Here’s how you can turn the tables to boost organic traffic

The amount of organic traffic your site receives fluctuates all the time. That’s just the nature of the game of search engine optimisation (SEO). If your site has seen a noticeable decline in search traffic over a prolonged period, or for that matter, if it has suddenly dropped dramatically, you have good reason to be concerned.

Two things need to be done to solve this problem and get your site back on an upward curve. First, you have to figure out what’s gone wrong and second, you need to get to work on fixing it.

Various factors could explain your organic traffic woes. Here are our pick of the most common.

1. Google changes its algorithm

The search titan’s algorithms are constantly being tweaked and updated to ensure users get the results they want. There are bots continually crawling the web, including your own site. It’s a good explanation if your traffic has declined significantly of late.

1. Consider giving your content a refresh
2. Re-examine your keyword targets
3. Provide potential visitors to your site with the most relevant and useful information for their needs

Technical issues with SEO

On-site content creation is undoubtedly a big part of a successful inbound SEO strategy. This is why it features as standard in all three of our search optimisation plans — Bronze, Silver and Gold — here at PENNInk Productions.

However, any good search engine optimisation agency will be just as good at looking at all of the technical aspects of your site’s SEO.

1. Check page load times and optimise for speed
2. Check mobile responsive design and consider a mobile-first approach
3. Check whether several of your pages may share topics, keywords and themes, which can make it difficult for a search engine to pinpoint the page of your site to prioritise for a particular search term

A Google penalty

Google can apply a penalty to your site manually or use an algorithmic penalty. The latter involves search engine crawlers coming across your site and automatically applying a penalty if you’re in breach of the quality guidelines. There’s absolutely no question this can wreak havoc with your organic traffic levels.

1. Ensure your site complies with the Google Webmaster quality guidelines. Otherwise, your site may be flagged and then penalised if you don’t resolve the issue.
2. View any manual penalties in your Google Search Console account, but you won’t be specifically told of an algorithmic penalty — you’ll just see the adverse effect on your traffic.

Lacklustre content

Content that is below par can certainly bring about a decrease in your organic traffic, especially if you also haven’t been producing as much content lately as you once did.

1. Simply replacing existing weak content of yours with stronger content could help to reverse your organic traffic falls.
2. If the frequency with which you upload new content is also an issue, remember that our Gold plan customers can benefit from more frequent, regular blog post creation, helping your keyword density and content quality to improve.

As touched on above, it’s one thing to know what’s likely to be causing your drops in organic traffic, and quite another thing to resolve it. That’s precisely why SEO needs to be treated as a long-term investment, requiring ongoing attention — as we can provide when you choose PENNInk Productions as your search engine optimisation agency.

Originally published at PENNInk Productions.