Website Traffic Dropped in Half in Past Two Months

[Powered]

One of the reasons I joined this forum is that my website traffic literally dropped in half of its daily visitors in the past two months. I'm thinking it was Panda 2, but I was wondering if you all had any more ideas as to why. I didn't make any changes to my site, I've been doing SEO and social media as normal. Did anyone else ever experience this? Why and how did you get through it? Any help would be appreciated.

[JamesF]

It may be one of the Google updates, but it's hard to know for sure without actually seeing your site…

[Harold Mansfield]

It could be a lot of things.

A long history of Bad SEO practices.
More competition in the SERPS.
Improper targeting that doesn't work anymore.
Poor site structure.
Links on bad sites that don't carry weight anymore.
Technical issues like long page load times.
You could have been reported for spam.
There could be malicious code or scripts installed.

It's really hard to say without being able to see your site, and getting a feel for it's history and current placement.

[Brian Altenhofel]

A drop in traffic may not necessarily be a bad thing, too. I had a client a while back experience a drop in traffic from some keywords, while some other keywords they hadn't been focusing on went up after an algorithm update. While their traffic levels from search dropped overall, those new keyword sources turned out to be a gold mine in conversion rates.

Pageviews and visitors are not really good numbers to go off of to determine the health of your website.

[Damon the Marketer]

I have to know where your traffic is coming from to give you feedback. Was most of your traffic from SEO?

[Freelancier]

I'm also seeing fewer visits... but I'm attributing that to summer, when a lot of IT projects get delayed. If this lasts into the fall, I'll be concerned, but for right now, it's ok with me, I'm busy keeping current customers happy.

[DeniseTaylor]

I think it's important to look at the exact date, because then you can match it up to whatever update occurred right around that time.

However, Harold sums up the (unfortunate) possibilities quite nicely.

Good luck!

[ashleyidesign]

Hey Powered, could you share your site so we can look more specifically at possible causes?

[Diplomat]

Without knowing your URL I can't say much, but it's better to know what those updates are all about.
There is a really nice article about them: Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird - get ready for Google's updates! (http://www.link-assistant.com/news/key-google-updates.html?utm_source=ranktracker:Professional)

If you know what those updates are (Panda, Penguin or whatever) then you know what might be wrong with your site. Bad content/links..

If that drop didn't happen during the big update then it's probably your backlink profile.

[appointmentCare]

Hi, I hope your SEO techniques were all white hat techniques and you werent doing any link-building exercises which would impact traffic negatively ? Use one of the tools liek SEOMOz, Google webmaster etc to find out more on why your traffic dropped.

[Georgias Gifts]

I can relate to Powered's question as I also have experienced a definite drop in traffic over the last few months to my site. My site is retail product and I realize that shopping online is evolving. In my case, I think people want sites that can do more than a lot of small retailers like me can offer.

I have been experimenting with putting product on ebay and another new retail market to try & offset this. They offer all the bells & whistles that I can take advantage of. But I am still trying to improve my site at the same time. I'm open to comments on my site also.

[Beat15]

Traffic drop is associated with a significant drop in your ranking as far as your targeted keywords are concerned. It could be the result of the Google update that you referred to. It may well be that you get outranked by your competitors. This can be quite frustrating when you lose a substantial amount of your daily traffic while having no idea of the cause of the problem.

[cathyc100]

Hard to say. Google certainly can do things that can hinder your ranking.
There are so many ways to market online these days to generate traffic. Explore all the options.
SEO is only one way. Consider a mobile app for your business. Mobile is huge right now and you
will reach another audience.

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[singhabhishek251]

I do not see any major Google update in your mentioned time period, are you sure you are following the correct process of SEO? Sometime it happens that you keep on working like link building and they are not getting indexed so on the whole your link building process remains zero that may also result in drop of traffic.

Or your website may have duplicate content and you may not be familiar with this, sometime other copy fro your original content and they get index early that yours and Google think your's is duplicate.

[Phil Gregory Seo]

Is your site E Commerce, or dependant on leads? Have your Profits or leads suffered? If so, then you will need to improve what you are offering your clients. If not, keep an eye on your rankings, but don't sweat traffic too much, a huge amount of traffic and low sales/conversions isn't helping you. Get rid of the tyre kickers and appeal directly to your core audience.