Decline in Traffic

[monique-plaw]

Our company is a full service law firm with a main website and 6 microsites relevant to each practise area. Over the last 2 years, we have had significant traffic growth and ranked well in SERP, conversions were good and everything was tracking along nicely. Come January 2019, the traffic on 2 of our microsites have dropped by 20% and is not recovering. We have done a site audit and there are no issues with the website, we are still ranking #1 in SERP for our targeted search terms but the traffic just isn't there.

Has anyone else with legal websites had this issue or can provide insight into the drop in traffic? It just doesn't make sense why all of a sudden the traffic isn't there anymore. Any advice on what other actions we can take to try and find the issue would be appreciated.

[jamesdavid101]

I manage an information-based website, and recently, I've seen a decline in organic traffic for certain key articles despite consistently updating and enhancing the content. I've ensured proper on-page SEO practices, but the rankings seem to be fluctuating. Any advice or strategies specific to informational websites for identifying and addressing these ranking fluctuations and improving overall organic traffic?

[monique-plaw]

Wouldn't that mean our ranking would have been affected as well? Our ranking hasn't changed for our target search terms and keywords. I even do a keyword analysis each month to determine whether no search terms or keywords are being searched in higher volumes and that hasn't happened.

It would make sense that a competitor took our traffic if they made changes to their site, but wouldn't that also mean they would have taken our ranking in SERPs?

[jasongmcmahon]

Having looked at Moz's list of Google updates close to the date of the decline in your site's traffic - November 29 was the nearest one.

However, this doesn't explain the failure to recover the  organic traffic, which in my experience of providing SEO for law indicates one of 2 things:

1. Changes you made to your website caused the decline
2. Changes a competitor made to their site took your traffic

[monique-plaw]

The decline started in December 2018. A seasonal drop in December is expected, but it never bounced back after that like it did in previous years.  The first quarter of 2019, organic traffic has consistently been down 10-15% compared to last year. April was down 33% and this month we are down 20%.

[jasongmcmahon]

Hello,

Have you noticed when the drop started in Google Analytics? It may coincide with an algorithm update.