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Website sessions are down | The Strategist Playbook Ep01

"My website traffic is decreasing. What can I do about it?"

In the first-ever episode of The Strategist Playbook, Digital 22's three wise men, Josh, Sam and Lee, discuss one of the most common digital marketing problems. In the interim, we also give mention to our favourite tools โ€” backlinks from them pending โ€” and throw a few of our own shameless plugs into the mix.  

(Seriously, watch Sam talk about everything topic clusters). 

 

Before we dive into diagnosing declining traffic, we discuss if website traffic is all that important. Or is it indeed just a vanity metric? ๐Ÿ’…๐Ÿป 

After all, whether traffic is converting (no matter how much of it you have) is what's most impactful. Even so, our strategists strategise this age-old problem, focusing on the most panic-inducing traffic source: organic

Interested in hearing what the guys had to say? Hit the play button above to watch episode one of The Strategist Playbook.

 

How to diagnose declining traffic

Without realising their wisdom, the group pull out three I's to explain their initial approach to this problem. 

  • Investigate - Look into the 'problem' and identify if you're attracting a smaller pool of more relevant traffic or if the decline is something to worry about. Compare against your conversion rate
  • Isolate - Use Google Analytics, HubSpot and other relevant tools to break down traffic by their sources, considering social, organic and paid. Figure out which source is suffering and work towards an action plan 
  • Intel - Use your marketing knowledge to account for interrupted traffic. Could a Google update or a drop in high-value keywords be the cause? 

What to do according to the traffic source

PPC? Do more PPC or start it as a tactic to generate some short-term traffic

Social? Do more social, be consistent with your posts and make linking back to your website a best practice

Organic? A trickier scenario, you'll need to fix any technical issues relating to crawlability, site design and mobile responsiveness before moving on to optimisation. You can optimise service and product pages yet it's also worth conducting a blog audit, looking at ways to 10X your content compared to top-ranking pieces. 

On-the-move but want to tune in? Check out the full episode using the SoundCloud player below.

 

Other things to consider

True to a strategist's role, we talk about other elements of marketing that weave into the overall plan. 

Top tip: If in doubt, use video. Video in blogs helps with optimisation, making information more engaging and likely to hold onto users for longer. It also goes down a treat with ranking in search engines like Google.  

When looking at traffic, our strategists keep a close eye on domain authority (using Moz) as well as a website's backlink profile. 

 

Hungry for more wisdom? 

Join the strategists in the second episode of The Strategist Playbook to learn all you need to know about leads by heading to our YouTube. There you'll find a library of digital marketing podcasts to take you from strategy to individual disciplines. Enjoy!