Most websites rely on a diversified basket of traffic sources to attract new visitors, sell products and generate buzz for their brands. Without this careful balance maintained, websites can suffer immensely in a variety of ways. Whether it is a death-knell for the website’s prospects or requires immensely expensive paid campaigns to stay afloat, the result isn’t pretty.

For a variety of reasons, a website may suddenly discover that a prime source of traffic -that which comes via search engines – suddenly dries up or disappears. There can be many reasons for this occurrence, ranging from obvious and justified to unexpected and unfair.

Today, let’s examine what options remain when search engine traffic for your website is no longer a viable course of action.

Target Social Media

Arguably one of the most effective strategies for traffic in the present day, social media provides brands with an unprecedented ability to reach consumers and fans. Offering both organic and paid avenues for traffic and awareness, many brands – even those with no search engine penalties or problems – are turning exclusively to sites like Facebook and Snapchat for attention and pinging users with their content.

If your brand has exceptional content or offerings that resonate with a target audience, then generating organic traffic, sales and attention is easier than ever. However, even new websites cand rum up plenty of social media traffic due to paid marketing campaigns that can be deployed within the networks themselves. Many brands are finding that paid social media campaigns generate better results than paid search campaigns, so never forget that this is an option.

Target via Email

While difficult to implement at the onset, email marketing remains a highly-popular form of marketing for those with established subscription lists. Because email marketing is effectively free and targeted at those who have demonstrated prior interest, brands love to blast out relevant campaigns to subscribers to encourage repeat traffic and business.

Even if you do not have an established subscriber list, targeting users of services like Gmail via paid ad campaigns is also possible. With virtually every internet user checking their email multiple times per day, email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective strategies in existence.

Target Search Engines (Anyway)

While you may wake up one day and realize that organic search engine traffic has dried up or ceased to be viable from your current situation, that doesn’t mean you have to completely forgo the platform.

Through a variety of paid search engine paid campaign efforts, you can still generate results and target the audiences best-suited for your message. While this strategy is obviously much more expensive than pinging users of search engines with organic content, it can be a viable alternative when organic results are no longer an option.

Since every major search engine offers marketing solutions that target search results, you can also diversify your search engine marketing and determine which platforms are best for your bottom line.

Unfortunately, one wrong move or sudden algorithm change can wreak havoc on your organic search traffic. Whether this is a temporary or permanent situation, there are ways for brands to recover. By utilizing a combination of paid and organic efforts across email, social media and even other search engines, you can recover your traffic and rebuild for the future.