Unlocking Organic Traffic: What It Is and What Might Be Affecting It

As a private practice owner, you hope that your website is being found organically by potential clients. You want these potential clients to find you through organic search. As it shows that your website is helpful for users. But what happens when your organic traffic begins to drop and how can you fix it? Read on to learn what organic traffic is and what might be causing the drop. 

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is important for private practices. Especially when it comes to relying on finding potential clients. Organic traffic typically is known as the visitors that come to a website through natural search engine results. These are from unpaid visitors specifically searching for the keywords they’ve put in. It is the opposite of paid traffic. Which attracts visitors through advertising or sponsored placements. Organic traffic is highly driven by search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Your website’s content, structure, and other factors are optimized to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results.

When you notice your organic traffic stop, either gradually, or suddenly, it can be from multiple factors. In this blog, you’ll learn the many factors that can be affecting your website’s organic traffic and how you can begin addressing those issues.

Potential Causes of Declining Organic Traffic

When it comes to declining organic traffic, there can be many reasons involved. Things like technical errors, algorithm updates, or a decline in website content quality can easily affect the traffic coming to your website. When this happens it’s helpful to take a look at all of the factors to help eliminate what might be the problem.

Identifying Any Technical Issues

Slow Page Speed

The first thing you will want to explore when organic traffic begins to decrease is whether or not there are any technical issues. It’s important to inspect any technical issues that may be affecting your websites and fix them as soon as possible. One technical issue could be slow page speed. Slow page speed refers to how slowly your website may load when a user visits. When a page is slow a user will more than likely jump back off the site and find another page in the search results. 

Broken Links

Another technical issue there are broken links. When you insert links into your content for users to utilize but they end up not working the user will become frustrated and leave your website. Broken links can also affect your website’s crawling and indexing capabilities. When search engines notice these broken links on your site they may keep your website from ranking higher as they want any technical errors to be addressed so users will have a great experience.

Missing Meta Tags

Another important thing to note is ensuring that every page on your website has meta titles and descriptions. Meta tags are important as they help users and search engines understand more about your page and what it’s about. These meta tags should always be unique and specific to each page letting the user visiting your site know what the page is about.

Unfriendly Mobile Design

Most users are using their phones to access most websites. When optimizing your pages you should take care to make sure you are optimizing for mobile users as well. Websites can look drastically different on mobile devices compared to desktop versions. With poor mobile optimization, your website might not have improved rankings or might provide a poor user experience.

Algorithm Updates

Another reason for a decline in organic traffic may be due to an algorithm update. An algorithm update may alter the way search engines evaluate and rank websites. The update may introduce new ranking factors or place more emphasis on existing ones, making previously optimized websites less relevant or authoritative in the eyes of the search engine. This can result in lower search result rankings and reduced visibility, leading to a decline in organic traffic. Algorithm updates may also penalize websites that employ spammy or unethical practices, further diminishing their visibility and traffic.

Content Quality and Relevance

When adding content to your website you will also want to make sure that the content is relevant to what users are searching for as well as creating quality content. Relevant and quality content plays an important role in organic traffic. Search engines often prioritize delivering the most valuable and relevant content to users that is easy to read. By creating content that addresses the needs, interests, and search queries of your ideal client, you increase the likelihood of appearing in relevant search results.

Engaging, informative, and well-structured content not only attracts and retains visitors but also encourages them to share and link to your content, enhancing its visibility and authority. Over time, this can lead to increased organic traffic as search engines recognize the value and relevance of your content, resulting in higher rankings and improved visibility in search results. Ultimately, creating relevant and quality content helps establish your website as a reliable and trusted resource, driving organic traffic and fostering long-term audience engagement.

Increased Competition

Increased competition can have a significant impact on organic traffic to someone’s website. As a private practice, you may be facing competitors for certain services if you are in a large city or highly competitive state such as Florida or California. When more websites vie for attention within the mental health field, such as anxiety therapy, the online landscape becomes crowded, making it harder for any single website to stand out.

With more competitors targeting similar keywords and topics, search engine rankings become more competitive, resulting in reduced visibility and lower organic traffic for individual websites. The increased competition also leads to the need for more strategic and aggressive SEO efforts, content creation, and marketing campaigns to maintain or improve organic traffic levels. Websites must continually adapt and optimize their content and online presence to stay relevant and attract the attention of search engines and users in a highly competitive environment.

Changes in User Behavior

Another important aspect of organic traffic is user behavior. User behavior is how individuals interact with search engines, consume content, and engage with websites. If there is a shift in user preferences or habits, it can significantly influence the organic traffic a website receives.

For example, what happens if users in Little Rock, AR favor mobile device searches over computer searches for things like “anxiety therapy in Little Rock, AR”?  Then the website they click on is not optimized for mobile devices. That website might have fewer visitors. It’s important to stay on top of the ever-changing user behaviors. As it can help keep organic traffic flowing to your private practice website.

How to Stay on Top of Organic Traffic Declines

As a private practice website, you should now understand what organic traffic is and what potential causes are that may harm the flow of organic traffic. But what are some possible ways you can fix or lessen these issues? Maintaining organic traffic and modifying potential causes such as technical issues, algorithm updates, content quality and relevance, changes in user behavior, and increased competition requires a comprehensive approach.

What to Maintain Organic Traffic

It’s important to regularly monitor your private practice website’s performance and addressing any technical issues or errors is essential. You should always be sure you are conducting regular site audits, optimizing your site speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness. These can help maintain optimal user experience and help you maintain your standing in search engine results. Keeping up-to-date with algorithm updates and adapting SEO strategies accordingly is also crucial to stay relevant in search results.

Also, be sure to continuously evaluate and improve content quality and relevance. You can do so by conducting keyword research, producing valuable and engaging content, and addressing user needs. As these can help attract and keep organic traffic. Be sure to remain attentive to changes in user behavior. Such as preferences for voice search or new content formats, and incorporating them into content and marketing strategies can help adapt to evolving user trends. Finally, staying aware of the competitors, conducting competitor analysis, and differentiating oneself through unique branding and marketing efforts can help the impact of increased competition and retain organic traffic.

Organic traffic is important when it comes to ideal clients finding your website. By understanding what issues may arise you can be better prepared for a decline in organic traffic. As well as use the strategies in place to best manage a decline. So, do you struggle with maintaining SEO? If you have trouble getting users to find your website organically, then Simplified SEO Consulting can help!

Book Your SEO Consultation With Simplified SEO Consulting

Looking to improve your rankings and have your ideal clients find you organically? Our team at Simplified SEO Consulting wants to help you learn the process of SEO and ensure that you can help your website begin ranking and finding your ideal clients through organic traffic. With our guidance and support, you will have the right clients calling your practice to get started with your services. To start your SEO journey with our Simplified team follow these three simple steps:

1. Book your SEO consultation
2. Meet with one of our Skilled SEO Specialists
3. Begin seeing improvement in your organic traffic!

Other Services Offered With Simplified SEO Consulting

Are you interested in working with our team to help you with your website’s SEO? To help you get your optimize ranking in the search engine results and find your ideal client, we offer support in both our Done For You SEO Services and DIY Online SEO Courses. Simplified SEO Consulting also offers a 12-week Done With You Intensive Program. Check out our blog for more helpful tips and guides to SEO!

About The Author

Brianna is an SEO Specialist at Simplified SEO Consulting, where she enjoys optimizing client websites and interacting with them to help achieve their private practice SEO goals. She has a passion for inspiring clients to learn about their own SEO and takes pride in helping them understand how the SEO process works. Brianna’s top priority is to ensure that Simplified clients not only enjoy their SEO journey but also feel empowered to work on their websites themselves and begin seeing their rankings boost!

Looking for extra support? Schedule a consult with the consulting team to see who can help you and how.