5 REASONS WHY YOUR SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC MAY HAVE DROPPED

Recently there have been many websites seeing a decrease in search traffic. Here is a quick list of possible reasons this might have happened with some notes of how to handle the situation and how to tell if that’s what actually happened:

1. You’ve been penalized. Most often this will also trigger the following:

- you have lost all your rankings for all your keywords
- your site has been dropped out of index

Solution: find out what you may have done wrong, clean up your site (and tactics) and ask for reconsideration. If you are sure that you are good enough for a human review by the search engine staff, you stand a good chance of being forgiven and relisted. If you don’t know how to analyze the situation contact Securenet Systems to help you review your situation.

2. Your site has been hacked. That’s a common scenario in today’s Internet world. Here are a few signs that you have been hacked:

- your site has been dropped out of the search engine index without any reason
- you get a rise of unusal traffic (especially for searches that have nothing to do with your site)
Google especially notifies you of unusual keywords in your site content. Prior to taking any actions Google does its best to notify a webmaster of possible problems:
--- they notify a webmaster via Google tools
--- they send an email alert to a webmaster to a most probable email address (admin@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, contact@yourdomain.com, etc.

3. The search engine is tweaking or adjusting its algorithm. That’s a highly probable situation considering that last year alone Google launched more than 450 new adjustments, that’s about 9 per week on the average. Some more recent adjustments include:

- Google’s “special” attitude to .info domains
- Google deranking most directories; etc.

4. Overall (seasonal) change in searches. Sometimes your traffic drop has nothing to do with either you or the search engine. This is due to fashion trends, political and economical changes, etc. Check out Google trends to find such patterns.

5. Your competitors are doing better with their promotional efforts. SEO is about constant competition. You can’t achieve the top and rest assured you are going to be there for life. You are being watched by those who want to be in your place. So do what your competitors are doing:

- always review your competitors and do competitive analysis
- review your competitors’ link building and social media promotion efforts
- improve your own SEO techniques

NOTE: What initially got you top rankings will not allow you to remain there. It’s like paddling a boat upstream. You must continually paddle to make constant headway.

If you can’t understand why you have a drop in traffic, whether sudden or over a period of time, you need to seek expert help. SEO is much like rocket science. If you don’t keep up to date with the latest SEO strategies and techniques, you don’t have the tools to analyze your situation, you don’t have the knowledge to understand what is going on or the manpower, contact an SEO professional organization to assist you. Call Securenet Systems; doing online marketing work for over ten years or call me direct at 866-568-9402 # 222.