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What r we doing wrong? Traffic dropped & DA dropped
* B2B SaaS company
* active on all digital marketing channels, SEO focus
* WordPressHi folks
2023 was generally good – traffic was good, more leads, more sales.
Till mid Sept, after Google’s update… Freaking page speed! Core Web Vitals in GSC report approx 1.4K poor URLs, despite pagespeed showing green lights (around 90 for performance) for desktop and mobile.
Could that be THE problem? I don’t think so…
The website’s monthly traffic dropped from 10K to 4K, with a 2 point drop in DA (37 -> 35).
We don’t buy backlinks, we build them organically. We pay attention to search intent and produce quality content, with many pictures (webp) at least once per week.
What else should I check or be aware of? Appreciate your help!
\*Edit: Don’t sell me audits in dms
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1 Reply
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Could you share your website? I’d like to take a look at it.
The timing of the drop does coincide with Google’s updates, so could be nothing. But that’s a rare case.
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What analytics tools have you been using. SEMrush and Ahrefs won’t give you accurate traffic estimates. Should be easier to identify in Google Search Console though. You can do 3 months vs previous 3 months to see what’s causing the traffic drop
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Where does your traffic come from? What keywords? Have you optimized for them?
Have you optimized for content creators as well aka do you provide what it takes for them to write easily about you?
Have you fallen out of favour because another product is better?
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Identify which URLs are experiencing the bulk of the drop in traffic and then which queries are driving most of the drop. After you identify key queries, check search volume trends. Then, you sleuth it out from there.
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Same happened to us with a video game site with similar traffic around the same time. We haven’t figured out what happened and we’re getting a little desperate.
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analyze the pages one by one through GSC!
Check which rankings have dropped and what caused it. Also manually check webpages for errors.
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Yes, the Sep update penalized more sites.
Can you please share the website URL so that I can better understand the reason for the decline? -
All algorithm updates these days really seem to be trying to nail down the EEAT signals and Helpful Content.
Dm me and I can take a look at your site and give you some thoughts
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Don’t worry it happens. It will gain traction soon. Every Google updates has side effects, positive or negative. Keep doing what you are doing. Find your real traffic. Ignore the spikes.
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Can we sell links in DMs? /s
I’d look at before/after in Ahrefs/GSC to find what dropped, then go from there to see about fixing it.
Ignore DA other than checking links lost during the time period with Ahrefs.
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Honestly I don’t think that’s 100% the issue. I think it’s more of the layoffs and other crazy things starting in September that didn’t get talked about
I’ve seen it across the board in my own business and the businesses I’m a board of director for, around September everything got slower
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It’s possible that the search demand and volume has changed. People aren’t still searching for your keywords. That’s one possibility.
The more obvious one is a content issue. Google may have decided that your content isn’t as helpful as someone else’s content.
Another potential is a loss of backlinks that were propping up your rankings.
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what backlinks are you building? Are you working with any agency?
I’ve built some links recently that helped me get some really good traffic back. I go with a monthly package of 8-12 links – and you can also send multiple target pages to get links to. They don’t buy links, they have their own partners and work with ABC link exhanges.
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I think whatever was unleashed in September was totally out of a websites control. You could spend months trying to change things and it isn’t going to do anything.
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