytics, which allows you to see previous weeks, months, or similar time points in the past year in cases of seasonality. This allows you to see any noticeable differences in user behavior or traffic sources.
It occurred to me that one client of mine saw a steady drop in traffic between May and July last year. They were very worried about knowing why site visits suddenly dropped. I started investigating by looking at last year’s visits, I saw that the same drop of visitors always happened during the summer months, then we waited for a while and the site retrieved its visits at the end of September. We were then able to conclude that the decline in visits was due to regular seasonality, which makes us feel reassured that their product was educational tools.
Step 5: Don’t forget to review the webmaster tools!
Combining Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools can be very important. Google Webmaster Tools has a messages tab that alerts you to any important issues with your site.
It should be customary for you to check for crawl errors and HTML errors. Both of these reports indicate the amount of internal errors that may exist on your site. If your site has a large number of bugs, it can affect the user experience. This may hinder new visitors from returning to your site (because it seems unreliable or difficult to use) and frequent visitors can go to competing sites.
It’s also important to monitor the performance of the best keywords for your site. If you review the “Search Analytics” section of your Webmaster Tools account, you can see if keywords with high search percentage have fallen in search results. If you see that your high-ranking keywords have declined in search results, it may be the reason for the decline in the number of site visitors.
Reasons for a sudden drop in site visits (the most common)
There can be several reasons why site visits drop suddenly and significantly. This could be a problem with something as simple as accidentally removing Google stats tracking code after updating your site, or a bigger reason like penalizing your site from Google. These are the most common reasons that should be reviewed to solve the problem as soon as possible:
Forwarding
Redirects are used to convert visitors and search engine robots from an old page to a new one. Using a 301 redirect, which means to Google that the page has permanently moved to another page to pass the search ranking from the old page to the new page.
Redirects are usually done within a .htaccess file or within a cPanel in a website hosting account or if you use WordPress, this can be done using WordPress plugins. Regardless of the method used, we recommend keeping a list that includes all redirects so that if something happens, you will have a quick backup.
To determine if redirects are still working and haven’t been removed, just take a few links from the backup list and check them by visiting the page to make sure they work.
Block the site from appearing in search engines
Unfortunately, this is the most common reason why the number of visitors to the site decreases. There are some ways you may have done it unintentionally that prevented the site from appearing in search results.
Site blocking usually occurs in two situations:
- Publish a page under update without knowing
- Redesign your site
Either way, the developer or designer forgets to remove the noindex/nofollow icon from the template, or not to allow routing from your robots.txt file, or in case the designer in WordPress forgets to uncheck the box in the settings> read> box that says “discourage” search engines from indexing this site.
Google Update
Google is always tweaking and updating its algorithms – including big updates, and other minor modifications.
- Mozcast tool – from the moz.com website, a basic report on search results changes
- semrush – SEMrush.com a sensor across its dataset of keywords
Although these two tools are among the most important SEO tools that many rely on to know Google updates now, they often cannot sense any details about some updates.
The recent impact of your site by the Google update may be the reason for the decline in traffic.
Bad backlinks
Google typically releases a major update to the algorithm at least once a year based on backlinks to try to sort valuable links against random backlinks generated by a bad backlink building tactic.
A bad backlink is usually one of the primary problems that sites make. Either the site owner works with a bad SEO specialist, or thinks he can outdo Google’s algorithm either by buying backlinks, or starting to implement strategies that generate large numbers of low-quality links.
To determine if site traffic is affected by a large number of low-quality backlinks, you will need to conduct a review of the backlinks, which begins with analyzing the graph showing the point of growing backlinks and then doing a thorough analysis of each link.
Poor quality content
Content is the essence of SEO and content is also king. Without sharing great content, you won’t get a ranking at Google, and the risk of being penalized by Google updates increases.
We’ve written about the quality of the content tremendously, however, we still find websites that create low-value, 300-word articles that provide no value.
Value of content
Before you hit publish, determine if your content is valuable by asking these four questions.
- Is the article written by a specialist who knows the topic well? If you do, you’re on the right track.
- Does this article contain spelling errors or blurred style? If your content contains errors, then you have to do a better job during the editing phase.
- Does the article provide exclusive content or information, reliable research, or correct analytics? If yes, then you are providing real value to visitors that Google will reward.
- Does the content provide a full or comprehensive explanation of the topic, or are the articles short, unimportant or do not contain useful details? If you’re creating short articles of 300 words, Google is more likely to throw your content to the last pages of search results.
Content structure
Visitors don’t read your content – they take a quick look to get answers to their questions. Since they are in a hurry to find the information they are looking for, they will skip beyond what is irrelevant to them.
One last tip
If you leave the problem of landing site visits as it is unaddressed, it may damage your site more, through the right tools and steps to detect the reasons behind the landing, you can avoid any further decline in site visits. So the next time you see a scary decline in site traffic, you can check this guide again to review the right steps to get past this stage, use Google Analytics as a weapon, and restore your site to glory.
