18 Sep Organic Traffic Drops: How to Fix It?
When your organic traffic drops, you probably know how frustrating it is as a website owner or marketer.
A question such as “Why has my organic traffic suddenly dropped? ” One of the most common questions we receive on our live chat is “What’s going on?”.
With Google constantly releasing algorithm updates, it’s no surprise that more and more people ask this question over time.
Usually, when website owners become panicked, they take the wrong advice, which further accelerates the dip and makes the situation harder to resolve. You are definitely not alone if you have a panic attack if your traffic suddenly drops; however, a team can help you regain control.
In order to avoid further risks to your business, however, you must address the issue timely.
The SEO community is grappling with this issue, so I’ll help you diagnose and remedy sudden organic traffic dips.
It’s time to get started.
Sudden traffic drops: Causes and effects
Finding out what triggers an issue is the key to fixing it, right? Traffic drops can also occur suddenly.
So, here are some of the most common reasons websites lose traffic abruptly.
1. Updating Google’s algorithm
As a way to provide users with a better search experience, Google regularly updates its algorithm.
A new algorithm update can cause fluctuations in the traffic rate of your website.
Why, then?
Resulting from algorithms updates, websites that don’t comply with its standards will see a drastic drop in traffic.
No webmaster can be 100% certain what a particular algorithmic update will bring to their website, so every site becomes either a beneficiary or a loser in this game.
What happens when your website’s algorithm changes? There is no guarantee.
It is not the case that all Google algorithm updates have a considerable impact. Although minor updates don’t have much impact (approximately 600 are released each year), major updates often lead to an upward spiral of traffic and rankings that causes you to fall from the ivory tower, especially if your site does not meet Google’s standards.
Stay up-to-date on SEO industry trends and developments, especially those that pertain to your niche, in order to survive Google’s algorithm changes.
Here’s how to think about it: Take the case of a website that reviews products. The Product Reviews updates on Google will affect websites with reviews more strongly than other updates.
The most important thing is to create content that adds value to your target audience, since these algorithm changes are meant to provide better user experiences.
2. Penalties and manual actions
When sites use black hat tactics to boost search rankings, Google Search Essentials takes manual action and imposes penalties (known as the Google Guidelines).
Your website traffic can drop dramatically overnight because of these Google penalties and manual actions.
Google may completely remove your website from its index in the worst case scenario. In other words, it won’t appear in Google SERPs since it won’t be ranked by Google.
In the Google Search Console, you will be notified if your website has been hit by a manual action.
Using the ‘Request Review’ option on Google’s website, you can submit your corrected post for reconsideration.
3. Problems related to technology
The grave mistake of ignoring technical SEO issues on your website is to ignore them. Technical bugs can cause your site to lose organic traffic if they go unnoticed or unattended on a regular basis.
There are a number of technical barriers, including slow or slow-performing websites, 404 errors, slow server response time, broken backlinks, issues with mobile usability, and site maps and indexing difficulties.
As a result, your site’s bounce rate is higher as a result of these issues. A poor user experience won’t be rewarded by Google.
All these factors combined can dramatically hurt your organic traffic if you have technical issues on your site. The problem should be fixed as soon as possible by checking your site periodically for technical problems.
4. Incorporating or changing content on the site
Is there any new content on your site since you last updated it? Have you migrated or redesigned your site?
The redirections may not have been properly setup or a hygiene check was not performed prior to the migration of the site. Your organic traffic rate may suffer as a result.
If you modified the content of your pages, you would see a change in Google rankings. Your optimizations may have been overdone or de-done without your knowledge. Google will display those pages differently if either of these things are done.
A sudden drop in organic traffic can occur when you make drastic changes to your website’s content or user experience.
To avoid massive fluctuations in organic traffic, ensure that your website is properly optimized when you update it.
5. Actions of competitors
It is also possible that your website’s traffic has decreased due to increased competition in your industry. Additionally, a decrease in traffic could indicate that your competitor is gaining ground on you.
Business markets are constantly being invaded by new players, regardless of niche. Nonetheless, standing out from the crowd and making it to the top of Google requires a keen eye for competitor activities and winning strategies.
In that case, you may be left stagnant by your competitors.
You can upgrade your SEO strategy to outperform your competitors by analyzing your competitors’ SEO strategies.
Traffic Drop Causes: How to Recognize Them?
Here’s how you can identify specific causes of organic traffic drops for your site at a given time, based on what you know about the common causes of traffic drops.
A two-step process can be followed.
- Tracking organic traffic is a great way to improve your website
- Compiling trends and data is done by analyzing them
1. A search engine’s interface
If your website’s organic traffic is decreasing, Google Search Console helps you identify multiple problems, such as server errors, indexing issues, manual actions, usability issues, and penalties.
These errors will be reported to Google Search Console if they are found on your site. Take action to fix the problem by clicking on the notification to see what the problem is.
When you have finished making the changes, submit them via the Search Console. It should not take long for you to see an increase in organic traffic and rankings if everything is done properly.
A notification will appear on your Google Search Console account if Google rejects your request.
2. Analytics from Google
A good way to identify traffic drops is to use Google Analytics’ Real-time report to examine your website’s traffic flow.
The Google Analytics tracking code might need to be fixed or replaced if you do not see any traffic data in your analytics account.
The Google Analytics data allows you to easily determine which parts of your website have experienced sudden traffic losses and should be revamped and optimized as a result.
3. Toolkits for SEO
Tracking your website’s traffic can be done with a number of third-party SEO tools. It is recommended to use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs that are trusted.
They make it easier to identify keywords that are losing traction. It is acceptable to have small fluctuations in traffic.
Nonetheless, you will probably find the culprit if you notice a noticeable decrease in certain keyword.
Besides monitoring keyword trends, you can also use patterns and correlations to identify and explain why your website is losing traffic.
In addition to identifying top-ranking pages on your site, one of these SEO tools will allow you to establish an advantage in terms of ranking and traffic.
4. Search engine trends
The Google Trends tool helps you identify industry trends and topics that have caught the attention of your audience and may be stealing organic traffic from your site.
You can make this process easier by leveraging Google Trends to identify seasonal trends and topics using one of the SEO tools I mentioned above.
How to recover organic traffic using best practices?
After reading this article, you will be able to identify the root cause for your website’s sudden drop in traffic. How can you regain traffic you’ve lost?
My goal here is to guide you one step at a time through that process.
1. Put a lot of effort into on-page SEO
Did I mention earlier that accidentally optimizing or over-optimizing your web pages could lead to traffic losses?
It’s for this reason that you should choose keyword phrases that can drive more traffic your way if you want to regain lost traffic.
Make sure your content provides value to your readers and is high quality. Then your content will be more engaging for your users.
Besides ensuring that your keywords are relevant to your content, ensure that they are placed naturally within it. Your search engine results will be adversely affected if you place keywords unnaturally or stuff them with keywords.
If your website is already suffering from massive traffic drops, a negative SEO impact is the last thing you need.
In addition to including keywords in your meta tags and headings, you can also include them in your content. It will help to improve Google’s search engine results for your page.
The use of internal links is an essential component of on-page SEO. Boost your internal linking structure so users can explore more relevant content and search engines can more easily understand your content by building links within your site.
Make sure that any pages you want Google to rank do not contain a no-index tag.
2. Optimize your technical SEO
When you do not have the right measures in place to fix technical issues on your website, they can cause chaos.
Test your website’s performance and speed with PageSpeed Insights and improve it immediately if needed.
The majority of online searches are conducted on mobile devices. Hence, you should also run a Mobile-Friendly Test for your website.
However, the story doesn’t end there. The goal of technical SEO isn’t just to enhance the speed of your website. In addition, you should pay attention to two things.
A broken link or redirect needs to be fixed. That’s right. A link is never visited by a user or search engine only to discover it is broken and offers nothing useful.
It is recommended that you use a broken link checker on your website to identify the broken links. Make sure the right link is replaced once you’ve done this.
As an alternative, if the content has been relocated to a new URL location, use a 301 redirect to redirect users to the new location.
Last but not least, you need to make sure Google properly indexes your pages.
Google won’t index your page, so you won’t get any traffic. It’s okay. Google indexes your site faster if you follow several steps.
- A number of things are included
- Disabling robots.txt on your website to stop Google bots from visiting it
- Add the sitemap for the non-indexed page
- Canonical tag removal
- Enhancing the quality of content
- Interlinking relevant pages on the page
- Using the Google Search Console to manually request that Google index your page
3. Increase the power of your backlinks
Backlinks are one of the top ranking factors for Google. More traffic means more ranking, and vice versa. Exactly.
Create high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites in your niche to your corresponding pages to regain lost traffic. Referral traffic will be driven to your website through these links.
Guest contributions to industry-related websites can help you acquire backlinks for your site.
It is also possible to get links by approaching influencers and bloggers in your convincing and niche them that the content you provide is worth linking to.
A service provider can do backlink building for you if you don’t want to deal with influencers and bloggers.
It is important that you ensure the quality of your content matches how you earn high-quality backlinks. A lot depends on the quality and engagement of your content when it comes to attracting referral traffic.
You will also attract more backlinks over time when you create high-quality content.
4. Maintain your SEO strategy and monitor trends
An SEO campaign is never completed in a single go. For your website to generate traffic, you must continuously work on it.
Therefore, ensure that your website undergoes periodic sitewide audits to ensure things are running smoothly.
You will be able to dodge a massive blow by staying on top of Google algorithm updates and other industry trends.
Track your competitors’ activities and fine-tune your SEO strategy accordingly to stay on top of the changing trends and aggressive landscape.
Finally, we wrap up
Getting organic traffic is essential to the success of your web business, as it is the way you get business prospects that transform into paying customers.
Every webmaster and marketer is taken aback by a sudden drop in organic traffic.
Follow these steps to determine why your organic traffic dropped suddenly and fix bugs as quickly as possible.
Let’s encapsulate it by reminding everyone to keep your SEO efforts in alignment with the evolving market trends, not just to maintain or improve organic traffic when all is well, but also to alleviate the effects of rocky paths in the future.
