Have you been seeing your website traffic steadily decrease over the past several months to a year?
Are you also a bit confused, because your keyword rankings have been holding steady, or even improving?
You probably think that you’re just losing traffic to your competitors, and are trying to find ways to beat them to the top of the SERP (search engine results page). Well, guess what? It’s not your competitor that’s stealing your website traffic. It’s Google!
Did you know that over 50% of searches on Google lead to NO CLICKS on a website? Let me say that again. Over half of the searches done on Google DO NOT lead to a click onto someone’s website.
Image courtesy of Sparktoro
Why? Why on Earth would Google steal my traffic?
It’s because Google has been making continuous updates to their systems to keep users on Google – to make a purchase, answer a question, book a hotel, compare TV’s, you name it, Google’s creating an algorithm for it. Since they’re already crushing their competition in terms of the market share of searches, what more can they go after? Well, they can go after the revenue that you and I would be getting if people ACTUALLY visited our websites! Pretty terrible, eh?
This very thorough article on the topic of Google stealing traffic explains what I have been telling my clients for about a year now – I hate rich snippets (look at that SERP!). I hate AMP. I hate anything that Google is doing to steal traffic from my clients, and it is just getting worse.
So, what do we do about it? How do we get our traffic back?
We stop using Google! Yeah, right. I don’t see that happening, do you? Actually, this article does a very good job of explaining what to do. If you don’t know what the heck they’re talking about, give us a call. This is the stuff we like to figure out. Yes, you heard me. We think it’s fun. Oh, and we’re darn good at it.