Why Your Organic Traffic Might Be Dropping (and how to fix it)

When you see the number of users who visit your website going down it doesn’t feel good. If you see it going down and you’re not sure exactly why it is going down, that feels even worse. That is why I am going to share some of the most common reasons why organic traffic goes down and how to correct the issue if possible. 

If you feel you’re losing traffic, Google Analytics is where you want to start your search for a reason. Assuming you use Google Analytics to track what is going on within your website, this is where you can determine if you are indeed losing traction and what source(s) (organic, paid, social, referrals, email, direct etc) might be involved. Many times I’ve seen folks panic over a sudden loss in traffic just to learn that a PPC campaign was shut off the week before and they forgot, or maybe a social media campaign just ended and it wasn’t mentioned. 

Google Analytics Can Confirm Your Suspicions. 

If we know there wasn’t a paid campaign that recently ended, it is probably organic traffic declining due to one or more of the issues we’ll cover here. To get a better sense of when the drop took place there are a couple of reports you will want to look at. 

The Aquisition Overview Report

Like I mentioned earlier, you should be able to get a quick idea of where the losses are coming from. The Aquisition Overview report can give you a quick glance at each traffic source and help put some light on the issue at hand. As you can see here when I do a comparison of this month vs. the same month last year I’m able to see a drop in traffic from two sources. 

The Landing Page Report
This report tells you what pages users have landed on when using a search engine to get to your website. When I’m looking at this report I will typically expand the timeline out to about a year so I can see a nice long chart that includes this same time last year. If you can do a comparison to the previous year you’ll get an even better sense of when things started to decline.

With a year-over-year comparison turned on, as you scroll down this report you can see the percentage change for each page. Look for those high percentages. 

Let’s take a look at what some of the scenarios are that you may encounter while looking at this report. 

You are seeing a decline, but only on a few pages

If you’re seeing a major swing in traffic for a few select pages while the rest are within 5-10% of where they were last year then you may have lost some rank on a couple of important topics. Focus in on what those pages are optimized for and see what improvements could be made or what content could be added to increase your footprint around that topic.

Some of your pages all of a sudden don’t have any traffic at all

If traffic for one or more of your pages has a sudden drop to zero and stayed there, make sure your tracking code is still on those pages. It may be possible that the issue is on the reporting side meaning you still get the traffic, it just isn’t being tracked.

Most of your pages are going down in traffic

If you’re seeing a decline in traffic across a large number of (or all) your pages then it may be something bigger than losing your foothold on a keyword topic and you’ll want to do some more digging to find the cause. We’ll cover some of this in a minute.

Search Console Will Show Losses in Opportunity

One of the biggest reasons I love Google Search Console is because you can see data on when your website ranked for a search even if no one clicked on it. You can get information on your average rank during a time period as well as how many impressions your website got in the search results. 

Just like with Google Analytics reports, you can see this line graph gives a clear indication when traffic starts to drop off. If there is a major update to the Google algorithm that you think might be impacting your traffic, this is where you’ll start to see that. To check on specifics for most noted updates from Google you can check their blog or get a list of Google updates from Search Engine Roundtable. I recommend using both because Google doesn’t always announce what they are doing but when they do it can be helpful to hear what they have to say about it. 

If you know a major update happened around the same time you see a decline in impressions, it might be your source for drops in traffic. It is important that you read up on what the algorithm update was for and make adjustments accordingly. 

Your pages might have been excluded

From time to time Google may exclude one or more of your pages from the crawl. If this happens those pages might drop in rank or disappear altogether from search. Go into Search Console’s Coverage report and click on Excluded to see what is being left out.

When you click on Excluded it will bring up a list of reasons why the pages were excluded. You can click on these to see the list of URLs for that reason. Look for Crawled – Currently Not Indexed and Crawl Anomaly. These are typically where you’ll find any pages that would normally be indexed but may have an issue. 

If you find URLs that you believe should be indexed there are two things you’ll want to make sure you do. 

1. Look at your sitemap.xml and make sure that URL is there. If it is, you’re good to move on to step two. If it is not there, take measures to add it to the file either using the plugin that manages your xml sitemap or manually enter it using the same syntax as the other URLs in the file.

2. Click on the URL in the list and a window will slide out from the right side of your screen. Click on “Inspect URL” and follow that to the next page where you can click on “Request Indexing”.

It may take a few days for it to show up but if the page is a legitimate content page then you should be okay and it should come back online. 

Traffic Drops After Getting a New Website or URL Change

Congratulations! You have a shiny new website! After making your way through the process of updating your website the last thing you want to face is a drop in organic traffic but it is more common than you might think. 

Changes in content per page

New site designs oftentimes replace large blocks of content with pretty pictures and high-impact video. While this may look nice, it can severely hurt your ranking and in turn, traffic. The reason for this is when you get rid of the text on the page and replace it with pictures or icons, you’re also getting rid of the content Google uses to evaluate if you’re an authority on the topics you used to get traffic from. You may need to consider adding some of that content back in.

Don’t forget to redirect old pages

With a new website comes new url structures. Make sure your development team has a plan for redirecting old URLs to their new home on the day of the launch. This is very important to the SEO health of your brand. Redirects should be done as part of the launch sequence and before a new sitemap.xml file is submitted to Google Search Console. If you’re on WordPress there are plugins such as Redirection that can help you easily manage your redirects. Even if you’re not on WordPress there is typically an interface that allows for easy redirect management. 

Did you tell Google you moved?

Google will eventually figure out that you moved to a new site but in the meantime, you may be losing traffic to your site. Letting them know you moved can help your chances of seeing any long-term declines in traffic. Luckily there is a tool for that in Search Console! Oh! And instructions! It isn’t often I get to say that. 

Follow Google’s guidelines for the change of address and you’ll be in better shape than if you just assume they will figure it out. 

In Summary

There may be one or more reasons your organic traffic has declined but it usually boils down to these:

• You lost position to your competitors on a topic you previously ranked in the top three for. 
• You were impacted by an update by Google and need to fix one or more pages on your site to get back into compliance. 
• There was an issue with some of your pages being indexed correctly
• Your new site or domain name has less content and might be missing 301 redirects from your old URLs