In the unpredictable business landscape, experiencing a decline in sales is an inevitable challenge that most companies might face at some point. It’s crucial to approach this situation strategically and proactively with tools related to SEO.
Instead of succumbing to frustration, smart business leaders take this as an opportunity to reevaluate their strategies and implement changes that can not only reverse the decline but also set the company on a path toward sustainable growth.
Why Do Business Sales Decline?
Before thinking about what to do when sales decline, it’s essential to understand the root causes of the current situation. This requires a comprehensive evaluation of sales data, customer trends, and external factors affecting your industry.
The issues could be many. From the decline of a sudden market shift, a change in consumer behavior, or many other reasons. These are some of the most common causes of a sales strategy failing or declining over time:
Poor Customer Service or Support
One of the most common reasons a business’s sales start to decline is because they need to pay more attention to what the customers are asking for. Understanding them and being aware of their needs is vital to ensure success.
Any SEO marketing strategy or planning is only useful if the organization keeps in contact with its client’s requests. Their satisfaction and sugerences must be a priority for any business to stay on top of the market and generate revenue.
Product Offers No Unique Value
In today’s world, many e-commerce provide their services and products to people worldwide. This makes the market very competitive, and sometimes, it takes a lot of work to maintain at the top. It’s all part of competition, and learning from it is necessary to return stronger.
To set a product or service from a company apart from the others, it is necessary to create a value proposition that makes clients no doubt about its quality.
Google Algorithm Changes Could Be Affecting the Sales
Another important cause for many businesses ‘ sales going down isn’t directly caused by them but by Google. Experts estimate that the algorithm of this search engine is updated around 500 or 600 times a year.
While most of these changes are relatively small and do not have an impact, some, like BERT or Passage Ranking, significantly impact all keywords.
Agencies need to pay attention to these core changes in the algorithm to understand the factors being refined or updated. For example, last year, Page Experience officialized Core Web Vitals, page speed, and mobile devices as official ranking factors, completely changing how SEO was done.
Check if Rankings Were Impacted
There are many tools that marketing agencies can use to measure their client’s business decline based on algorithm changes. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Conductor are some of the most renowned ones that allow tracking keyword rankings.
Sometimes, specialists might notice that keywords are dropping their visibility, but this sometimes happens because updates are rolled out over an entire week. After the changes are fully live, sites tend to regain their position. In case this doesn’t happen, actions must be taken.
Determine the Impacted Factors
One of the most common challenges that SEO marketing agencies face is finding and isolating the source, causing sales setbacks. Experts must look closely at every available data to make the wisest decision possible.
With more than 200 ranking factors, Google has many options that could be causing the decline of keyword rankings. Simplifying these areas into a few core zones, such as content, authority, technicals, experience and industry, can save time and make finding it faster.
Improve the Affected Pages
While the most common impact is that some pages get more affected than others, the truth is that every page will follow a declining trend. Depending on the affected factors and algorithm, recovery might require specialists to take a wide approach or a site-by-site recovery.
Marketing agencies often make general link-building efforts to recover some of the lost ground quickly, a fundamental approach to gaining time. Refining the on-page elements is still necessary for content-focused changes, where experts must prioritize the ones with higher conversion and high search volume.
What to Do to Recover from Declining Sales?
After addressing where the sales issue is coming from, marketers must take action and start finding potential solutions to get the business back on track. These are some of the most common methods a team can employ to begin growing sales again:
Start Cutting Expenses
The most common and direct way for any business or organization to combat declining sales and negative profits is to cut expenses. It can help to find unnecessary things that don’t work and get rid of them, as well as organize and improve other areas.
Since raising prices or adding new products will not help increase sales due to lack of visibility, cutting expenses offers a short-term way out.
The important thing is to know where to cut. Many, in the desperation of the moment, cut back on SEO. This big mistake will only bring negative consequences for the company.
If your company’s sales are down, that is where you should focus your efforts to make your company visible in an organic way. Otherwise, you will lose positioning, which will be very difficult to recover when you want to work on it again.
Gather Customer Feedback and Take Action
Customers are often another source of information about what’s working and what’s not. Reaching out to them through surveys, feedback forms, or direct conversations to gather insights is very important.
This feedback can shed light on a product or service needing improvement. Marketing agency specialists can also help you address customer concerns to demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction and identify specific areas to focus on.
Explore New Markets with SEO
Relying heavily on a market can leave a business vulnerable to fluctuations. To change this, hiring a marketing agency to conduct thorough market research to pinpoint potential markets is vital. Agencies search based on demographics, preferences, and needs, gaining a deep understanding of what’s needed.
Keyword research is a foundational step that every expert must take to start exploring new areas. This is done to identify relevant keywords and phrases that a new audience will likely use. Keyword tools gauge search volume and competition for these words, helping to optimize content effectively.
Localization is also crucial. High-quality content that resonates with the new audience is a must. Specialists need to translate or adapt your existing content to match the language and culture of the new market. This ensures that the message is clear and relatable to the new customers.
Employing multilingual SEO can also be of immense help. Hreflang tags can indicate language and regional targeting to search engines. Depending on the situation, experts can use country-specific domain extensions (ccTLDs), subdirectories, or subdomains to indicate your business targeting clearly.
Evaluate Your Competitors
A competitive analysis of competitors made by specialists from Kala can help to understand your company’s challenges, issues, and strengths and why sales are declining. This leads to new opportunities and knowing what is necessary to acquire new potential customers.
Considering the competition between each market is important. Regional, national, and international levels have their characteristics and challenges. Also, competitors are divided into three other groups:
- Direct: These companies are very similar to your own. Their products or services are the same or vary only a little.
- Indirect: While their products or services are from another market, these companies could provide specific relief to the potential customers interested in your favor.
- Future: It refers to those companies that could expand their services and start competing with your company.
Planning and addressing these types of companies is of high importance not only to start gaining visibility again but also because it can alert of unknown competitors.
Rate and Address Customer Loyalty
While measuring customer satisfaction only helps a little to know if a customer will keep buying from a company, some factors can be taken from it to see if they’re potentially loyal.
Doing a complete survey is the best way to acknowledge this situation. Rating their recent purchases, their frequency and the amount of money spent can provide vital information to know where to focus and start working on declining sales.
These surveys can be done in many ways, such as a formal customer survey, informal feedback, or simply as a purchase analysis. Doing this regularly can help marketers evaluate how well your revenue is improving or declining and its profitability.
Conclusion
There are many things to do when sales decline. It is challenging, but approaching the situation with a strategic mindset and implementing strategies allows one to navigate through the downturn and emerge stronger than before.
Remember that every challenge presents an opportunity, and a well-executed recovery plan can lead to restored sales, increased resilience, and a more robust business overall.
In addition, hiring some of our experts from Kala can be a very beneficial boost not only to revert this situation but to boost visibility and reputation. Our team is competent to carry strategies that will ensure the complete growth of your company in the desired market.
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