Are you worried that your website is losing traffic?
Don’t freak out! There are countless reasons that this could be happening...and not all of them are terrible (honestly!) Your data investigation process should be thoughtful, methodical, and consider all of the many critical data points, in order to best help you craft a successful recovery plan.
The “investigation process” basically boils down to the following steps:
Validate if your issue is, in fact, a traffic problem.
Understand your data:
Identify the underlying causes & paths to resolution.
Determine if it’s worth fixing.
Outline a game plan to resolve it (as needed.)
For the purposes of this article, we’ll mainly focus on the first 3 steps: you know, the parts giving you a panic attack right now. So take a deep breath, and dig in. You’ve got this!
First things first: determine whether this drop in traffic has to do with a real marketing/SEO problem, or simply a tracking issue.
Measuring website traffic can be tricky with lots of platforms and tools to perform this task, plus tons of metrics to review & understand, which makes it even harder. Whether you have implemented Google Analytics tracking code directly on your website, or utilize Google Tag Manager for tracking purposes, there are some key areas you can check to see if your traffic decline is down due to a tracking issue.
This may seem like a silly step to you, but it’s the core problem in fully 15-20% of the cases we see.
Is your traffic issue really a tracking issue? Consider yourself lucky! The sooner the better and once you fix it, you can go back to investing in your business. Get help auditing your GA and GTM account to ensure tracking is actually working properly.
The next critical box to check: are the declining traffic levels normal or expected behavior? Check for the obvious contenders:
If the drop is unexpected, the following step is to understand the magnitude and time-frame for the traffic loss you are experiencing.
In general, a sudden or significant change likely points to something “breaking” or “stopping” (e.g. you noindexed your site, broke tracking, or paused your advertising campaigns), or, in the case of an SEO traffic drop, an algorithm update.
Slow and steady drops are more frequently associated with website quality issues, growing competitors, wrong audience/brand alignment, and other similar marketing optimization issues.
Then you’ll want to dig into the obvious ways to “break down” your data, to determine if the issue is specific to a device, platform, section of your site, etc.
At this point, we know something is actually wrong, and we should know more about where it’s happening & the impact. So what’s next?
Understanding the WHY behind the traffic pattern change.
NOTE that this process assumes your business actually cares about the traffic loss, and it’s worth the work to recover it. This isn’t always a given - for example, you might lose traffic after retiring a service offering, for terms relating to that service.
Below we’ve broken out the major possible reasons we frequently see when doing SEO traffic investigations, organized by Internal & External factors.
External causes of traffic drops aren’t the result of your actions… but may way be the result of your inaction. Resolving these issues isn’t as simple as “fixing” the problem, so be prepared for a longer timeline to resolve them.
If you are going “by the book”, you should (could?) be fine. However, sometimes even the best brands get their share of traffic drops from Google’s constant efforts toward improvement - after all, quality is a moving finish line.
New Google Core Updates - and algorithm changes on previous ones - are all over SEO news, so they can (sometimes) be easy to understand why your traffic got hit by a Google update. Tools like Panguin can help you visualize this by overlaying your traffic updates with confirmed and suspected algo updates. Get more data about what the updates were about from Marie Hayne’s Algo Update list.
Have you been telling yourself it’s “okay” while secretly violating Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines? Start by checking if there is a notification under your GSC account in the Search Traffic > Manual Actions section. If so, you have a long way to go, and Google’s documentation on manual penalty might be handy.
Check if there’s anything peculiar happening on the SERPs (search engine result pages) for key queries you are losing traffic for. Maybe there’s a feature you haven’t seen before (on mobile, desktop, or both.) Google is constantly testing new features to improve the search experience for users, and that could affect your SEO organic - even when your keyword’s ranking is static.
If you had a drop in your rankings, gather the queries that saw the drop (via GSC) and see if there is a technical problem related to the pages these queries land on. Sometimes these are A/B tests Google is running, sometimes it’s a bug on Google’s side, and sometimes these changes are competition or algorithm-driven. If you are curious, check Google Webmasters’ tweet on it.
Search intent is one of the most important aspects to keep in mind when creating pages and deciding which keywords to target. If your pages have been performing well, but a slight and gradual drop is happening, this could be because of the user intent changing for the queries. Deciding which keywords to target for improving SEO organic traffic can be difficult, but it’s critical to get right.
If your rankings have dropped and favor other sites, look into those sites. What’s changed? What are they doing better than you? How many new backlinks have they built? How are they better aligned with the user’s search intent? (And try to be objective!)
From small to big, these kinds of events can have an outsized impact on how many people search for something, as well as what they mean by what they search. To determine changes in search volume, utilize tools like Google Trends. To identify changes in intent, search for the term in question to see what's ranking well (that may not have been there previously.)
For example, top rankings for popular figures will change when something happens to that figure. One day that person’s basic bio might rank, the next an exposé on whatever it is they did wrong or right.
Sometimes traffic drops happen because something is “wrong” with your website. Let’s take a look at the common internal factors of SEO traffic drops.
Being accessible on all devices (specifically smartphones), whenever and wherever your users are, helps you to get more SEO traffic. If there is an issue regarding the mobile version of your website, you may want to fix it swiftly, since Google’s moved to Mobile-First Indexing.
A regular content audit can do wonders for a website. When your website traffic is down, check whether the problem is caused by the removal of good content - or too much “meh” or low quality content. If it’s something you can fix, just do it. Here is an article on evaluating and improving content for existing pages that can help. If your competitors are outranking you with great content, then pivot to go beyond their success. Examine what they are doing, and think through how you can implement something dramatically better.
Did you recently edit page copy on a page that seeing a drop? What about removing a link to that page? Content and internal links can very much impact search rankings.
Technical SEO is the foundation of a quality, sustainable traffic to large websites (to clarify, technical SEO is less critical and complex for small websites.) If there is a problem regarding the correct implementation of the following (especially to the extent that something “broke” that was previously working), your traffic might be suffering. Utilizing website monitoring software, or automated crawling software (e.g. Moz, Ahrefs or SemRush) can help you identify issues before they become traffic issues. Additionally, good QA processes - and double-checking critical user flows - can
Google Search Console (GSC) and Screaming Frog are the to-go tools for identifying crawl errors. The URL’s under “Coverage Report” are not indexed by Google to serve the users. Make sure your fruitful content is not having an indexation issue.
One of the worst-case scenarios we see as SEO’s are the cases of botched site migrations. The SEO migration process can be complex/high-risk, requiring close attention & QA. Redirects in particular are a common issue with migration projects. If there is a problem with your redirects, your traffic might be suffering as a consequence. (Don’t forget to redirect www, non-www, http, and https URLs!)
Canonical tags tell search engines which pages are original sources of content, and therefore what pages are worthy of indexing. If you accidentally point your canonical tags to the wrong URLs…. bad things happen.
When implemented incorrectly robots.txt & meta robots tags can also cause traffic losses on your website, since you are stopping search engines from accessing important content. Learn more about common issues for crawling & indexing websites.
If you utilize a web platform (say, WordPress or Shopify) and leverage plugins, extensions or apps to add additional functionality to your site, there's always the possibility that the plugin itself is broken and causing site issues. If this is the case for you, you'll either need to wait until the plugin developer fixes it, fix a new one, or forgo the use of that functionality entirely.
Keep in mind that these factors can and do overlap; for example, a Core Quality Update (algo update from Google) could change your website’s quality score from “good enough” to “not so much,” resulting in dramatic-looking losses. Technical SEO issues that might not be deal-killers in themselves (e.g. XML sitemaps with lots of broken pages) can compound into bigger issues.
For this reason, it’s best to investigate all the possible items that could be wrong - if only to rule them out.
This is pretty much 100% a contextual question. Where are you seeing the drops, for what keywords? Did that traffic provide you with brand awareness with your core audience, or did it bring you meaningless spammy bots?
If you have GA goal, eCommerce, or event traffic setup, it may well be easy to quantify the business impact (or lack thereof) of this change.
But the important part is just to ask yourself the question before you put time and effort into the fix.
This item is also quite contextual to the what/where/when/why that you defined in the investigation process, but on a high level:
Big picture, the most critical step in the process is identifying the actual, real problem(s.) Without understanding that, you can’t possibly fix it!
We hope this breakdown helps you understand a good approach for identifying and resolving website traffic issues. If you need help with your investigation - or the plan to fix it - reach out!