Maintaining Website Traffic

When growing organic website traffic, older web pages will drop in the SERPs with every new page published.

It can seem like a losing battle since you have a content calendar with new ideas.

Getting the traffic is hard but keeping the traffic challenging too.

A few reasons for old content dropping in the SERPs over time includes:

• New content created by competitors
• Changes in search engine algorithms

So if you’re struggling to move your website forward because of traffic leaking.

In this blog post we will learn how to find this traffic loss and prevent it from happening.

Let’s dive right in.

Traffic Growth Problems

Blogs grow organic traffic in two ways:

• Publish new content that’s targets new keywords your not ranking for yet
• Update old content that’s losing the most traffic and leads

Update old content and use SEO tactics to better target certain keywords.

But the problem with this strategy is that as your website’s traffic grows it becomes difficult to:

• Track each webpage
• Pick the right webpage to update

A better way is to find the blog posts that will potentially lose organic traffic and update them to stabilise website traffic.

Restoring Traffic or Maintaining Traffic

When one of your webpages loses traffic, it’s easy to see by looking at the performance.

But you don’t know where you’re losing traffic until it’s already happened.

And from the loss of traffic to recovery, you also end up losing out on:

• Leads
• Demos
• Free users
• Subscribers

Even after traffic has been restored, you’ve missed out on potential sales.

So it’s better to find web pages with the potential to lose traffic and help maintain or increase the page’s traffic.

Predicting Drops in Traffic

You need SEO data to see traffic that could potentially decline for particular blog posts.

Websites get organic traffic from:

• Ranking for keyword with a lot of searches per month
• Ranking on the first page of the SERPs for that keyword

So if a blog post stops ranking on the first page of Google for a high-volume keyword, it loses its traffic.

So basically, a website’s traffic is based on:

• Keywords
• Keyword search volume
• Ranking position
• Organic traffic

So less organic page views causes blog posts to lose their position for keywords on the SERPs.

So it’s better to spot drops in rankings before they leave the first page of the SERPs and help these webpages maintain their traffic before they lose it.

Also ideally, accomplish this on multiple blog posts as a time automatically.

Finding Blog Posts That Will Potentially Lose Traffic

This method works in three parts:

• Getting the keyword data
• Cleaning the data
• Data conclusions to better optimise content

Getting Keyword Data

Find your website’s keyword research data, that includes:

• All of the keywords your website ranks for
• All the data linked to those keywords

The keyword research data that will be valuable to you will include:

• Your current search engine rankings
• Past search engine rankings
• The monthly search volume for those keywords
• The value keyword difficulty of those keywords

Then pull all the top keywords that drive traffic to your website and this is something you can do once every quarter.

All this raw data is useless on its own, until you clean and format it to make it useful.

Cleaning the Data

Now it’s time for data cleaning to make it more understandable.

So when taking your data over to Google Sheets or excel, clean and format it.

This can be done by subtracting the current ranking from the previous ranking to get the difference.

For example, if the previous ranking was 4 and now the ranking is 9, the difference is -5.

Then filter the results to only show the keywords with a negative ranking difference.

So only the keywords that have lost rankings will show, not the keywords that have gained or stayed the same.

Now you are left with cleaned and filtered data on Google Sheets or Excel.

Data Conclusions to Better Optimise Content

Your input columns will include:

• Keyword
• Current position
• Previous position
• The difference in position
• The monthly search volume

And the last column will be the “Status column” which will you should input the following formula in the relevant cells:

• =IF(AND(B2<11,B2>7,D2<0,D2>5), “AT RISK”, IF(AND(B2<11,B2>7,D2<0), “VOLATILE”, “ “))

The results of the formula in the “Status Column” will be one of the following:

• “AT RISK”
• “VOLATILE”
• Blank (no value)

Blank outputs or rows with no value, are URLs that haven’t lost rankings or are on the second page of Google so ignore them.

“Volatile” are pages that have lost rankings but aren’t old-enough to take action yet.

Because new web pages change rankings as they get older then will get “topic authority” to maintain their rankings.

So it’s better to flag these blog posts and watch them as they are getting old and gaining authority.

“At Risk” are blog posts that:

• Were published more than six months ago
• Dropped in ranking
• Are ranking between positions 8 and 10 for a high-volume keyword

These are classed as failing content and in less than 3 positions will go from the first page to the second.

Conclusion

Remember, you can’t save all blog posts from falling traffic right on time.

For example, some blog posts will fall off the first page of Google after an update then return to a higher position later.

Because you can’t control when and how often Google recrawls and re-rank a web page.

You can always re-submit URLs to Google and to be recrawled but that’s only worth it for important or time-sensitive content.

But your goal is to prevent content from underperforming or reducing the time its underperforms for.

So use what you’ve learnt in this blog post to save time trying to find out why your website’s lost traffic.

Because you’ll never know the loses your webpages makes when it comes to:

• Page views
• Leads
• Signups
• Subscriptions