…Without having to spend a dime.
My wife’s closet is adjacent to the shower in our bathroom. One morning a couple weeks ago, she walked into her closet barefoot and felt wet carpet. “Probably just some water from the shower that got on the floor and onto the carpet.”
Then she felt it later that night, the carpet was still wet. Dang it.
So I saw a small water stain on the wall and figured the shower was spraying from behind the wall then dripping to the floor inside and out to the carpet. The I noticed mold.
So we called a plumber who came and cut open the drywall to find out the leak was actually coming from above the ceiling – it was a pipe that leads to the shower with a pinhole leak, slowly dripping all the way through the wall to the carpet.
But it took someone actually cutting into or “popping the hood” on the problem who knew what to look for and where before we were able to come up with a solution.
3 Causes of Potential Website traffic loss
It never fun to lose traffic, ranking, sales or leads from the organic side of your marketing.
When this is the case with any potential client coming to us, we always run some diagnostics to drive traffic looking at 3 main points of interest:
- SEMRush – this will give us a timeline of when the traffic drop occured. This is important because we can correlate the drop with either:
a. a website redesign or update (new CMS, new servers, new content, new pages etc…)
b. a Google update
Here’s what happened to draxe.com over 2 core Google updates as he went from almost 16m monthly visitors to 1m:
Most of the issues I’ve ever seen are one of the two above, seldom anything else. You can get a free account that will at the very least give you the timeline. But to be sure, the next tool I use is: - Majestic – this tool allows you to look at the backlinks pointing to a website. You can check the newer links to see if there’s anything indicitave of a negative SEO attack or a website hack. The dead giveaway? Links that come to pages you didn’t create with words like “viagra, cialis, brides…” you get the point. The downside of this one is that it requires you to pay for any information…
- Google Search Console – You’ll be able to get some of the information that Majestic would have given you – so it’s still a good option.
When you’re logged in to the search console, just visit the link on the left side of the page and see if there’s anything fishy:
Between all of these checkup points, you should get a pretty good idea on what the heck happened.
Of course you also want to just ask your brain what was going on when there was a loss in traffic. Did you do any work on the site?
Or maybe it was something darker, like a denial of service (Dos / DDoS) attack, which is a lot harder to track.
If you’ve reached the end of this article – and the end of your wits, then you need to get in touch. I’ll run a free diagnostic on your site so we can pinpoint exactly what’s going on with your traffic.
And get you back on track to where you were … and beyond.
THE END.