Your Website Traffic Dropped

Your Website Traffic Has Dropped- Now What?

Nothing is more discouraging than seeing your Internet home business websites traffic drop dramatically over the course of a weekend. There are reports all over the internet about websites that suddenly have a traffic drop-off 10%-30%. While you might immediately want to pull your hair out, it isn't very productive. The key is to take focused steps to understanding what has caused this drop and what you can do to fix it so you can continue to earn online from home. Here is a quick look at the steps that you should take in the event that you suddenly start losing traffic.

The first thing that you need to do is double check and make sure that there is no outside influence that would cause your target visitors to suddenly stop visiting your website. The most common reason for this is that there is a holiday that you didn't take into consideration. Remember that the Internet is a world wide entity not just focused to your particular country . There could be a holiday in a country on the other side of the world that you also get a fair amount of traffic from. Don't discount the week leading up to holidays, especially holidays that start on Thursday or Friday because they create an extra long weekend. The easiest way to check this is to check your website against competing websites to find out if there has been a major change to the overall level of traffic within the niche.

If you don't find any environmental factor that would cause your website traffic to drop, then the next thing you need to do is check out the health of your website. There are a variety of common tactics that hackers use to siphon off your traffic. They could have slipped in a server or page-level redirect or some type of malware. There could also have been hidden text and/or links added to your website, which might cause Google to drop you from their rankings. One of the best ways to check the health of your website is to utilize the Google Webmaster Tools because it can alert your to these types of problems quickly.

Once you have gone through these two steps, you should be able to discover whether or not the issue is related to either external factors that affect your visitors regular schedule or any unknown infrastructure changes, it is time to take a closer look at what your traffic data is telling you. The next thing that you need to do is check to see what sources of traffic have dropped and then find out why.

For example, if you normally use PPC, then you need to do some bid management. If your primary sources of traffic are via organic traffic, then you need to check your SERPs for your best performing pages. Is there a new competitor that is taking your traffic? Is your link building strategy becoming obsolete? Was there a major change to the search engine's algorithm? Whatever the reason, you need to identify it and try to fix it.

But what do you do in the meantime? If you see a giant drop in your traffic and it is going to take some time in order to get it back, then this is the perfect time to start focusing on increasing your conversion rate. Just because you have less traffic, doesn't mean that you should be making less money. Treat this setback as a blessing in disguise and start focusing more on ways to convert your visitors into buyers..

The absolute worse thing that you can do is sit back and hope the problem fixes itself, because it won't. The key is to identify the underlying reason for the loss of traffic and then create a plan to fix the problem. In the meantime, you will be given a great opportunity to focus on upping your conversion rates, which will benefit you long after your have regained your lost website traffic.