30-second summary:
- A traffic drop doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong – in most cases, it is natural
- All sites have experienced a decline in traffic throughout their lifetime, which can be explained by seasonality, loss of PPC budget, and many other factors.
- When it comes to organic search traffic decline, it is often caused by static content, the emergence of new competitors, or the loss of backlinks.
- To diagnose a traffic drop, identify which traffic source is declining, find which pages have lost traffic.
- It is essential to avoid hasty decisions, take your time exploring whether you lost any positions and which pages replaced yours.
- Try to evaluate why this shift has happened and how you may fix it
Have you ever checked your analytics and seen a sudden or gradual organic traffic drop? Who hasn’t? If there’s one common thing in just about any marketing strategy: All of us have dealt with organic traffic decrease on many occasions. Any website out there has seen traffic dips, often even regularly.
How to deal with an organic traffic drop when you see something like this inside your Google Analytics? Source: Screenshot made by the author (April 2021) Here are four well-defined steps to take when diagnosing a traffic drop:
Step 1: Check which traffic source was effected
This is an obvious one, but too many people automatically assume that Google organic traffic has dropped. So make sure it hasn’t been PPC traffic that has exhausted your budget. This happens more than you think! So assuming, it is an organic traffic drop, let’s go on checking:
Step 2: Which page has dropped?
To quickly find out which pages dropped, navigate to your Google Analytics account Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels. Click “Organic” there, and in the date range, check “Compare to,” and in the drop-down, select “Previous period”:Source: Screenshot made by the author (April 2021)
