The Grinch is a mean one (until he learns the value of Christmas time), and this is why he is stealing your website traffic! While your company has holiday parties, events, and gets ready for OOO messages and emails, the Grinch is behind the scenes slowly stealing website traffic! 

Here are four ways that the Grinch is stealing your website traffic this year. 

1. Understanding your baseline

How will you know the Grinch stole your site traffic or the Whoville family left you a present without understanding your baseline? This begins with reviewing reporting and analytics from past seasons and months. 

It can be expected that during the holiday months, ecommerce and other retail shops can find their website traffic up due to the demand for their products. However, if you aren’t in the retail or online retail industry, it’s important to continue to have a baseline in traffic. 

If you find the Grinch stealing your website traffic, go back to reports! Review all analytics, current campaigns, and any other marketing strategies to help boost or level out declining traffic. 

2. The wrong keywords 

One of the top strategies for the SEO industry is to optimize content with the right keywords. If the Grinch was to place the right keywords on a website, it would bring qualified organic traffic that SEO is searching for; however, with the wrong keywords, this can bring down website traffic. 

One by one, just like switching the letters in the mailroom, the Grinch uses the wrong keywords to bring in traffic, but not qualified. And over time, this traffic will decrease based on the patterns Google will notice! 

The Grinch forgets about keyword research based on your company’s target audience, and instead adds higher volume and only somewhat relevant ones! 

As a mortgage broker, if potential clients and leads are calling in regards to purchasing a home, the keywords are off. 

3. Spammy backlinks 

Link building, also known as backlinking, is an imperative part of the overall SEO strategy. Since 1998, Google has stated that backlinks are one of the many contributing factors to ranking in its search engine. 

Research shows that the more backlinks a page has, the more traffic it will receive from search queries in Google. However, backlinks are not equally effective in the strategy. The backlinks that will be stealing your website traffic are known as spammy backlinks. 

The more spammy backlinks that the Grinch has inbound to your website, the more traffic will be affected! Now, websites could start to rise, but once these links are disavowed or dropped off, website traffic will dramatically decrease. 

The wrong traffic will decrease and hurt website traffic no matter what. 

How can this happen? It happens when spam websites or low-quality websites link back to your company’s website pages or blog content, and in return, these backlinks are slowly added more and more. 

While you can’t do anything about it at first, you can disavow them once you realize this is happening. 

This is a way that website traffic can be stolen in its own way because the website traffic can be misleading or not the right audience. 

On the other hand, if your company has hired an SEO agency that has left you questioning their strategies a time or two, this could be the start of low-quality backlinks that are being implemented by the thousands to quickly rank the site. 

A dramatic uptick in website traffic could indicate that there are some of these practices going on, but that is not always the case. This is why you should review site traffic or review organic keywords and search in any marketing tools as often as possible. 

4. An old outdated website 

A website’s lifespan is about three years in the digital industry. Not only does the company website appear to be old, but depending on the CMS in place, it can be prone to security breaches. 

This is giving the Grinch the best opportunity to ruin the Christmas and New Year’s celebrations in Whoville. 

Not only does an outdated template or website pose the ability for security breaches, but Google’s latest update can work with the Grinch. 

The Core Web Vitals update started around November 2020 which released the new page experience signals, but in 2021, the update launched in two parts, which released a number of different requirements. 

Not only because of security but also because of this update, this can hurt the website’s entire ranking and traffic! 

The Grinch is a mean one, but there are ways to avoid his ways! For more information on how to avoid this, contact us today!