Why is my e-shop traffic suddenly decreasing?

[Kikidi]

Hello!

I have my eshop in Shopify since September 2020, so it's not very new.

I noticed (in google analytics) a sudden decrease in traffic on April 17th and continues to this day. I feel helpless cause I don't know what's causing it.

A few days ago, end of April, I made some adjustments to image size to decrease page size and also took off some elements from the homepage. I am trying to get a better grade on Page Speed Insights, and do I have. I started 73 (Desktop) & 33 (Mobile) and now the site has 92 (Desktop) & 54 (Mobile)

So I can't think of what causes this decrease in traffic.

I am running Facebook ads the same way as I did before.

Here are some stats - date: 17th April to 7th April compared with the previous period

google / organic -  % Change -70.58%

social / traffic  - % Change -88.04%

direct -% Change -28.67% (even direct traffic dropped)

Here is my site - https://amamelis.eu/

Am I missing something here, please some help will be greatly appreciated. 

thanks

[DigitalArtisans]

Hello @Kikidi !

Its seem your Facebook ads are running perfectly.

You need to improve your on-page seo and off-page SEO.

The reason of decrease in traffic might be due to another website with a better SEO has taken your place. So my advice would be to work on and improve your SEO to increase organic traffic again.

Thanks,

Digital Artisans

[KieranR]

So there are a number of things, speaking from an organic search pov. This is the kind of process I typically go down to diagnose a decrease in traffic like you are describing.

• Validate the data first (is this a measurement error or an actual change)
  • Compare Google Analytics vs Shopify Analytics traffic
  • Compare Google Analytics vs Google Search Console traffic
  • Compare any other sources of data you have to verify the change
  • Is this actually a drop, have you done the dates around the wrong way and you're actually looking at +ve growth? 
  • etc...
• Is the drop actual or incorrect?
  • If data is bad - stop freaking out, just fix the GA data collection
  • If actual - investigate further
• Is the drop in traffic related to a drop in conversions? 
  • If the drop in traffic has happened, but you're not seeing any drop in sales then this might not be a problem in itself, but worth understanding all the same.
  • If the drop in traffic is related to (or possibly causing) a drop in conversions then this is much more problematic.
• What segment of the site has seen a decrease in traffic? eg: 
  • product pages
  • collection pages
  • home page
  • page pages
  • blog pages
• Which individual URLs on the site have seen the greatest drops in organic traffic? List them out. 
• Check for changes in organic visibility
  • you can use GSC to identify changes in impressions and average rank
  • you can use 3rd party rank tracking tools (if previously setup) to see if you've dropped any page 1 to page 2 keywords
  • put any visibility changes in context of search volumes per keyword
• THEN: looking for causes
  • Was there anything technical that changed on your site?
    Intentional, untentional, known, unknown or otherwise
    Pay special attention to the affected pages and segments
    
    • You can use GSC error history to get partial picture here. 
    • If you have any previous site crawls, can you compare any changes? 
    • If you're running crawl monitoring on Ahrefs, SEMrush or ContentKing were there any increases in errors being reported?
    • Was there any changes to title/meta descriptions?
    • Was there any changes to indexability or canonicalization?
    • Any Schema or JSON-LD changes?
    • etc... much more to look at here
  • Was there any on-page content that changed on your site? 
    Intentional, untentional, known, unknown or otherwise
    Pay special attention to the affected pages and segments
    • H1 heading changes, additions or removals
    • HTML structure/content change
  • Off site changes? 
    • Were there any changes to backlink profiles near the change period? 
    • Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, SEMrush, GSC may be able to fill in some of the blanks here.
  • Any new warnings in Google Search Console?
  • Behavior and trends - is your website/business/niche likely to be impacted by any large external forces affecting search volumes or brand reputation? 
    • The weather (eg selling heaters and there's a cold snap, then the next week is warm causing a "traffic drop")
    • Election cycles
    • Consumer buying trends
    • Covid / lockdowns
    • Offline marketing activity (your own or other brands) 
    • IRL events (like music concerts)
    • Other seasonality patterns

[Kikidi]

Thank you Kieran for your thorough reply! It helped

[Gil-Momo]

Hi Kikidi,

I am experiencing a similar situation as you. Did you manage to figure out the issue and improve it at the end?