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?

[EvolvingText]

Hi Kikidi, I feel your pain we have been experiencing the same issue.

[Imogen]

Hi there, @EvolvingText! Thanks for taking the time to follow up on this older thread! If you haven't had the chance already, I recommend checking the really great reply that @KieranR provided to the original poster! It's got some great insights on how you can funnel through your SEO and determine areas for improvement!

There can be a number of reasons for why traffic for your store has decreased. What sort of marketing having you been doing for your business? Have you made any changes recently to your marketing strategies?