6 Things to Check for when your Organic Traffic Suddenly Drops

A sudden drop in your site organic traffic can leave you confused. This could be a major obstacle since lack of traffic can impact your site’s ranking, conversion, and sales. You may wonder what the possible reasons behind this could be and how to overcome the problem.

Before coming to a conclusion, check these six things if there is an unforeseen drop in organic traffic

1. Check Google Search Console

For a successful digital marketing strategy, checking Google Search Console helps you study the nature of your site’s organic traffic. You can look for errors in your site, crawl rate, how Googlebot accesses your site and when, both internal and external pages which link to your site, indexing problem, and keyword searches which help your site pop up in the SERPs.

2. Make sure the tracking code is installed properly

Make sure to check your site’s tracking code as changes in your website code or analytics plug-ins can create problems in the same, resulting in glitches in analytics reporting. Look for the tracking code section at Admin, followed by Tracking Info and then Tracking Code. Under tracking code, look for the status at the top of the page. This way, you can check if your data is being read reliably by Google Analytics. Else, you need to install the code properly, and check for troubleshooting tips on Google’s Analytics Help page or contact your developer.

3. Be updated about Google algorithm changes

As you may know, Google keeps changing its algorithm very frequently. Its core algorithm is known to be updated nearly 500 times a year. So, it is important to keep yourself updated with the latest developments with regard to Search Engine Optimization so that you can plan your course of action in advance. Google’s search engine uses a core algorithm to crawl and maintain rankings on search results pages. Study these to understand how you can navigate the changes in Google to avoid penalties and continue to occupy top rankings.

4. Check for link loss

If your site loses out on links, Google is signaled that you are not as reliable any longer, resulting in a drop in your search rankings. This, in turn, hampers your visibility to users, leading to a drop in organic traffic. You can check for link losses through tools like Majestic and Ahrefs. Based on the results, you can either contact the sites that have removed your backlinks or can start afresh by writing guest posts, link building through do follow as well as no-follow backlinks that can boost engagement thereby improving traffic, along with revamping of your overall digital marketing campaign.

5. Issues related to site migration or redesign

It is often seen that there’s a significant drop in your website’s organic traffic when your site goes through redesigning or migration. To correct this, you need to first check if you have, by any chance, de-optimized some part of your website. Among the things to investigate is page speed, now that it is a ranking factor for Google. The audience has been found to leave a website that takes any longer than 3 seconds to load, research has shown. Some of the other interruptions to check to comprise those related to service, failed redirect implementations, broken links and images, information architecture changes and content loss or metadata. Coordinate with your developer to get these problems fixed at the earliest.

6. Analyze the quality of content

An important determinant of the organic traffic you draw to your site is the quality of your content. Good-quality content helps you optimize user to search and improve your ranking in the SERPs. You can begin by deindexing or improving doorway pages, which are low-quality pages that offer little value to website visitors. Opt for longer and in-depth content since it is related to better search rankings and better user response. Use high-quality images, reduce the number of pop-ups and design easily navigable user interfaces.

It is very frightening to see reduced traffic which leads to reduced visibility indicating less conversion and ROI. The best thing you can do in such a situation is not to panic but take necessary actions to restore your growing organic traffic.

Now that you have checked all these six factors, it will be easier for you to detect the underlying issues resulting in traffic drop and solve them by taking adequate measures.