May 02, 2016 | 3 minute read Increasing Your Website Traffic
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By: Carrie Miller
With all of analytics packages available to us today, we are more aware than ever of the dips in our website traffic patterns. What do you do when those dips turn in to dives?
Check the Obvious
There are many things that factor in to your website traffic numbers. An example would be Google with their frequent updates – which can greatly impact your numbers. Another of the obvious culprits is tracking code deletions. You would be amazed how many times I personally find myself helping a customer who opens a ticket because their code is not working, only to find that the code was deleted during a routine website update.
What is your Domain Authority?
Again, it is always interesting to me that so many companies do not even know what Domain Authority is, or how it is scored. Your Domain Authority – not Page Authority – is a good indicator of website presence. What goes in to calculating this number? Domain Authority includes many parameters, such as new page publish frequency, the number of inbound links, the number of outbound links, the quality of those links, and more.
You might be thinking, “Big deal. Who cares?” Well, you should. Take a couple weeks off from posting blog posts and you could easily find yourself losing website traffic after Moz deploys it’s latest Domain Authority of all websites. The Moz number is actually so important that Google uses it. Example, if your number starts to fall, it signals to Google, Bing and others that your website quality might be dropping. Since these search engines are competing each other at all times, they will rank you lower to prove themselves the more relevant and in tune search engine.
Unfamiliar with your Domain Authority rank? Calculate if for free here.
Got Keywords?
Keeping a handle on your keywords is also a must. Keywords or search terms and their rankings can decide if your page stays ranked 1st or is dropped down to 20th. There are quite a few keyword tracking software packages that can help you keep track of your keywords and their placements – if possible, this is the simple solution. If not, add it to your weekly/monthly monitoring plan (along with your Domain Authority tracking).
Do you Link?
One of the less widely known hacks, is the toxic backlink hack. Many think that backlinks can’t hurt them or their rankings, but this is untrue. Sure, you didn’t link to your site from that questionable website in another country – but search engines like Google will still punish you if they pick up on it. But how do you know and what do you do?
You can keep track of your referred traffic many different ways, but the way that I recommend is through a solid analytics package like the one that is provided by Visual Visitor with the Anonymous Visitor Identification package. This allows you to track your referred visitors by country, etc. If you find that you are suddenly receiving more traffic from another area of the world that you usually do not do business with, drill down and find out who has referred that traffic. If it seems suspicious, you will need to track it to the end, submit a list to Google, Bing, etc. and disavow any relationship. Not sure how to do all of this? Well, that is really too deep for this post, so a professional might be needed.
In Conclusion
In all honesty, with the updates to Google alone, Panda and Penguin, there are many changes for us the searchee. These major algorithm changes will cause changes in website rankings to be felt for weeks, months. Keeping a close eye on your online presence and rankings is your best defense against unplanned traffic drops!
