What to do when you see drops in organic search traffic or performance

What is organic traffic?

In a nutshell, organic search traffic refers to the amount of users or sessions that visit your website from search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to know whether organic traffic has actually dropped

It’s no big secret, organic traffic is hugely valuable. In fact, 68% of online experiences begin on a search engine and 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search. It’s therefore very important for your business to attract and retain any organic traffic that travels to your website from search engines like Google. 

Simple! But what do you do when your site traffic suddenly drops, and you’re at a loss to explain it? One thing’s for sure: it’s best to get to the bottom of it as soon as possible to prevent more ranking, conversion, and sales losses. In these instances, it’s enormously useful to have a contingency plan. That’s where this checklist comes in. Here’s a look at two different scenarios and the things you should check for when you notice a drop in your organic traffic.

SCENARIO 1 —your rankings didn’t drop but you are getting lower traffic

If you are experiencing a decrease in organic traffic, check your rankings using a tool such as Accurank to monitor your rankings over time. If you don’t see any drop in your rankings, but you are getting lower traffic, it might be caused by a sudden change in the Google algorithm or in users’ behavior and search intent. Ask yourself:

Were there any changes to SERPs?

The vast majority of Google’s updates are pretty minor changes. However, some do bring crucial changes. That’s why it’s good practice to stay abreast of developments in the SEO world, so that you can see these algorithm updates coming or you can determine what to do once they’ve been released. 

Was there a change in search intent?

As our world constantly changes, so do users’ intents and topics. This means that even if you have the most riveting content about a certain topic, the topic itself can cease to be interesting. And that means you can still rank well for certain keywords, but find that their search volume has decreased.

If a relevant search intent changes, you should evaluate your content and try to adjust it to fit the current state of events (for instance, responding to the Covid-19 pandemic).

SCENARIO 2—your rankings have dropped and you are getting lower traffic

If your chosen rank tracker shows your rankings have dropped, this means your performance has decreased overall, and it’s time to identify what might have caused it. The following factors could be deemed responsible:

Have there been changes to your website?

Changes to your website can cause both ranking drops and decreases in organic traffic due to changes in:

• URL structure 
• Content
• Page design
• Navigation
• Internal linking

If your traffic suddenly drops, check the state of your website in Google Search Console.

Is your website experiencing any technical issues?

Technical issues can cause damage and hinder your site’s visibility by limiting Google’s ability to crawl and index your content. Check if Google is reporting crawl errors in the Index Coverage report so you can react quickly and make sure Google understands your content. 

Have you migrated your website?

Some of the most threatening moments arise when you decide to redesign and migrate your website. Even if things are being improved by putting 301 redirects in place, migrations frequently lead to at least a short term drop in organic visibility and traffic, as Google re-crawls and indexes the new URLs and content. 

Education is key at this point! Some volatility should be expected during a migration and stakeholders should be made aware of this. If the migration was well-managed and redirects were in place, it’s probable that traffic will recover over time.

Have you lost links?

The quantity and quality of your links play a significant role when it comes to your website’s SEO performance. If you lose inbound links, Google will consider your website less authoritative, which will result in a decrease in rankings and in turn, organic traffic.

If you suspect a loss of links, you can use tools such as Majestic or Ahrefs, two of the biggest link counters on the web, to determine if you lost any links.

Is your content actually relevant?

It’s possible your website has stopped attracting users due to a drop in the quality and relevance of your content. Ask yourself:

• Does my content still fit the original search query intent? 
• Am I covering up-to-date topics? 
• Is there room for improvement? 
• Am I still using the most relevant keywords?

Has your competitor activity increased?

The sudden drop in organic traffic might be caused by a new competitor—or old ones who are now doing a better job at SEO than you (perhaps they’re using the topic cluster model). By delivering pages that better serve the user’s needs, your competitors will eventually start to outrank you and drag your audience away. Get a few steps ahead and set aside some time to monitor what your competitors are doing well and use this information to see where you can improve.

The end goal

Ultimately, getting organic traffic to your website will help to increase your brand awareness. Get your website in the top results for their search queries, and users will start to recognize and trust your business, improving your chances of converting them into paying customers.

If you’d like further guidance and help increasing your organic traffic, please don’t hesitate to contact us.