Our traffic is down, let’s analyse what’s wrong! When faced with this issue most Digital marketers won’t automatically know where to start.
Here is a 30 points checklist to verify the performance of your site and try to understand which elements are affecting visits and conversions.
Seasonality/company issue
- Is the decline visible in other channels?
- Same volumes %
- Do we observe similar pattern amongst our top affiliates?
- Is our decline similar to Google trends for generic keywords
Technical elements
- Are we seeing a decline across all sites?
- Are we seeing an decline across specific languages?
- Have we changed code of site?
- Have we changed any element of the hosting/Akamai?
Webmaster tools
- Is our Crawl rate consistent?
- Is our load speed consistent?
- Is our page speed consistent?
- Is our index rate consistent?
Keyword Ranking
- Is our ranking consistent
- Does our ranking has a ceiling for certain positions (Penalty 6 & Penalty 50)
- Does a spot check verify information provided by AWR
- Is 1 site losing to another? Is the shift resulting in lower positions?
Analytics
- Which pages are most affected?
- Is the decline associated with a specific Search Engine? Google places visits?
- Are certain page categories more affected than others?
- Are certain regions more affected than others? Source vs. Destination
- Are certain cities more affected than others (buckets view)?
Linkbuilding
- Has our linkbuilding been consistent
- Verify using majestic SEO data
- Are we seeing significant difference based on LB activity
Content activity
- When did we last updated content on the site?
- Are we seeing difference based on content freshness?
- Are we seeing difference based on content quantity?
Search Engine Activities
- Does the start date of decline correspond to any large algorithm update
- Is there activity on main SEO forum/sites suggesting a shift in certain algorithm elements
- Have we seen shift in Page Rank / Mozrank / Moztrust?
Answers to each of the checkpoints will be added in future posts. Stay tuned for more info.
