As we all dream of OOO emails dancing in our heads, and the new year approaches, there is someone lurking behind the scenes slowly, but surely, stealing website traffic one way or another. 

This is the Grinch plotting his four ways to steal your website traffic. 

1. How to evaluate your baseline of website traffic 

With the right understanding of website traffic, it can provide a business the ability to write new content, properly optimize keywords, understand their audience, and overall bring in new leads and qualified traffic. 

1. Make sure to implement proper software
2. Review top pages
3. Visitors
4. Referral traffic
5. Demographics 

As one can expect, the ecommerce industry can find itself with higher numbers due to the holiday season, but for those who are not in the ecommerce industry, website traffic could be changing drastically from end-of-the-year budgets needing to be spent or everyone out of the office. 

2. The wrong keywords 

The basics of SEO deal with keywords. The right keywords provide the ability to bring in more qualified website traffic with visitors who will potentially turn into new customers. On the other hand, the wrong keywords can be detrimental to the entire marketing strategy. 

The average consumer uses Google at least four times a day to find the latest products or understand more about their search queries. And with their search queries being the keyword phrases themselves, the wrong ones allow for the Grinch to steal website traffic. 

If you are an online thrift store, and consumers are coming for fast fashion, this means that the keyword strategy is off. A big mistake that companies make is let the Grinch use any and all keywords.

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! 

3. Spammy backlinks 

One of the top ways to rank, no matter the year, is with the proper backlinking strategy. 

Link building, also known as backlinking, is an imperative part of the overall SEO strategy. Since 1998, Google has stated that backlinks are one of the many contributing factors to ranking in its search engine. 

Research shows that the more backlinks a page has, the more traffic it will receive from search queries in Google. However, backlinks are not equally effective in this strategy. The backlinks that will be stealing your website traffic are known as spammy backlinks. 

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. 

4. An old outdated website 

An old, outdated website gives a negative first impression of your company to consumers, and in return, you are providing the Grinch the easiest way to steal website traffic. 

In a digital world that is all about first impressions, don’t let the Grinch take this away from you! Along with a negative first impression, Google released an update called the Core Web Vitals update in two separate parts. 

This update has over eight different criteria that need to be met to ensure that each website showing search results is providing the best user experience. This hurts first impressions with Google and potential clients as well. 

That is giving the Grinch free rein of your website traffic. 

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