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Get a Quote Today!How to Write a Proposal for Websites Hit by a Traffic Loss?
Here at Bough Digital, we constantly receive questions and emails from companies that have just seen a massive reduction in website visitors. They basically want me to solve the problem straight-away and obviously try to get as much free advice and data as they can, before finally deciding whether to sign-up for our services. It is always a counter balance between how much information you want to provide (as a teaser) versus giving them too much advice and providing them with the answer they can carry out in-house. So, what we tend to do here at Bough Digital is provide them with a teaser and specific hypotheses into why they might have lost some traffic.
However, first it is important to let them know that you’ve done some research into their website and know the general basics of their query. A table similar to the below should suffice:
Key Statistics:
| Key Metric | Results |
| Indexed Pages | 61 |
| Indexed Images | 67 |
| Indexed Videos | 1 |
| No. of Keywords Ranked in Top 20 (all geographic locations checked) | 25 |
| No. of External Links | 195 |
| No. of Unique Domains (external links) | 78 |
| No. of External Links (historical) | 696 |
| No. of Unique Domains (historical) | 215 |
All of the data provided in the table above can be valuable in working out why they have lost their specific rankings. However, without having access to the actual data on when, how, where, and what traffic they have lost, it is nearly impossible to provide any answers. Without this information, we provide them with a little taster of possible hypotheses. This is in order to draw their attention to some possible reasons why they have lost their traffic and to tempt them into using our services. Here, we usually earmark it with a big sub-heading of “Why the Drop in Traffic?”, so in that school of thought, here would be our casual yet informative proposal:
Why the Drop in Traffic?
Within your project brief, you state that you used to gain approximately 75,000 visits per month to the website. Having looked over the website, and having an excellent understanding of the digital marketing, I have provided some hypotheses on why the traffic may have dropped, which can be found below:
| Potential Hypothesis | Description |
| On-Page Alterations | Have there been any major development projects recently? Have you changed the source coding? Even the smallest changes to a website can have a detrimental effect to a website’s visitor figures. |
| Google Algorithm Update | There have been a large number of Google Algorithm updates over the last twelve months, and in particularly in the last 3-4 months. Your website’s loss in traffic could have been caught in one of these updates: 7-Result SERP’s, Google Panda 3.9.1 Update, Exact-Match Domain update, Google Penguin, DMCA Penalties, Page Layout Penalty? Bough Digital can carry out a full analysis on each of these updates once been provided access to your information, statistics, website date etc. |
| User-Behaviour | What is the user-behaviour on your website? Search engines are now paying closer attention to removing pages with low PPV, high bounce rates, poor social engagement etc. |
| Quality Content | As highlighted above, your website has a limited number of pages on their website. Google are looking for high-quality content in the present day. A more structured content marketing solution should be put in place. |
| Traffic Analysis | Have there been any spikes in traffic in the preceding months? Has the traffic been brand or non-brand related? There could be multiple of different aspects that Bough SEO could evaluate in the traffic analysis of your website. |
| Keyword Rankings | Has there been a loss of keyword rankings? What keywords have you lost rankings for? Are they brand related keywords? What is the search volume? Have you reduced keyword position or CTR from search engines? |
| Natural External Links | Google have made a large number of algorithm updates related to unnatural link building. Has this been problematic for your website? What is the quality of your backlinks? Where do they come from? Do you have control over these links? Are they too anchor-text heavy? |
| Loss of External Links | Based on the statistics above, your website have had a reduction in the number of external links crawled from 696 historically to 195 last month. When were these 501 external links lost? Why were they lost (domains removed, links removed)? How can we regain these external links? |
The set of factors and possibly hypotheses set out above provide a teaser to the prospective client into the potential reasons why they have lost the search engine traffic. The reason to display some of these factors shows that you have the knowledge on why the traffic has been lost, but for a full investigation they need to employ your services further. This tactic may or may not work for you or in every situation; however, we’ve had some pretty good success here at using this method.