Factors Affecting Organic Website Traffic
Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 8:07 am
You may have noticed that organic traffic fluctuates in one direction or another for unknown reasons. Its source, unlike paid traffic, is not so easy to determine. Reliable information can be obtained from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Let's list the factors that can help to understand the reasons for the decrease in organic traffic and loss of positions in search results.
Main factors
Pages not indexed
Pages not indexed
How do you know if your site is indexed? Enter nursing homes email list a search query with the name of the online resource in the format "your-site.ru". If the pages that are important to you do not appear in the search results, you should diagnose the cause.
First of all, check the robots.txt file: are pages or directories blocked? If there are no problems with the file, then you need to check on each page whether there is a noindex tag.
Bots
Exclude all bots and spiders, otherwise the traffic figures will be unreliable. Bots usually enter the site through the main page and move around the site, imitating human behavior.
How do you know if there were bots on the site? This is indicated by pages with a large number of visits, but a high bounce rate and low conversion. Also in this case, the average time spent by visitors on the site will be small.
To begin with, you can install a standard bot filter, but in the future it is better to manually configure the blocking. Be sure to check that your IP address is excluded from the statistics.
Site updates
If you have made changes to the site content, transformed the navigation or deleted pages, be prepared for organic traffic to drop for several weeks. This is because it will take some time for search engines to index these pages again.
When changing the URL structure or after deleting pages, develop a 301 redirect strategy. This way, you won’t lose traffic or lose your position in search results.
Let's list the factors that can help to understand the reasons for the decrease in organic traffic and loss of positions in search results.
Main factors
Pages not indexed
Pages not indexed
How do you know if your site is indexed? Enter nursing homes email list a search query with the name of the online resource in the format "your-site.ru". If the pages that are important to you do not appear in the search results, you should diagnose the cause.
First of all, check the robots.txt file: are pages or directories blocked? If there are no problems with the file, then you need to check on each page whether there is a noindex tag.
Bots
Exclude all bots and spiders, otherwise the traffic figures will be unreliable. Bots usually enter the site through the main page and move around the site, imitating human behavior.
How do you know if there were bots on the site? This is indicated by pages with a large number of visits, but a high bounce rate and low conversion. Also in this case, the average time spent by visitors on the site will be small.
To begin with, you can install a standard bot filter, but in the future it is better to manually configure the blocking. Be sure to check that your IP address is excluded from the statistics.
Site updates
If you have made changes to the site content, transformed the navigation or deleted pages, be prepared for organic traffic to drop for several weeks. This is because it will take some time for search engines to index these pages again.
When changing the URL structure or after deleting pages, develop a 301 redirect strategy. This way, you won’t lose traffic or lose your position in search results.