Author: Gokul Renjith

No one prefers to see their organic traffic declining. Unfortunately, most website owners experience this issue every so often. 

SERP volatility is normal and you should expect this if you are owning a website.  It depends on the competition as more websites are created every day with tons of content are pushed daily for the target audience. 

But if you are hit by a sudden decline in traffic, it doesn’t look good from an SEO standpoint. There is no definitive and straightforward answer to why this has happened. 

In this blog, Let us, deep-dive, into some of the most common causes to check and validate to find what caused you the dip in traffic. 

Why Your Organic Traffic has Dropped?

There may be a number of factors why your organic traffic has abruptly and drastically declined. This could be as easy as your analytics code being unintentionally deleted after a website update, or it could be a more serious issue, such as your website being penalized by Google.

There are many things to look into to figure out why your Google traffic has decreased, so here’s a list to get you started.

1) Google Algorithm Updates

Throughout the year, Google releases multiple updates, some very major updates and others might be very minor. They might or might not announce the update before it is rolling out. 

However, an easy way to keep track of the algorithm updates is to follow the social media pages <Google Search Central>. Most of the time the algorithm changes will be officially confirmed and updated on this page. 

Also, you can use some third-party tools to track whether your site has impacted by the updates. One such tool is SEMrush Sensor from SEMrush. This feature from SEMRush gives a clear indication of the SERP Volatility overall specific to the industries and also you can get your score on your website. 

2) Website is Blocked from Indexing

Unfortunately, this is more common than we would like to see. There are a few ways you can unknowingly block your website.

This is one of the reasons that can cause a dip in your website traffic. 

There are few ways in which you can unknowingly block your website from crawling and indexing

• Taking your website live from staging state.
• When redesigning the website. 

During this process, the developer will put the “NO INDEX”  tag and block the website with the robots.txt command to stop the search engines from crawling and indexing the development site. 

Once the site is live, there is a chance that developers will forget to remove the “NO INDEX” tag or change the robots.txt command which will block the website from indexing. 

If that is the case, you should update the robots.txt command and resubmit your file through the Google Search Console. 

3) Toxic BackLinks

Google usually releases a big link-based algorithm update once a year to try to filter out useful links from spam links generated by a new link-building tactic that marketers started using.

When a website loses organic traffic, one of the most common problems is spammy links. The business owner either employed a bad SEO company or believed they could “outsmart” the Google algorithm by purchasing links or implementing techniques that generate a large number of low-quality links, such as directory submissions, article directories, press releases, and so on.

You can make use of the Google Search Console to identify the toxic and spammy links that are harming your website and start the disavowing process. Read more about disavowing links in our blog. 

4) Google Penalities

This is another reason why you might experience a decline in organic traffic. You will face manual action from Google if you fail to comply with the Google guidelines that include any black hat SEO strategies like buying low-quality spammy links, duplicated content. 

5) Page Speed 

Page speed and user experience are said to have an impact on your organic performance like never before. With Google rolling out the  “Core Web Vitals”  update early in May 2021 page speed will have a major impact on the ranking. So it is important that you provide the best browsing experience for the users who land on your website.  

Poor user experience not only affects your traffic, ranking but will also have a severe impact on the conversion rate. 

Read more to know about Core Web Vitals and how you can improve for the same in our Blog. 

6) Lost Backlinks

Losing Quality backlinks might be a warning issue that you see a serious decline in organic traffic. Especially if you have lost the link from a high authority site and content that has been performing very well in search engines. 

With the help of third-party tools like “MOZ link explorer” and “SEMrush Backlink Audit” you can keep track of your link building process. 

7) XML SiteMap Changes 

A change in your XML sitemap may be one explanation for the drop in traffic.

Crawl the sitemap URLs and make sure they all return a 200 OK response, as well as any new landing pages or posts. If your site has 200 URLs but the sitemap only has 50, you’ll need to regenerate and resubmit it via Search Console.

8) Poor Content

All marketing strategies revolve around content. Users won’t engage if you don’t have quality and relevant content, Google won’t rank you, and you’ll be more likely to be affected by a search engine update.

There are 2 important things that you need to take into account when it comes to content

A) The Authority of the Content

Before publishing the content make sure your content provides value to the target audience. It is important to have content that covers the topic comprehensively. Avoid duplication of the content. If your content is original, detailed and relevant, it is obvious that your content will perform well.

B) The Content Structure

Here are a few things to take note of while structuring your content

• Avoid Lengthy sentences
• Split the content into short paragraphs
• Properly structure the content with H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 Tags
• Avoid promotional writing
• Be precise and informative

9) Keyword Cannibalisation

Keyword cannibalization occurs when you target the same seed keyword for multiple pages. When this happens it will confuse the crawlers to decide which page is more relevant and close to the search query. This causes the traffic to split across multiple pages, you could affect by losing valuable organic traffic. 

SEMrush has a great feature to find the pages affected by Keyword cannibalization. You can get a detailed report of the same which helps to fix the issues in an effective way. 

To Conclude

Losing traffic is always worrisome.  The good thing is that there will be some reason why this is happening. Most of the issues can be fixed.

Once you identified the reason, you can start the recovery process. SEO is always process-oriented, if you do it right putting the users in front,  Google will always reward you with the best results. 

 

Got questions? Reach out to us.

 

Big Changes are coming to Search Engine Optimisation. Normally Google rolls out plenty of updates throughout the year, and there might be winners or losers depending on the nature of the update. Most of these updates they might or may not announce. 

Starting in May 2021, Google will start rolling out Core Web Vitals as search engine ranking signals. Improving the page experience factors will increase your chance of your users engaging more with your website.  In this blog, we will deep dive into the details of this vital update.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals, or user experience vitals, are the set of metrics that measure and analyse the speed signals of a website that is very important in delivering a superior user experience. To sum up, these core vitals are factors that will influence google’s most important “user-experience” factor measuring a website’s speed, responsiveness and visual stability. These include mainly 3 user interaction and page speed metrics

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Let’s deep dive into each of them in detail:

3. Core Web Vital Metrics

A) Largest Contentful Paint

The Largest Contentful paint (LCP) is the time from clicking on the particular link to viewing the content on-screen. In simple terms, it is the time taken for the primary content to load on a particular website.  For all the core web vital metrics Google has breakdown into 3 pillars :

• Good
• Needs Improvement
• Bad

So how can you improve the website’s LCP? Here are a few tips that you can do to improve the LCP 

• By removing unnecessary third-party scripts. 
• Upgrade to a way better hosting service; It is proved that a better hosting service increase your loading time improving the website performance
• Remove large page elements
• Enable Lazy loading

An ideal LCP measurement should be 2.5 seconds or below

What is Lazy Loading? 

According to the web.dev, “Lazy-loading is a technique that defers loading of non-critical resources at page load time. Instead, these non-critical resources are loaded at the moment of need” 

B) First Input Delay

Now, let’s move into the second factor of the Core Web Vitals. First Input Delay (FID) is about the time it takes for your page to be interactive. This is a measurement of how responsive and interactive your page or website is. It is a very important factor as you don’t want your users to wait and bounce back simply because it takes a long time for the web page to become interactive. 

Here are the things that you can do to improve the First Input Delay (FID)

• By Minimizing  the Javascript 
• By removing unnecessary third-party scripts.
• Using a Browser Cache

An Ideal FID measurement should be less than 100 ms

C) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Now we are moving on to the final metric of the core web vital i.e Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS indicates the stability of your page visually. If the elements on your page move around while the page is loading, then your website has a high CLS. Most times it will have an impact on the mobile user experience. Make sure that the page is stable so that the user doesn’t end up clicking on something that he doesn’t intend to.  The main reason for high CLS is not defining specific image sizes in the HTML code. 

Here are the things that you could do improve the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS )

• Use specific dimensions for Images, Videos, GIFS, Infographics etc.
• Leave a space reserved for ads on the website
• Make sure to add the new UI elements below the fold

An Ideal CLS measurement should be less than 0.1

4) To measure and fix Core Web Vitals

Now that you are aware of the three Core Web Vital signals, the most important thing is to analyse how you are performing on these signals. If you find an issue regarding the numbers, it is important to fix it. To fix it, you need to measure the same. How?

Since Google made the “Core Web Vitals” are critical factors for search engine ranking, they have also made measuring and analysing the core web vitals very easy. You can use the chrome user experience tool, page speed insights that give a detailed analysis and measure of the Core Web Vitals. One Important tool that you can make use of is the “Google Search console”

Navigate to

Google Search Console>>Click On the Property>>Core Web Vitals

If you find any “URL’s poor or needs improvement” in the web vital report, this is where you need to draw your attention. Dig deep in the report that gives you all the insights and act on the things that need to be done for the improvement of the same with the help of your developer.  

5) Achieving The Perfect Web Vital Score? 

There is a tendency that most SEO’s ignore the page speed factor. With the Core Web Vital update,  page speed demands much more attention. 

According to Google, as the page load time goes beyond 10 seconds the bounce rate increases by 123%. It is proven that the top-ranking websites load below 3 seconds. If your website is taking too long to load, you are probably losing a prospect who might tend to convert. 

From May, Core Web Vitals will influence Google algorithm in determining your ranking along with the current important SEO ranking factors.

 

Got questions? Reach out to us.

 

There is no denying that Link building plays a big part in your SEO strategy. But the fact is that not every website that links back to your site is not worth it. It can affect your overall rankings, domain authority and performance when there are too many low-quality links associated with your website. The best practise is to reach out to the website publisher manually and try removing the low-quality links if that is not working the next best option is to disavow backlinks. 

What is Link Disavowing?

As I mentioned earlier, disavowing links should always be your last option. Disavowing link is telling Google the particular link is harming your site in terms of overall performance. It doesn’t remove the links, but signals google not to consider any link from that site when it comes to ranking factors. Don’t prioritize disavowing across the board as it might hurt your own SEO. 

5 Types of Links you need to consider disavowing

Bad backlinks come in different types. Although this doesn’t include every type of link that you should disavow, the most common types that you have to consider as a starting point. 

1. Forum Spam Links 

Google doesn’t encourage users linking back to random materials in forums or comments. If you think that this will help your backlink profile, you got this wrong. Say for example; in a popular forum like Quora or Reddit, if you try to flood with links back to your website without any context, Google will consider it as spam and penalize your website. 

2. Expired Domain Links

If you have links that are coming from expired domains, this is a clear violation of webmaster guidelines and google can penalize you for the same. So if you have some backlinks that are coming from expired domains this is one category that you should seriously consider removing.  

3. Low Quality & Spammy Site Links

Like the expired domain links, another category which you should consider disavowing is a low quality and spammy site backlinks. If you don’t consider removing these links, there is a chance that your website is being targeted by a negative SEO attack. So it is always important to keep an eye on the search console on the actions required. 

4. Directory Submissions

Submitting your link to low-quality is not a good practice to follow when it comes to SEO. But that doesn’t say that directory submission doesn’t play any part in the same. Always try to acquire links from relevant and targeted directories. Especially when it comes to Local SEO, if you can get relevant backlinks it definitely improves your overall SEO performance. Here is a list of relevant directories as per Hubspot. 

5. Links From Cheap Link Building Services

This is another Link building tactic you should certainly avoid. Even though they are not part of google’s guidelines, we suggest that you avoid this link building method. Links from fiver and other cheap link building services more often can do harm rather than proving beneficial to your SEO efforts.

Should You Disavow Backlinks?

This is a question that definitely needs clarity. If you get a manual action notification from Google or suspect one in the future, you should consider disavowing backlinks. 

This manual action message could be a warning sign of bad links, spammy links and other unhealthy links to your website. To avoid this scenario always follow the healthy link building strategy, regularly check your backlink profile and check out for the suspicious links that may lead to negative SEO attack that will harm your website overall performance.  

As mentioned in the beginning always follow the option of reaching out to the website publisher via email to remove the link directly. If that doesn’t work out, consider disavowing the links if you come across the following: 

• You get a manual action message
• Suspect a lot of spammy, low-quality backlinks to your website
• A sudden drop in your performance due to these low-quality links. 

How To Disavow Using Google Search Console?

As you know Google search console is an important tool when it comes to SEO. GSC helps you manually select the links which Google should ignore to avoid potential negative effects. But if you don’t use it wisely for disavowing, it might affect you negatively. 

Here are the steps for disavowing backlinks in Google Search Console:

• Download the backlink profile
• Conduct a full backlink audit
• Create a disavow file and upload it to the google search console

1) Download the backlink profile

Before you start considering disavowing backlinks, find out the links that are harming your website. Use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz to download your backlink profile. By using these tools you can keep track of the backlinks.

  2 ) Conduct a full backlink audit

Now that you have a backlink profile, conduct a detailed audit of the backlink profile to identify the spammy links that can harm your website performance. The Disavow tool helps to get rid of spammy and irrelevant links. 

3)  Upload the file in Google Search Console

After you have a detailed list of your link profile, you can consider removing the links. This isn’t a too technical and complicated process.  It can be easily done using the disavow tool in Google Search Console. 

• Go to Disavow tool in Google Search Console
• Select your property
• Upload your .txt file

To Conclude

As we say, when it comes to Link Building, Focus on quality rather than quantity of links. Be alert on the incoming links that can harm your site’s authority and reputation. You can use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz to do regular audits. Disavowing should be done based on your priorities, overdoing it might do more harm than good for your site.

 

Got questions? Reach out to us.

 

According to Search Engine Journal, in this year of uncertainty SEO became the top priority as a marketing channel for brands and business. Studies and research shows that almost 70- 80% of the users  are focused on organic search results and they tend to convert into quality leads when compared to the paid ads.  So, is it all about organic traffic these days? Yes, with reduced marketing budgets, organic traffic is key to getting new sales and leads. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a major role in your customer journey because it helps grow your organic traffic.  

For your website to gain visibility in the search results, you need to implement the on-page SEO elements making it easy for the search engines to understand, recognize and rank the content. To make this easy for you we are taking you through the important aspects of on-page SEO. Let’s dive in. If you are in a hurry, you can always bookmark this article for the future. 

What is ON-PAGE SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website for better visibility in search engines to rank higher by driving quality traffic. To get the best results for your website the on-page implementation should be supported by some technical SEO strategies. 

The ON-PAGE SEO Checklist

1.Keyword Research

The on-page SEO starts with the keyword research and finding the right primary keyword that needs to be mapped along with the relevant – content. Once you choose your primary keyword;

• Assign that keyword to a specific page on your website  
• Make sure you don’t assign that keyword to any other page of the content. Keyword cannibalization is something that can hurt your ranking in the SERP.

2. Optimize for the Titles & H1

Once you have assigned the primary keyword to a specific page, the next step is to optimize your title and H1 with the primary keyword that you have chosen. The title should be catchy enough to grab the attention of the search engine and the audiences. Add the primary keyword in the beginning and -get your audience  with a hook telling why you should not miss the content. 

3. Optimize the URLs

Every page of your website should have a unique URL that differentiates it from the other pages. The URL should be clean.  Clean? Okay let me simplify this:

• The URL should include your primary keyword
• Avoid using special characters
• Keep your URL short this makes the users and search engines to remember your URL

4. Focus on your Meta Description 

Never ignore the Meta Description. What is a Meta Description? Defined by Moz, the meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a web page. Search engines such as Google often display the meta description in search results, which can influence the users to click through. – Include your primary keyword in the first few words of your meta description which helps create anticipation, and builds relevancy for the audience who is about to click through. 

5. Body Content 

Make sure that you have enough in your body content for Google and other search engines to understand what you are offering. The word count of the page depends on the purpose of the page and depth of the content. For example, if it is a blog, -you cannot have thin content. Based on the purpose of the content, if you are planning to write a long form,- it is recommended to have a word count more than 800 words. 

If it is the service page it is recommended to have a minimum of 300 words with the primary keyword positioned around the first 50 words and supported by strong semantic keywords. However, it is important to remember to not “stuff keywords.” You should avoid that at any cost. 

6. User Experience Matters

With all the updates Google has made, it is clear that only one thing matters –  the users. Are they finding the relevant information they need? It is important to provide a seamless experience to the users who visit your website. How can you make this possible? Here are a few things to consider:

• Make sure your content is easy to understand
• Ensure that there are no broken links
• No one likes a slow loading website, improve your website speed both  for mobile and desktop
• Make the website responsive

7. Provide High-Quality Content

Providing high-quality content means not to exhibit your flamboyant grammar skills. Make it as simple as possible.  A good yardstick is that even an eighth-grade level reader should be able to read and understand it. Avoid jargon. Create content that provides value for the users.  Evergreen content plays a major role in the SEO strategy.

8. Make the Content Scalable 

Content that is easy to scan and understand usually performs better in search engines. Once you are done creating the content; go through it and make sure the content is in a scannable format making it easy for the reader to understand. 

• Break the content down into subheadings
• Use short paragraphs 
• Use bullet points to list the features and information as much as you can

9. Internal Linking

What is internal linking?  Internal linking is the process of linking your content to other pages or articles within your website. It is the best way to hook your audience to the website and encourage them to stay longer and explore. -This increases the over-all dwell time on your website. 

Use relevant and descriptive ‘anchor texts’ to make the reader understand what  the content and internal link is all about and how relevant it is.

10. Add External Links to High-Quality websites

External links leading to other quality sites helps the search engine to understand the content and also enables search engines to give  context. So, do not feel bad to include highly relevant and quality external links leading to high-quality websites where you mention the name of the resource within the content. In the process of doing this, you do not want your users to exit your website. Set each outbound link to open in another window with the goal that your site stays open regardless of whether the user visits another site.

11. Do Image Optimizations

Always make the content more visually appealing by adding images. But the job is not done yet. Make sure that you do proper image optimization. 

• Add the primary keyword to the image file name
• Add the primary keyword to the image title
• Add the primary keyword to the image alt tag
• Make sure to compress the image properly

12. Is it a Blog Post?

If yes, make sure to add relevant categories and tags to it to organize the content better. This helps search engines to understand the topic -You also need to be confident that the title tags and categories are relevant to the content. 

13. Implement Schema Markup

Schema markups help in organizing the data structure that enables search engines to read and rank in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). 

Referred to in MOZ, Schema.org is the result of the collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at this time. Adding a Schema markup to your HTML improves the way your page displays in SERPs by enhancing the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title.

14. Include Social Sharing 

Content distribution is as important as content creation. Your content must reach the right audience at the right time. There is no place better than social media channels for better visibility for your content. Add the social sharing buttons to make your content easily sharable.

15. Page Speed 

Research- shows that 50% of the users will exit the page if the page doesn’t load within 3 seconds. In this age of instant gratification,  users are searching for answers and they want it really quick. 

Page speed also contributes to one of the important ranking factors for Google.  Make sure that the website loads faster to get better visibility in the search engines. 

Find your page speed insights here.

To Conclude

These are some of the most important on-page SEO factors that you should start with your optimization. Always keep in mind that SEO has moved a long way from where it began. Always prioritize the target audience not Google and other search engines. The best way forward is to focus on trying to satisfy what you think your users need-By doing this you should definitely see quality traffic to your website. 

Do you think that any important elements were missed out? Let me know in the comments. 

 

Got questions? Reach out to us.