5 Reasons Why Website Traffic Can Drop Suddenly

Everyone who has owned a website knows that most of the effort goes into ensuring a continuous stream of steady visitors. As such, any sudden drop in traffic can be alarming and disappointing. You need to find the root cause and remedy the situation immediately. Below, we list five reasons why your website traffic might have dropped all of a sudden.

1. Poor Content

Writing good quality content is great for receiving tons of free website traffic. But the opposite is also true – poor content will drive down your website traffic faster than you can blank. Sometimes, you may have to hire new people to write content for your website. And if they are not as good as the previous writers, then the content they publish will be of an inferior quality. This can not only discourage regular readers from visiting the website, but fewer web pages will make it to the first page of the search engine results. As a result, your traffic will suffer.

2. Changes In Google Algorithm

There have been many incidents in the past when websites saw a massive drop in their traffic because of a new search algorithm employed by Google. As such, if your traffic drop happened after any recent Google update, then you should check whether your current website meets the quality criteria of the new changes or not. If adjustments need to be made to the website code or content publishing, then do it immediately. It is also a good idea to track when the next Google update will be so that you can be ready.

3. Keyword Stuffing

If you or any of the writers of your website has started doing keyword stuffing, then stop it immediately or you risk damaging the authority of the site. Keyword stuffing is essentially the practice of putting too many keywords in an article. For example, if the keyword you wish to insert in a 500-word article is ‘buy now’, then you should ideally insert it only about three times in the article. Instead, if you use the keyword 10 or 15 times, then that will be considered as keyword stuffing. Search engines like Google will view such sites with suspicion and will be hesitant to show the website links on their search results page. And this will obviously result in a big drop in traffic from search engines.

4. Link Removal

You should also check the status of the backlinks you have developed. If the high authority websites on which you have placed your links have updated their website code for some reason, then there is a good chance that the links have been lost. And as a consequence, your website will lose all the ranking benefits it has been receiving till now which will negatively affect its traffic.

5. Metadata Issues

If you have just redesigned your website or moved to a new CMS, then make sure that the metadata of the web pages is still intact. If the metadata is lost during the change, it can lead to lower traffic. The only solution is to update all web pages with the lost metadata.