GSD 191: What To Look For When Organic Traffic Drops On Your Website

Now, what happened was Google, at the time… So I was trying everything I could to get the search engines to show our pages above all our competitors, and I was good at it; it’s called search engine optimization. And what happened was Google updated its algorithms. Then all of a sudden, overnight, all of the traffic died. It all nose-dived. So I was stuck with this problem: What would I do now that I don’t have any traffic? And what I did do or what… I mean, I pivoted to paid traffic. I started running Facebook ads and Google Ads and started working on the paid traffic angles, which was fine. I refinanced our house to learn, so I could have enough ad budget to learn quickly and get it figured out. So that was a risky move, but it worked out well.

But at the end of the day, that was my fix. So paid traffic will fix the problem. You will get traffic when you pay for traffic. And that’s the thing about now, whenever I look at businesses, I always want to build the most robust, sure, solid foundation I can for all of our clients. And for all of our internal stuff, I want a solid foundation built on traffic that I control.

Now, traffic that I control is traffic that I pay for. So I know that we’ll get so many clicks if I put $1,000 of traffic out or $10,000 of traffic. I know we’re going to get so many sales. That part’s easy. It’s all backed by data. Now, I don’t ever trust free traffic. I don’t ever count on search engine optimization and affiliate traffic. It’s all a bonus because if that traffic drops and slows down, then I do not depend on it. I’m relying on the stuff that I control. I can’t own Google, I can’t own search engines, I can’t hold affiliates, whether they mail or not, or whatever they do. I can’t own any of that. So this lets me do what I need to build a foundation to grow a business.

So that’s the secret if you will. Now, three things that I… Currently, there are three… So when I see that traffic drops, and I’m not driving paid traffic, I do three things. First, I go to Google Search Console. So we’re going to go and check this out. Google Search Console is a free search. It’s a free tool you can install on any of your websites, and it does a couple of cool things. You’ve seen me use this for the search results functionality. It will show you where you come up, how many clicks you’re getting from the search engines, your average position, what keywords you’re ranking for, and which pages those keywords are going to. But it does some other cool stuff too.

There’s a page experience tab, so you can see which URLs have a bad experience on mobile and desktop. It has mobile usability, so you can see what pages are useless. So if there are non-usable mobile pages or your website is slow to load, your traffic will go down. There are other things that you can dig into. We got our core web vitals here. So you see that 196 of our URLs are poor, so we’ll need to figure that out. On the desktop, we have some URLs that need improvement. So again, we’re going to have to address that. There are lots of things that Google is looking for, so it makes sense to make sure that, from a usability standpoint, all of your pages are dialed in.

Now, in the second place I went, I said something about speed. The second place I go is Pingdom, tools.pingdom.com, and you can see your page load time. So I’m going to go ahead and see what it is for Washington, DC, and we’re going to hit the start test. Now, your load speed time, so it depends on, it depends on a lot of things. It depends on your DNS, which is… This all leads to the following tool that we will look at. But your load speed, page load speed time, is an essential ranking metric in Google because when somebody clicks a button, clicks a link, comes to your website, or whatever, your site needs to be responsive and there for them. If it is not there for them within so many seconds, Google starts deprioritizing it because you’re not giving the viewer the experience that Google wants you to give. We can check here; our load time for our website is 679 milliseconds.

I’m not sure how that is a performance grade of a D, but apparently, it is. So I got some Fs here, reduced DNS look-ups, whatever. But all-in-all, that’s pretty damn fast, 679 milliseconds. So I use a WordPress plugin called W3 Total Cache, W3 Total Cache, and I love this plugin. This plugin works with my third tool, Cloudflare, to offload some of your more extensive scripts and data. It offloads that off to Cloudflare and is a free content delivery network, a free CDN.

Now Cloudflare is the next one. So if there are issues with your page load time, then Cloudflare can offload some of those big image files and some of those JavaScript files and stuff that’ll minify your files on your website, so it’ll load a little snappier. Plus, it has some security and malware protocols in there. It has free SSL to get an SSL certificate for your website. It does DNS and a bunch of other tech stuff that the tech stuff is really… If your traffic problem is not, that you’re not paying for traffic, the tech stuff is often where you’re going to get tripped up.

The other side is that it might be an outdated search engine optimization strategy. You might be optimizing for the wrong keyword phrases. The keyword phrases that you might have been ranked for might be de-indexed there. There are lots of SEO-specific things for when your traffic drops. Still, these tools, Google Search Console, Cloudflare, W3 Total Cache, from a caching standpoint, and Pingdom, will help you figure out, help you diagnose, where the problems are so that you can address them.

But at the end of the day, building a solid foundation for your website for your business is of paramount concern. So, if you have any questions at all, leave them as a comment down below, and we will make sure to address them. If you would like to chat about setting up a sales funnel, doing paid traffic marketing, setting up marketing automation, and all that stuff to help you sell more online, go to doneforyou.com/start, and I will talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.