A drop in traffic is scary for the website owner as it puts them in a critical situation. If this issue is left unaddressed, it can lead to a potential loss of revenue and visibility that can impact the overall business performance and brand perception.
We are going to give you a glimpse of how we recovered the organic traffic of a dating and relationship guidance website in a span of 10 months through Traffic drop analysis, Technical SEO Audit, and On-page recommendations.
About the Client
Our client owns a website dedicated to couple relationships, which offers a secure, fun, and non-judgmental space for people to read, share, and discuss theory experiences in the journey of love and relationships.
They cover all aspects such as single life, dating and relationships, marriage, parenting, and divorce.
Apart from publishing informative articles, our client also provides counseling services to people with problems in their love and marriage life.
At present, the client has a team of 35 people composed of experts, counselors, and writers that publish around 2 to 5 articles every day.
Issues Faced by the Client
All of a sudden, the client’s website witnessed almost a 50% drop in their organic traffic. Furthermore, this led to a drop in their revenue by 60%.
As the client’s revenue depended majorly on its website’s organic traffic, the client wanted an expert SEO Agency to help them in recovering their lost organic traffic. This was when the client approached us.
We helped the client recover its organic traffic by conducting traffic drop analysis and providing technical and on-page recommendations.
We have decided to keep the client’s name confidential with respect to the NDA signed between us.
Let us take a closer look at the approach that we had followed for recovering the lost organic traffic of the client’s website.
Our Approach
Traffic Drop Analysis & Website Audit
To understand why the website traffic had dropped, it was important for us to review the website’s health by conducting a traffic drop analysis and an extensive website audit.
Traffic drop analysis is conducted to diagnose the traffic drop, identify the declining traffic pages and keywords.
Our traffic drop analysis was also accompanied by a technical and content audit to ensure we did a 360-degree audit of the client’s website.
On conducting the audits, we identified a total of 24 issues, out of which 5 Issues were of high priority, 3 were of medium priority, and 16 were of low priority issues.
High Priority was given to issues that were urgent and critical. These issues, if fixed, can immediately help us recover the lost traffic.
Medium Priority was given to issues that were important but not urgent. They can have a long-term effect in improving traffic.
Low Priority was given to issues that were best practices and which were good to resolve but may not necessarily help us in recovering the traffic.
Out of all the issues we identified and fixed, let’s look at one major issue.
MAJOR ISSUE – Under Performing Articles & Unhelpful Content
There were over 8000 articles published on the client’s website, and out of them, around 6898 articles had very low traffic.
Following was the 12 months traffic breakdown of these articles:
- 2809 articles – 0 clicks
- 2075 articles – 1 to 10 clicks
- 1470 articles – 11 to 50 clicks
- 544 articles – 51 to 100 clicks
Around 86% of their articles can be considered as pages of low quality content.
Having many pages on the website with almost no traffic or clicks can be perceived as unhelpful content, which might have led to traffic loss and lower SERP visibility.
Here is the guideline from Google on helpful content to support this:
“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.” (Source)
It is clearly stated that if a website has a high amount of unhelpful content – it is less likely to perform well in the SERPs.
Unhelpful content situations can be addressed in two possible ways – (i) rewriting the content to make it helpful and (ii) deleting the content.
We recommended that the client delete all pages that received 0 clicks in the past 12 months as the first step.
Furthermore, we also suggested deleting the articles with clicks between 1 to 50, but only after reviewing them manually.
As part of our manual review, we asked them to identify any content they wanted to keep that wasn’t rank-worthy but still useful to their audience.
It was a tough decision for the client to remove so much of the website content, but it was necessary to do so.
In the end, the results were extremely positive!
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Other Issues Identified
Apart from the above-mentioned major issue, there were other issues that we had identified, such as,
- Irrelevant pages indexed on Google
- Trailing slash (/) issue
- Blocked URLs due to 403 error
- Multiple Pop-ups Affecting User Experience
- Duplicate Content
- Poor Score on Core Web Vitals
- And many more…
Monthly Consulting Calls
We did consulting calls with the client to help them implement all our recommendations and also help them improvise their content creation process.
We had suggested they start using the “Surfer SEO” tool to add entities, choose the correct keywords, and much more.
Conducting ongoing monthly consulting calls not just helped the client improve their understanding of SEO but also improved their content creation workflow.
Result – Happy Client 🙂
On implementing our recommendations and suggestions, the client’s website traffic has now been recovered.
Hurray!!!
- Initial improvements were observed in the website in September 2022, when the board core algo hit. The website traffic moved to 35K-40K per day.
- The next improvements were observed in March 2023, when another board core algo hit. The organic traffic of the website spiked up to around 50K per day.
You can see the client’s response below –
Final Thoughts
Recovering the organic traffic of a website that witnessed a major drop in their traffic was indeed a complex and challenging task, but we managed to accomplish it successfully.
Impressed, aren’t you?
We can help you recover/ uplift your website’s organic traffic too, Contact us NOW!
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