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How to Recover Lost Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is unpaid traffic you get from search engines. Unlike paid traffic, you can improve your organic traffic based on combined factors like keyword research, link building, and more.

Getting higher organic traffic could mean higher sales, improved brand awareness, and dominance over competitors in the digital space.

This is why losing organic traffic could be worrying. You start to think that instead of clicking on your website, potential customers could be heading to your competitors’ websites instead.

Today, we’re going to discuss the most common reasons why you’re losing organic traffic and how you could start to recover.

Let’s get started.

You have a slow website.

Back in mid-2018, Google rolled out its Speed Update. The update made page speed a major ranking factor in mobile search engine results. Even if you’re publishing excellent content, you might fail to improve your chances of ranking higher if your website is slow.

For example, two websites published excellent content about the same topic. Both blog posts have roughly the same number of words, contain unique information, and were written by experts in the field. The main difference is, Website A is faster than Website B when viewed on mobile.

Keeping the Speed Update in mind, Website A will have better chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages.

If you’re unsure how fast your website is, you can check your website’s current speed using PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free tool created by Google using data gathered from Google Chrome Users. Aside from scoring how fast your website is, it also gives you improvement suggestions.

Some common improvement suggestions include the following:

• Resizing images. – Website owners sometimes upload images that are too large. Most of the time, you can upload a smaller version without affecting image quality.
• Minifying code. – You can use WordPress plugins and other tools to compress code files on your website, so they’ll take less time to download.
• Lazy loading. – This is a design pattern that loads website elements as a user scrolls down a page instead of downloading everything at once. If this is implemented, the website automatically loads faster.

The improvement suggestions may differ depending on your website’s current speed, but you can rest assured that they will be specific and not generic.

Your site is ridden with duplicate content.

Duplicate content is content that appears on more than one URL. It can occur within one website or on different websites.

Here are some examples of duplicate content:

• You published a blog post on your site and re-published it on another website as a guest post.
• You use product descriptions provided by the manufacturer for all your product pages. Other businesses who sell the same products online also use these descriptions, resulting in several instances of duplicate content.
• Your domain has several versions. For example, users can access your website if they type www.yourwebsite.com, http://www.yourwebsite.com, and https://yourwebsite.com. All three versions may look the same, but search engines will consider them different.
• Content scrapers copied your content word for word and posted it on their websites without your permission.

Google will not penalise your website for duplicate content. However, the search engine won’t see the point in indexing web pages that contain the same information. It will deem a webpage as the original version and choose to index that, excluding the other versions.

If your webpage isn’t deemed the “original” version, all your SEO efforts may go to waste.

You can start avoiding duplicate content by using Google Search Console to select your “main” website domain. The free tool allows you to tell Google which version of your domain you’d prefer to be indexed. It also alerts you whenever duplicate content is published on your website.

If you’re wondering if your content has been published on other domains, you can use Copyscape. It’s a free plagiarism checker that finds duplicate content online. All you have to do is enter a URL and click Go.

You migrated your site without setting up redirects.

There are plenty of changes to your website that could also impact its URLs. These changes include using a different content management system, changing your domain, switching from HTTP to HTTPS, and more.

When a change that affects your website URLs occurs, you need to let search engines know. Otherwise, they may still index the web pages’ old URLs, letting all your SEO work go to waste.

To start setting up redirects, you can use the WordPress plugin Redirects. Installing it is quite easy, and you can start creating redirects using its simple dashboard.

Conclusion

Getting higher organic traffic is vital for increasing your conversion rate and making more sales. If people don’t go to your website, you won’t have a chance to convert them from first-time visitors to paying customers.

Need help recovering lost organic traffic? Cornerstone Digital is an SEO agency in Sydney that can help you find your ideal customer via SEO. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us atinfo@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.