As anyone involved in the digital marketing space will testify, the rumors about “SEO being dead” are here to stay. They’ve been around for the past couple of decades, so the notion that they are disappearing anytime soon is certainly not going away.
In other words, businesses large and small are always going to rely on this source of traffic. It has a low cost per acquisition, at least when compared to other channels like paid search, so it’s always going to be favored.
It means that if the worst does happen, and rankings do suddenly fall off a cliff, a business can be severely affected. This is the reason behind today’s post, and we will now take a look at some of the first areas you should look towards if you see your organic traffic eliminated.
Reason #1 – Is everything tracking OK?
It sounds a simple reason, but sometimes your rankings are completely fine and it’s purely a tracking issue which is distorting the problem. If you perform a search for some of your main terms, and they appear, there’s every chance this is the case. It’s at this point you need to calculate just which page the reporting isn’t occurring.
Thankfully, if you use something like the Webeden site builder which is becoming more commonplace, it’s quite easy to add and edit any tracking code that is being inserted into your pages.
Reason #2 – The noindex tag
First and foremost, the noindex tag can serve a valid purpose. There will be some pages on your site that you don’t want to be found by the public on Google, and this is where it works a treat.
At the same time, it can prompt problems. There have been occasions of sites accidently adding this, and subsequently seeing their pages removed from Google’s index. As such, make sure you’re not affected by such an error.
Reason #3 – You have a manual penalty
Perhaps one of the most worrying issues for a webmaster is if they have been banned from Google. Just like many of the other points we have looked at, this is easy to diagnose as well. Through Google Search Console, you will receive a message informing you of the penalty and the reason for it. From here, you can carry the necessary tasks to remove it and ultimately appear in the search results pages. Unfortunately, this is something that can take time.
Reason #4 – Your robots.txt file blocks everything
Let’s end with another really simple reason behind your loss in organic traffic, and again one that can be fixed in a matter of no time.Just like there’s a time and a place to use the noindex tag, the same can be said for a robots.txt file. This is a file that alerts Google to what pages you want it to crawl, and with the slip of a key you can quickly block your entire site. Take a look at this page to look at how to put an effective robots.txt file together.
Originally posted on March 18, 2019 @ 10:34 am