Online Store in trouble - What can I check?

[BobGW]

Hello,

One of our online stores has half the traffic that it did a month ago. What can I check and what can I do to troubleshoot? I can't list the domain here, but what would you suggest? Could RankBrain be the problem?

So far I've

Checked the functionality of the site including the checkout functionality

Checked rankings for main terms, they seem to be holding

Checked competitors, there's some sales but I don't see that cutting us off this much.

Added content continuously for the past 2 months - quality, targeted, helpful

Updated the home page text to be more helpful recently

Checked for structural changes that would effect backlinks - found none.

Analyzed Google Analytics, still looking deeper.

What would you suggest as further troubleshooting?

[erickcalderon]

Hey Bob,

I'm sorry for your loss. I would start by taking a look at your past months traffic reports. Check your google analytics and webmaster tools/search console to see where the traffic was coming from the past 3 months pervious to this one. You are looking for traffic from keywords in organic search, but also for traffic from refers like Facebook or other social networks or sites. Compare the average of the previous 3 months to the current month to see where you are losing traffic from. In search console -> search analytics, you can turn on all the values: Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Avg. Position and then download that for each of the ways you can check: Queries, Pages, Countries, devices, search types. Get them all for the custom date ranges. Then compare the data, you should be able to see when you lost a bunch of traffic, and you may be able to see where you lost that traffic from, keyword positions you have lost, or channels that are not sending you as much traffic anymore.

In Google Analytics, do the same kind of investigation to cross check with your info from search console. Pay close attention in GA to traffic sources, and time on site, bounce rate... If you lost some traffic from specific sources see how you can repair that. If your time on site went down, maybe your latests posts are not engaging, if your bounce rate is now super higher, what dod you change on the landing pages that has caused that...

If you can identify where the loss in traffic came from by using the data from these 2 tools, you maybe able to identify why you lost that traffic. Example if you lost search position for your best keywords, go fix that. If you lost traffic from lack of engagement from specific social channel, go fix that or find a new social channel.

Lastly, if you happened to take part in some link building in a certain time frame and lost traffic then, fix that.

Hope that helps. Hit me up if you need any help.