If you were one of the many marketers preparing year-end reports in December or early January, you may have come into an uncomfortable situation: Did your traffic over the year decline? It’s an uncomfortable situation to be in. Despite your best efforts, SEO work, and the pages that you added to the website, your traffic didn’t rise. Luckily, with the right analytics tools and a little marketing insight, you can understand what the dip means, why it happened, and make a plan to grow your traffic.
The first step to understanding why your traffic decreased is to examine the various sources that send traffic to your website. Tools like HubSpot’s Sources application can make this very easy, and it’s still possible to do in Google Analytics or other tools with a bit of work.
Questions to Ask Yourself Now:
How much traffic do I get from search engines, and what does it look like over time?
Which particular keywords are rising or falling for me over the last year?
What are my top five referring sites, and are they same as the ones that I had last year? Why or why not?
Digging Deeper
If a site that used to be a top referrer has dropped off, what happened? Look at the pages or links on their websites that used to be helping keep your site full of vital traffic, and see what they changed there.
Usually when traffic is dropping off like this, it’s because some keywords are rising and others are falling, and some sites are rising or falling, but the falling numbers outweigh the rising ones. It’s important to take note of which are which though – it will help you focus your efforts on your “trouble spots” more closely.
For each of your keywords where traffic has dropped off, think about why this happened. Did you remove a page from your website that used to rank well in search? Did you change the optimization of the page? Think about which page of your website is or was optimized for that keyword, and what happened to that page. You shouldn’t necessarily just revert that page back to the old version – But think about what other pages might be a good fit on your website, or if you need to add a brand new page to represent that missed keyword, and re-optimize around it.
For your referrers, take a look at who has stopped sending you traffic, and where your traffic used to come from on their site. What was the referring URL from them? Find out what happened to that page on their website. Is that page gone, or otherwise not really accessible? That means that it is time to build new links from that source, or from them and new sources so that you can reclaim your missing traffic and value from that relationship. Chances are, it was an innocent mistake or aging of a link or you’d already know about it, so keep up your efforts. HubSpot’s Referrals chart can help you understand this if you’re a HubSpot customer, by showing you your traffic over time by domain and which pages on that site referred that traffic.
At this point, you should have a pretty clear picture of what traffic is arriving at your website via organic search and referring sites, and what words or locations specifically refer that traffic through to you. In my next post, I will examine ways to react and develop a coherent plan to recover and grow your traffic from organic search and referring sites.
Photo Credit: Nicholas_T
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