How do i analyse vis google analytics the reason behind this? Thanks!
aristotle
2:20 pm on Oct 10, 2016 (gmt 0)
What were the percentages of your site's total traffic that came from the U.S. before and after that date?
born2run
2:28 pm on Oct 10, 2016 (gmt 0)
20% before 10% after
goodroi
2:43 pm on Oct 10, 2016 (gmt 0)
First let's make sure the numbers are significant. I know you say you lost half but dropping from 100 visits to 50 visits could be a temporary glitch or a seasonal change with consumer habits. I'm assuming we are talking a real big drop that has no explainable industry reason.
I'd start with looking at your traffic sources. Did you only lose Google traffic? Did other traffic sources also drop?
Then look at your landing page report. Identify which pages were impacted. Was it limited or sitewide?
Then check out your site change log (you have been documenting all changes you made to the site, right?) Did you change your hosting from US to Europe? Did you add some new code that overwrote geo-location tags? Did you redo the footer which swapped out your textual address with a pretty image of the address that Google can't read? Did your marketing intern buy a cool new blog spammer which now has you penalized? Did the content get rewritten to add a new language making Google think it is no longer a page for English speakers? Go over all the changes and make sure to ask everyone who has access to the website if they changed anything.
Also check out your hosting uptime report. Hopefully you have a service that regularly tests your hosting. Make sure there were no glitches. Maybe the host went down when Google tried to crawl some of your popular pages or worse your host is stupid and throttled googlebot cause it isn't a real human visitor (yeah some hosts have done stupid things like that).
I've dealt with many drops and there are countless reasons for them. Start your detective work. The good news is that many drops for fundamentally well built websites can be recovered in a relatively short-term by a smart SEO. If your site was exploiting a flaw in Google's ranking algo, don't be upset about losing traffic, be happy you exploited it while you could and move on.
Nutterum
8:24 am on Oct 11, 2016 (gmt 0)
Was about to write pretty much what Goodroi said.
I want add a very common mistake done that usually makes the traffic dip significantly for US "targeted" websites. Have you fiddled with the "International targeting" on Google Search Console? Going from US to international or vice versa can lead in sudden drops of traffic and is not recommended by any means unless you really know what you are doing. In addition if you have .com site but switched to something else like .co.uk often slashes the US traffic, then again it slashes international traffic in general.
Last but not least check your Geolocated TLD distribution of links. If some US blogs/sites stopped linking to you, the loss of referral traffic often is accompanied with loss to organic traffic.
The culprits can be many. You need to start investigating what you did in the past week, then month, then quarter and try to connect the dots with if those changes somehow can alter the traffic. For example if you have 10 presidential race articles but suddenly switched to EU politics, the lack of fresh content for the US readers and by proxy SERPs can hamper your US traffic.
