While companies, marketers, management, and staff are dreaming of a white Christmas with a big celebration this New Year, the Grinch has been working behind the scenes to try to steal this joy! If you have noticed a decline in traffic, it could be because of him! 

As the song says, “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.” 

We picture the Grinch smiling like this as he steals your website traffic this year! Here are the top four ways that he is slowly, but surely, stealing website traffic to ruin the holly jolly season! 

1. What is your baseline? 

How will you know if the Grinch stole your site traffic or the Whoville family left you a present without understanding your baseline? 

Using analytic tools and data is key to understanding the customer’s behavior patterns, improving conversions, and showing when there is a consistent decline in traffic. 

There are six important metrics you should be keeping a watchful eye on! 

• Number of visitors
• Traffic sources
• Top performing pages
• Device search
• Target audience
• Goal/conversion drop-offs

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. 

Based on research in 2020, November and December showed the highest sessions before purchasing in the ecommerce industry with total online sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday anywhere between $455 million to $971 million. 

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 analytical software and 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 most basic elements of SEO is keyword research and optimization. This content should be written for each stage of the customer journey, and for the right customers. It isn’t enough to put keywords on a website and let it go, they could be the wrong keywords. 

If the Grinch was to place the right keywords on a website, it would bring qualified organic traffic, but 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! 

What about any backlinking strategies tied to these keywords? 

3. Spammy backlinks 

Low-quality links, also known as spammy backlinks, are links that are referring back to your website that are low-quality. While having more backlinks is important to the overall strategy, having too many spammy links hurts your company’s website, 

It is better to have 1K quality links versus 10K spammy links. 

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. 

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. 

4. An old outdated website 

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. 

One of these requirements that is important is a proper user experience. A positive user experience is what Google is all about in their search engine, and providing the wrong one could be hurting your ranking. This is giving the Grinch all of the power to hurt your website traffic! 

How else could he be stealing website traffic? Here are 16 ways. 

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