8 Reasons Your Shopify Store Is Losing Traffic – & How to Fix Them

Wondering why your Shopify store doesn’t drive much traffic? Click to explore the most common traffic drop reasons with actionable tips for improvement! 

When it comes to traffic, there is one simple truth to bear in mind – more traffic=more potential buyers for your store. Simply put, if you want to generate sales and grow your business, traffic is one of the core goals to focus on.

But what if you’ve been driving visitors before, and now their number is falling rapidly?

This is a disturbing sign that might mean deeper issues that hold you back from achieving success. In this guide, we’ll tell you about the most common reasons your Shopify store is losing traffic and offer practical tips on how to overcome these problems.

Shopify Organic Traffic Drop: Basics to Understand and Analyze

There are 6 primary types of traffic you must know about:

• Direct
• Organic
• Paid search
• Social
• Email
• Referral

While all these types of site traffic are valuable and can bring potential buyers to your doorstep, organic visitors tend to be the most valuable ones. Now, when the biggest share of consumers’ interactions with brands begin in search engines, search engine result pages (SERPs) remain among the biggest sources of visitors. And since you can only earn your positions in SERPs naturally, it’s also one of the cheapest sources.

In this article, we’re going to talk about a decrease in organic traffic, in particular. Since it’s earned naturally, it typically remains pretty steady for businesses that take good care of their search engine optimization (SEO). Hence, a sharp drop in it might signal some problems, and that’s what we are going to talk about.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is when visitors explore your site in unpaid search results for queries related to your brand, niche, or product/service type. This type of traffic is earned naturally through SEO best practices that help you earn higher positions in SERPs, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, link-building, and others.

The main reason why we call organic traffic one of the most valuable ones is because it comes from people actively seeking solutions to a specific problem. That is, people who find you naturally through related terms are more prepared to convert than, for example, people who accidentally click on an ad.

How Do We Measure Organic Traffic?

In order to notice a sharp organic site traffic decrease and address it immediately, Shopify store owners need to implement regular performance tracking and analytics. An easy way to do this is by leveraging specialized tools, such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console. These tools will let you see how many people arrive at your pages daily and notice any changes in their amount or behavior.

And if you want to go the extra mile, equip yourself with more comprehensive SEO solutions, for example, the traffic checker by SE Ranking. The tool will show you not only how many visitors you drive but also provide access to historical data on your organic and paid visits and competitors’ data to help you analyze your website traffic performance deeper and see if fluctuations are related to internal problems, seasonality, or other reasons.

Common Reasons Your Shopify Store is Losing Traffic & How to Fix Them

1. Google Algorithm Update

Google updates its algorithms regularly in order to refine its crawling and ranking processes and ensure that search results satisfy users’ needs even more precisely. Updates can roll out multiple times a year, and they often come along with big changes in search engines’ work. Hence, some fluctuations in traffic are natural.

To check if your performance drop is a result of Google updates, analyze your historical data and note down the dates of decrease. Then check the Google Search Status Dashboard to see if there were any updates on those dates.

How to fix it? The best way to overcome update-triggered fluctuations is to wait until Google completes the update and it gets into full swing and then see if things go back to normal or if you need to optimize some aspects of your store to match the new requirements.

2. Google Backlink Penalty

While most updates won’t affect your SEO drastically, some of them can have a devastating effect on your store, such as Google’s occasional link-specific update. This procedure targets sites that use spammy or unnatural link-building strategies. On top of that, Google may perform a manual linking spam check and penalize doubtful sites by removing them from its index.

The easiest way to check if you’ve been penalized is to go to Google Search Console and generate the manual actions report. The report will give you the details about any penalties applied to your store with suggestions for overcoming them.

How to fix it? If you were penalized for spammy links and think it’s a mistake, you can request reconsideration via Search Console. However, if you think you might have some doubtful links in your backlink profile, you will want to request third-party sites to remove them or upload a disavow file to Google to stop being associated with rules-violating URLs.

3. Poor User Experience (UX)

User experience affects multiple performance indicators that affect how both potential buyers and search engines see your store. Great UX gets visitors hooked and makes them stay in your store for a longer time, thus enhancing the likelihood of making a purchase. In the long run, good UX can result in:

• Decreased bounce rate
• Higher click-through rate
• Better engagement
• Longer dwell time

Together, these factors increase the value and credibility of your site, driving better rankings and more prospects.

To check your UX, keep an eye on your store’s bounce rate. If it gets high, your ranking will decrease, leading to a smaller number of visitors.

How to fix it? Leverage responsive design to improve UX for mobile users, ensure fast loading times, improve your navigation, and follow other eCommerce UX best practices to deliver outstanding experiences.

4. Absence of Quality & Engaging Content

High-quality content that captures the audience’s attention performs several crucial roles for Shopify SEO. First of all, it educates prospects about your products and highlights your unique selling points that can drive conversions. Also, quality content enables you to target your primary keywords and ensure higher positions in SERPs. But most importantly, your content is a chance to stand out from a huge crowd of other stores and get noticed.

Some reasons your content might not drive visitors are if you’re not posting regularly, cover irrelevant topics, don’t include visuals, or don’t update your old content.

How to fix it? Rethink your content strategy. Focus on writing for your audience and delivering actual value. Also, experiment with different content types, optimize for search engines, include appealing visuals, and make your content easily shareable.

5. Technical Mistakes

Technical optimization matters for two reasons – 1) errors hinder user experience, and 2) technical errors can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your site appropriately, which can result in lower rankings and traffic. Some errors that might explain a traffic drop include:

• Noindex tags – These bits of code are added to a website to block the indexing of certain site elements. Check if your store has these tags on any pages that need to be crawled and indexed, and remove them.
• Robots.txt files – These files are there to help you manage your crawl budget effectively and control how search engine bots behave on your pages. Making mistakes in these files can result in improper crawling and indexing and a loss of rankings.
• Canonical tags – These tags are there to prevent duplicate content and let search engines know which versions of your pages you want to be indexed.

How to fix it? Leverage Robots.txt files to control how bots crawl your online store. Be sure to use the aforementioned tags correctly to ensure optimal crawling and indexing and, respectively, improve rankings.

6. Too Many Plugins and Apps

Quite often, stores created with Shopify are large and take many third-party apps and plugins to manage them. An excess of additional resources can hinder the loading speed and cause various tech errors, leading to an overall poor shop performance and a higher bounce rate.

How to fix it? Regularly run a full revision of all plugins and apps your shop uses to detect any unnecessary tools and get rid of them. Where possible, consider switching to a multi-feature tool instead of using many smaller plugins.

7. Seasonal Changes

This might not apply to every eCommerce business, but some niches experience significant seasonality. For example, if your Shopify store specializes in Christmas products, it might naturally have a drop in visitors and sales in summer.

This kind of fluctuation requires even more careful analysis. To check if fluctuations are within the norm, leverage Google Trends to see how frequently people are looking for your type of product during a specific season and compare this data with previous years of the same period.

How to fix it? Rethink your entire business strategy and either plan your operations according to seasonality or diversify your product range with fewer seasonal goods.

8. Competitors Improvements

Strong competitors can really hinder your performance. The first position in SERPs steals most of the clicks, so if you face a competitor shop that knocks you from the top position, it can lead to a significant drop in the number of visitors.

Check this by tracking your and your competitors’ keyword rankings.

How to fix it? Overcoming a drop triggered by strong competitors is the hardest. It requires you to analyze your competitors’ strategy and audit your own store. Pay attention to any errors or gaps that you can tap into to improve your site and take higher positions in SERPs.

Summary

The number of people who land in your store is a direct reflection of your SEO and marketing efforts and their effectiveness. Not to mention that it has a direct impact on your further growth and sales.

If, after analyzing your Shopify traffic and historical data, you notice a significant drop in the number of visitors, it could be rather confusing. However, though sharp drops aren’t typical, now you know that there might be a few reasons to explain them – from algorithm updates to strong competitors.

Use the guide above to identify the reasons for your site’s underperformance and leverage our tips to overcome these challenges and propel your business.