Why did my organic traffic drop?

Working on SEO and getting traffic to your website takes time. We all know that. Once you’ve got it working and traffic is coming in, you want to make sure it continues to work. Sometimes, we see situations where something suddenly seems wrong, and a website’s organic traffic drops. This often leaves business owners wondering – why did my organic traffic drop? And more importantly, what do I do to fix it ASAP? A dip in SEO traffic, whether it’s sudden or ongoing, can severely impact your business, leads, and sales.

Why does organic traffic drop?

There are a few reasons why a website's Google traffic can drop. Sometimes, it’s due to something you’ve done, and other times, it has nothing to do with your website but rather what a competitor is up to.

How do we identify what’s causing the traffic drop?

If you’ve been tracking your website’s SEO performance for a while, you should have data on your SEO keyword ranking, Google Analytics traffic reports, and maybe even Domain Authority. Let’s start by reviewing the data.

A quick note about data sources -

If you’re only tracking your website performance from the monthly report Google Search Console sends you – please switch to Google Analytics and a keyword ranking tool. They’ll provide you with more reliable data. Use Search Console to tell you about your indexation information, but don’t count on it for keyword ranking, clicks, or traffic information. As professional SEOs, we use that data sparingly – we consider it directional at best and completely wrong at worst. You’re not getting traffic from keywords that are ranking beyond position #10 – I don’t know why they bother reporting on ones that are in position 50 – no one is clicking on page 5 in the search results. And I’ve seen the click information in those reports be 10x what the site actually received. Trust Google Analytics and your SEO keyword reporting tool instead of Search Console for reporting.

Website Organic Traffic Data

If you’re tracking your SEO performance (Organic Traffic) in Google Analytics, then you should be able to see a decline soon after it begins. You want to look at your total website traffic and your organic traffic (number and percent of traffic) each month so you know if you’re going up or down. By tracking monthly, you don’t end up finding out there’s an issue 6, 12, or even 18 months later. The earlier you can identify an issue, the faster you can turn things around.  

Look to see if it’s your homepage traffic that’s down or another page or blog posts that are down. Is there anything that stands out because it’s had a big drop in traffic? Look at your top 25 pages for the past 90 days and go through them month by month. Are any of the pages down more than average? It’s possible you had a blog post or a page that was ranking higher in the search results and has dropped down – that will impact your website’s organic traffic. Is your homepage’s traffic lower than it was a few months ago?

Compare this year’s traffic to last year’s traffic in Analytics and see how you’re trending year-over-year. You also want to consider the possibility of this being a seasonal dip. What happened to your website’s traffic this time last year? Did you see a drop in traffic?

It’s possible that your organic traffic is down this month, and it was down this month last year, too, and this is nothing more than an expected seasonal drop. If you think this is the case, I recommend waiting and seeing what happens the next month if you don’t see any other potential issues in this blog post applying to your business.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

Is there more competition causing your drop in organic traffic?

Have you checked to see if the competition is doing SEO or doing better than you are? It’s possible you have a competitor who’s gotten into SEO and is doing a better job (or not doing it at all now), which means you must work a bit harder to protect your rankings and organic traffic.

How do you find out if you have a new or improved competitor to contend with? Go to Google, open an incognito browser window, search for keywords related to your business, and see who shows up at the top of the page. If there are new names you haven’t seen before, and they’re showing up for multiple keywords, then it’s likely they’ve stolen some of your traffic. If your regular competitors are there but they’re showing up more frequently, then they’re probably working on their SEO, too, and now you need to work to beat them.

When there isn’t a lot of competition in a niche, you can rank high on Google a bit easier than when things are competitive. What you did before may not work anymore, and you may have to change your strategy to compete. I’ve worked with brands in many competitive niches. We always look to see who’s there and what they’re doing for SEO and adjust our strategy accordingly. If you’re facing this situation and not sure what to do to compete, join me in Simple SEO Content. Do what you learn for your site to review their SEO, figure out what they’re doing, and then ask questions, and I’ll help you create a strategy to beat them. 

Have you made a technical change recently, or have you updated/refreshed your website? Sometimes, your traffic drop is because of a site migration. When we make big changes to websites, we often see rankings and traffic drop as Google gets to know the new site. We also sometimes see technical issues from changes that cause problems for Google. If you have a Google Search Console account, be sure to log in and check your indexation information. If Google can’t crawl your website, they’ll let you know in your account. Be sure you have an updated XML Sitemap for your site so Google knows where your URLs are located so they can easily and quickly find your content in addition to finding it by crawling your website.

How do you start to fix it when your organic traffic is down?

The first step to fixing a drop in traffic is to figure out what’s happened. Why did the traffic drop? Do you have a technical issue that needs to be fixed? Can Google crawl your website and index your content? If there’s a technical issue, then you need to get that fixed. If you’re not sure what to do or how to fix it, hire someone to help you. This is a time when it’s often best to pay for technical SEO help. I don’t manage the backend of my website myself. I manage the content and SEO, but someone else who has a better understanding of the technical / development end of things handles the backend issues for me.

If you have a new competitor in your niche causing your organic traffic to drop

If your traffic is down because of a new competitor, you’ll need to review their website and SEO to determine if you can beat them and get your rankings and traffic back. If they’re a more authoritative site than you, it may be a bit of a challenge, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

You may need to update your website's SEO. You might need to add more content, target new keywords, etc., and adjust your strategy to protect your website from losing more traffic and rankings.

You need to determine if you’ve made any SEO mistakes. Are your SEO elements all optimized following Google’s best practices? Are you targeting different keywords on each page? Have you chosen SEO keywords your website has a good chance of ranking for or are you targeting the wrong keywords?

If you’re not sure why your organic traffic has dropped and need help figuring it out

Join me in Simple SEO Content. I’ll help you figure out what’s happened and craft a strategy to regain the lost traffic. You can get your organic traffic back, but you’re going to have to work. If you ignore it, you’ll likely continue to lose traffic over time.

I have a client who has worked with me for five years now. We’ve had great results, and they have so many #1 ranking keywords for their niche in their market that they’re the business everyone else is trying to catch up to. When they came to me, that wasn’t the case. When I first looked into their Google Analytics account, I found that their SEO traffic was actually down for two years straight. Their old SEO consultant had never given them a report on their performance, and they didn’t know things were bad. They’d been paying for SEO for several years, and they weren’t getting results. I had to redo a lot of the work the old person had done incorrectly, and once we got that done, their site began to rank for keywords that were important to their business. Today, their website traffic is more than double what it was when we started working together, and SEO is their #1 traffic and lead source every month.

It's possible to recover from a traffic drop if you know what’s causing the issue and can correct it. If you want to learn how to increase organic traffic to your website, join me in Simple SEO Content, and I’ll teach you exactly what to do step-by-step.

Podcast Episode Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the Simple SEO Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I'm so glad to have you with me here today. I also want to take just a super quick moment to make sure you know that I am teaching a live SEO class this week and next Monday. I want to make sure you know so that you can save your seat. We're going to talk about why your website is not getting free traffic from Google and making more money and what you can do to fix that ASAP. You can register for that right now if you go to the homepage at etchedmarketing.com. Just click the "Take the Free Class" link right there at the top. That'll get you signed up. Choose the session that works best for you, and join me live. You will have a chance to ask your questions, so I just want to make sure you know so that you can get signed up for that.

Today's topic is a fantastic question from a new student. She was trying to understand what had happened, why her SEO had stopped working, and why her organic traffic was going down. That was actually why she joined Simple SEO Content—so she could get help figuring out what had caused the problem and, more importantly, how to turn it around and start to figure it out. So, let's jump right in.

If you've been doing SEO for a while and you've been working on it and you're trying, follow along on the podcast or watch the YouTube videos. You're working and you're trying and you're doing it, and it feels like it's working, but then it stops working or it's not really taking off the way that you thought it would, it can be super frustrating. I get that because you're putting your time and effort in, and you're not getting the results, or you're not getting the results that you were hoping for. That's really frustrating. So rather than sitting in that, having that struggle, let's figure out what's potentially causing the issue.

I'm going to give you a couple of things that you can look at today. If you're not sure or you can't figure it out on your own, you always have the option of joining me in Simple SEO Content, where I can help you, look at it with you, and help you figure out not only what's going on but, more importantly, how to correct the issue and turn things around.

If you're experiencing a drop in your organic traffic, the first thing I want you to look at is your SEO keywords in an SEO keyword reporting tool. Check if your ranking for any of those keywords has gone down. Because if you're ranking lower, meaning you have a higher number on your search ranking—so maybe you were one or two and now you're six—I would expect to see a drop in traffic to those pages that used to be in positions one or two that are now in positions like six, seven, or eight. The same thing applies if you were potentially in position five and now you're in position ten or eleven. You're going to see a drop in organic traffic simply because you're showing up lower on the page, and Google is not really showing you to as many people because they're not scrolling all the way down on the page, so they're not seeing you. So, you will often see a decrease in traffic if your keyword rankings have decreased. There's a correlation between where you rank and how much traffic you get. So that's one of the things to look at.

Now, if you don't have an SEO keyword reporting tool that you're using and you have not been tracking your keywords, it's okay. We just don't have as much data as we might like to figure out what's causing this drop in your traffic. The next thing I want you to do is go to Google Analytics. Look at your website traffic this month versus last month versus the last 90 days, maybe even year-to-date. I want you to go in and look at the different views of it to see over time how your SEO, your organic traffic, has performed. If you're seeing a decrease month over month, then I want you to go and look at maybe your top ten or top twenty-five pages. There is a chance that this drop is site-wide, but there's a better chance that this drop is tied to a couple of pages on your site. So, I want you to go in and look at your analytics and make sure you're using Google Analytics. Don't look at your Search Console report for this; just ignore it. It really doesn't tell you much. I know it seems like it tells you a lot, but the data that you actually want to use and rely upon is your keyword ranking report and your Google Analytics report. That's the data that matters.

If you're signed up for a free account with one of the ranking tools, and it sends you information and tells you you've got 6,000 keywords, and the vast majority of them are in positions 11 through 100, just ignore it because nobody's finding you in positions 11 to 100. The only ones that really matter are positions one to ten. So be very careful about where you get your data that you make your decisions on. Your data should come from your Google Analytics account and your keyword ranking reporting. That's all I want you to really use to base your decisions on. I don't even really look at the Search Console report or anything like that because I was trained to use other data that's more reliable, so I don't even open it. I may browse it for a second, but I delete it. Don't worry about what that one says; worry about what Google Analytics says.

Now, I want you to look, using an incognito browser window, if you've determined that it looks like you've dropped in keyword rankings. Use an incognito browser window and see who's ranking above you. Who's showing up? It's possible you have a new competitor, maybe somebody who has been there but hasn't been doing SEO before. Maybe they are doing SEO now and their site is viewed as a better result from Google's perspective than your site is. So now you need to look at that and determine if those pages that have dropped or those keywords that have dropped have a new competitor. Is there someone out there who's impacting me and essentially taking the traffic away from you? If there's a new competitor, then you're probably going to need to come up with a strategy and determine how to combat that. How do you go up against that new competitor? What do you need to change? Do you need to change your optimization? Do you need to change your content? Do you need to add more? Do you need to tweak something? Google is looking at every page of your website through this E-E-A-T lens—Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Google wants to make sure that they are showing the absolute best result for that keyword search query to their user, and their user is your potential visitor, your potential customer. If Google doesn't believe that you are the best result, they're going to rank someone higher than you. So, you have to work to earn Google's trust back or to earn it again. It can be harder when you have new competitors who are now doing SEO or who have always been there but now they're doing SEO and they're more authoritative than you, or Google feels that they've got better information on their site. That's going to be one of the reasons that you're not ranking as high, and you're not getting as much traffic.

So, what you really want to figure out is which pages have lost traffic. You're going to have to have a pretty good understanding of Google Analytics to be able to figure this out because you need to go in and look and see year over year, month over month. You need to look at different views to determine where you've lost traffic, which keywords have dropped, and which pages are not getting enough traffic. Then, from there, you're going to need to look at your competitors. You're going to need to look at who's ranking for those keywords, and you're going to need to craft a strategy to address those drops so that you can start ranking higher and start to recoup your traffic. It's going to take a little while, and it's going to be very dependent upon what happened in your particular competitive set with this very specific keyword or this specific keyword set. You may need to create new content, update existing content, or change things around. There's a lot that can go into creating a strategy to recoup your lost organic traffic.

If you're not sure how to do this, I want to invite you to Simple SEO Content. This is the type of thing that I help my students through. I guide them on not only how to optimize their website but also what to do when something like this happens—when you see a drop in your organic traffic. You need to be able to figure out what caused it in order to put together a strategy to fix it and get your traffic back. That's a really hard thing to figure out on a podcast episode or from a YouTube video just because there's so much that goes into it. So do yourself a favor and join me in class. Let me help you with this. I'll guide you and help you figure out how to get that organic traffic back.

If you have questions, you know what to do: DM me on Instagram. If you have questions that you would like me to address on the podcast, make sure that you're putting those on the Google form for me so that I can see them. I look at them and go through them before I do my next batch of podcast planning. So definitely ask your questions. I go through and look at them, and I address them here on the podcast.

Alright, that's it for today. Have a great week, and I'll see you here next week. Bye for now.