Do you wonder how to increase organic search traffic?
Is it possible you’re losing the very traffic you’re hoping to gain?
Guest author Samantha Anderson explains 4 reasons you could be losing relevant, organic search traffic.
Before you try to increase your traffic coming from search engines, you better make sure you’re not losing the organic search traffic you have.
4 Reasons For Losing Relevant, Organic Search Traffic
by Samantha Anderson
Google wants to give its users access to unique, high-quality content and the finest writers.
That’s why it is constantly evolving. It improves its algorithms, makes minor changes 500-600 times each year to refine the quality of its search results and makes major updates (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that result in huge shifts in search engine rankings.
The goal of these changes is to help searchers find websites that meet information needs of the internet users and provide a good user experience.
Google eliminates poor quality content by decreasing the ranking of the sites that violate Google’s quality guidelines and elevates the best of the web to the top of the SERPs [Search Engine Results Pages].
Google uses many different techniques to control the quality of search results, including algorithm penalties, manual penalties, and ranking algorithms. They may cause the organic traffic of your website drop significantly which can be a disaster for any blog or business online.
A drop in organic traffic can be attributed to different problems with your site. While Google publishes some clue about its algorithm updates, it rarely explains all the reasons for changes. Here are the most common reasons for the organic decline and the good news is that these problems can be fixed.
The Site is Slow or not Mobile Friendly
Websites that are slow to load make the users frustrated and cause high bounce rates.
Besides, a slow website makes it more difficult for Google to find important pages and may cause crawl path problems when individual pages or even sections of a website drop from the search index. You should monitor your site’s speed regularly and keep these issues to a minimum. You can install a caching plugin or use CDN to make your site faster.
Websites can also lose organic search traffic opportunities if they lack responsive web design. Now more than a half of internet traffic is mobile so if a website is not optimized for tablet and smartphone users, it will miss out on a lot of traffic.
Besides, Google’s algorithm Mobilegeddon makes mobile optimization a necessity because it reduces the domain authority of websites that are not mobile friendly. As most of Google searches are conducted on mobile devices, it favors those sites that provide a better user experience for mobile users.
[Read:Â How to Set Up Accelerated Mobile Pages for WordPress]
On-Page Issues
In 2011, Google introduced the Panda algorithm change that works as the most powerful anti-spam weapon and is a core ranking algorithm. It improved ranking for a lot of high-quality websites and a large number of websites were penalized for low-quality content, content that was designed not for readers but for bots, and duplicate content.
Your site needs high-quality content to have a high ranking. Â Writing expert-level content is time-consuming and requires expertise and strong communication skills to convey your ideas effectively. As a way out, you may outsource this task to professional content writing and paper writing agencies.
Here are the most common on-page issues that can decrease your organic search traffic
- Duplicate content
Duplicate content can have a negative impact on user experience and confuse search crawlers. When your site has duplicate content, it is less useful in Google’s view so use tools like Copyscape to make sure that your site’s content is unique.
- Keyword stuffing
If you are using a certain keyword on a web page over and over again, hoping that it will get you a better ranking, you make your content unnatural and almost unreadable. For Google, the top concern is the user experience and a very high keyword density indicates poorly written content; that’s why it may penalize you. All content should be written with a reader in mind and if you can’t do it yourself, find professional agencies that offer a wide range of services and write compelling, engaging articles and sales copies, and unique product descriptions.
- Unnatural anchor text
When you use the same anchor text that contains certain keywords in all your links in order to reinforce their authority, you are showing Google that you are using disreputable techniques and trying to game the system. You should use honest links that use natural real English phrases.
Content should be helpful and relevant to the end user, informative, fresh, and easy-to-read. Websites that are regularly updated with fresh, quality content gain more authority and earn the highest rankings.
Wrong Outer Area
An overly aggressive SEO tactic like buying/selling links or joining low-quality link directories that are intended to manipulate Page Rank or a website ranking in a Google search result may lead to a penalty. Google considers such tactics as a part of a link scheme that violates the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The link schemes may include manipulations with backlinks or outgoing links. Google warns that they may have a negative impact on a website’s ranking in search results.
Here are some examples of link schemes and violations of guidelines:
- Buying or selling links
- Exchanging lots of links
- Low-quality directory links
- Broken external links
- Forum linking
Links are important for any website but not all links are now effective. Your site needs high-quality links from trusted sources with high domain authority. So you need a content strategy for creating unique relevant content that can be popular in the internet community. This is the best way to build high-quality links to your site.
If your site was penalized for some troublesome links, don’t panic. Use the disavow tool to request Google not count the links that are harming your site and try to get some of the links removed. Most of the penalties can be fixed if you put some effort and work hard to rebuild your site with an ethical approach.
You should think more carefully about your content strategy and focus on creating high-quality websites that deliver the best possible user experience and employ white hat SEO methods. As low-quality content on some pages can impact the whole site’s ranking, you should improve your site and remove low-quality pages or improve the content of individual pages and make them more useful. Ensure that an article or a blog post is original and useful for readers. Produce engaging content that has real value for readers.
Instead of trying to figure out how to optimize your website for any particular Google algorithm, you should focus on creating amazing, compelling content that deserves to be on the first page. If you step into Google’s mindset and start thinking about the big picture, your website will be more likely to rank high for the long-term.
About the author:
Samantha Anderson is an experienced writer with an educational vocation. She spends her free time helping students with assignments and writing term papers at writing service PaperWritten.com. Her main life goal is dedicated to communication strategies development.
Readers, please share so other website creators know how to avoid losing organic search traffic.
