Why is our traffic declining?
SEO professionals, marketers, business owners, and stakeholders have this same question and concern.
Traffic = customers = revenue. We all know it.
Managing your site more effectively, making more confident business decisions, and winning over stakeholders can all be achieved by understanding the source of traffic loss.
On March 16, I moderated a sponsored webinar presented by Wayne Cichanski, Vice President of Search & Site Experience at iQuanti.
He shared tips to help you diagnose traffic loss, discover what may have caused it, and determine how to address it.
Here is a quick summary of the webinar. To access the entire presentation, complete the form.
Uncover What Causes Traffic Drops
Most often, organic traffic declines are a combination of three triggers:
- Change in ranks.
- Change in volume.
- Change in CTR.
A general formula to take into consideration is:
Keywords(s) volume x CTR = Traffic
[See this formula in action] Instantly access the on-demand webinar →
The key is understanding the elements, the changes, doing the math, and moving forward to solve it.
How To Spot An Algorithmic Drop
Knowing how to spot an algorithmic drop gives you the power to communicate that to the stakeholders in the organization and guide your teams to take the necessary action.
Steady Decline Shows A Change In Authority
iQuanti, March 2022The common cause for a steady decline is a shift in authority.
Your site has either lost authority (links/referring domains) or your competition has gained authority.
[Learn what to keep an eye on] Instantly access the webinar →
Sharp Drops Mean An Algorithm Change
iQuanti, March 2022If your traffic is stable and then drops suddenly within a brief period, this shows an algorithm change.
[Learn what you should do] Instantly access the webinar →
Learn How To Calculate The Loss Of Revenue
Let’s take a look at this problem statement:
Page A normally gets 12,120 visits per month, but now only gets 7,244 which is a traffic decline of 59.7%.
Revenue loss during this period is $150,000.
When you sum all these together, you get attribution to what happened.
[Get the step-by-step on calculating revenue loss] Instantly access the webinar →
With the formula from the on-demand webinar, you’ll be able to more clearly explain know how much percentage in traffic drop came from ranks, volume, and CTR.
Being able to calculate the loss of revenue gives you the intelligence and insight you need to make those informed decisions and communicate properly with the stakeholders.
Or, if you are the stakeholder, you can now tell your team the direction you want to move forward based on what has cost you and what areas of the traffic have declined.
How To Recover Revenue
Understand what you can control and what you can’t.
Not all revenue can be recovered due to some elements out of your control.
- Ranks: Fixable
- Volume: Out of your control
- CTR: Difficult
[Find out why] Instantly access the webinar →
What To Do If Traffic Is Unrecoverable
After segmenting out the revenue loss by each contributing element, you can gain transparency on how much revenue you could hope to retrieve.
Here are some questions and action points you can consider.
- Did another internal page pick up the traffic?
- Where in the landscape did the volume shift to?
- Redefine the intent of the terms that dropped.
- Data mine net new volume.
[Dive deeper into recovery] Instantly access the webinar →
There will be a decline in traffic for almost every website, so it’s wise to be prepared.
[Slides] How Much Revenue Are You Losing From Organic Traffic Declines?
Here’s the presentation:
How Much Revenue Are You Losing From Organic Traffic Declines? from Search Engine Journal
Image Credits
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal