Organic traffic drops can often send alarm bells ringing for website owners. A sudden drop in organic website traffic can mean that fewer people see your site on Google, which also affects your clicks and subsequent conversions. This prospect can be worrying from a business perspective.
At totalsurf, we’d be the first to tell you how complex SEO is and that it takes consistent time, work and attention in order to work. So what should you do if you spot a sudden drop?
Most drops can be reversed, which is why it’s important to understand what exactly happened to your site that resulted in the drop. This isn’t exactly easy for everyone to grasp straight away, however, Google is now categorising types of drops to give you a better understanding of what the problem might be.
While some drops in website traffic can point to a serious problem, others can be explained by simple factors, such as the season we’re currently in.
So how can you be sure that you don’t need to panic? Luckily, Google Search Console – provided you know how to use it and what you’re doing with the data – can help you make sense of what’s happened to your site. Knowing the type of issue your site is facing is easier to manage than not understanding what the specific problem is.
The crucial factor is being able to see the category of traffic drop. In the performance reports in Google Search Console, you can now review what different types of organic traffic drops look like, allowing you to narrow down the type of issue you may be dealing with.
Through Google Search Console, the categories below provide a visual representation of what drops look like. They are:
These errors can prevent Google from indexing, crawling or serving your pages to users. Technical website issues can be site-wide or page-wide. Site-level issues are problems that affect your whole site, including crawlability issues like improper sitemaps or a site that is permanently down. You could be dealing with a site-wide issue if you notice your traffic takes a sudden dive and stays down.
A page-level issue is something wrong with a specific page or set of pages, causing them to be ranked incorrectly. These issues include poor load speed on pages, broken media or image files, misplaced robots.txt tags, just to name a few. Traffic drops caused by page-level technical issues are similarly sharp and sudden, but look a bit more ‘fluctuating’ and less linear than drops caused by site-wide technical problems.
If your site is not complying with Google’s guidelines then some or all of your pages may be omitted from Google search results as a result of a Manual Action. If you’re implementing black hat SEO tactics you can face Manual Actions courtesy of Google, thereby harming your SEO efforts. Similarly to drops caused by site-wide issues, your traffic will suddenly dive and stay down.
Google is continually improving how it assesses content and updating its algorithm to match this. Google core updates and smaller algorithm changes may affect how some pages perform in Google Search results. It’s wise to pay attention to news on algorithm changes as you may unknowingly be the victim of a traffic drop if Google changes how it views and assesses content quality. In this case, the Google Search Console graph will look similar to page-wide technical problem drops.
Sometimes, changes in user behaviour will affect the demand for certain queries or questions they ask. This could be due to a new trend, seasonality throughout the year, or sudden events (for example, the COVID-19 pandemic), which could mean your traffic could drop purely due to external factors. If you’ve encountered search intent disruption, your GSC graph will fluctuate.
If your traffic suddenly drops or spikes, before returning to normal shortly afterwards, there probably isn’t anything concerning. It’s rare, but Google Search Console can report erroneous data on occasion, so there is a chance it could be a reporting error.
Organic traffic drops can indicate serious problems with a website, but similarly, it may be a page-level issue that isn’t affecting your entire site. Equally, there could just be a wider change in demand for your products and services.
The short answer is, it depends. If you’re technically savvy and understand what site-wide technical issues look like and how to fix them, then this will significantly help you if you encounter a sudden and sharp drop in organic traffic.
The best cure for any issue is always preventing it from happening in the first place. So if you have enough web development and technical SEO experience to remedy any traffic drops, then more power to you.
If you don’t have the capability to protect your site against sudden organic traffic drops, then the totalsurf team can help you there.
When you work with totalsurf, you’re working with a transparent SEO and web development agency. We have acted as SEO consultants for clients that have experienced sudden organic traffic drops, where our team have rectified a range of problems to not only restore organic traffic, but improve it significantly.
With any traffic drops, we will help you understand them in context, as well as any technical problems, security issues, Manual Actions or trends that are affecting your site and traffic.
If you’re concerned about your organic traffic and not sure how to overcome the issues affecting your site, get a free, no-obligation technical SEO audit from totalsurf today. We would be more than happy to discuss ways we can help.
It’s very simple. Just fill in the form and we will be in touch with your reports. We will also ask you to book a 30 min call with us so we can run through the report and explain what the issues are with your site, what your goals are and how we can help you.
