What To Do When Your Organic Traffic Drops

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The most significant part of long-term website management is paying attention to organic traffic. It is the most important indicator of website health and will ensure high income and engagement. But what should you do if there’s a decline in your site’s organic traffic? Here’s a checklist of questions you can ask to diagnose the problem:

Diagnosing the Decline in Organic Traffic

Is there a sudden drop in organic traffic on your end? Is it a cause to panic? Not necessarily. Many factors influence the decline in your organic traffic, such as a drop in rankings, changes to the website, the relevance of your content, or just Google updates to the algorithm. But where do you start diagnosing the problem?

Here’s What to Check When Your Organic Traffic Drops

First things first: which page’s traffic is dropping the most, and in what specific way is that page being impacted? And once you have determined which page requires your attention, you can go on to the next step of doing certain checks.

• Check which search queries have been affected: Navigate to the “Performance” report on your Google Search Console account. Choose the timeframe and compare it to the previous period. Click the “Pages” tab, then the page you identified to have the decline, then return to the “Queries” tab and sort by “Difference.”
• Check your rankings: If your organic traffic is going down, you should first look at your rankings. Use tools like AccuRanker or Rank Ranger to track where you stand in the rankings over time. If these tools do not indicate a drop in your ranks but see less traffic, it might be due to a sudden change in the Google algorithm or user behavior and search intent.
• Check SERPs changes: Unfortunately, no information about title changes is accessible in Google Search Console or Google Analytics. As a result, SEOs have turned to third-party tools to determine whether their titles are being altered. The displayed title of search results significantly impacts the clickthrough rate. Thus, it is essential to monitor these changes.

You may check the title changes or use SISTRIX—under SERPs > SERP-Snippets, there is a button “Show title changes,” which takes you to this screen. The red text indicates words that have been dropped from the title, and the green text indicates words that have been added.

Another thing you can do is observe a competing page that is moving up for a certain keyword, then compare their link-building and content tactics to yours and see what you can improve.

• Check for Search Intent Changes: Because our reality constantly evolves, users’ intentions shift across topics. This means that even if you have the most intriguing stuff on a topic, the topic itself may become stale. You can still rank well for specific keywords, but their search volume may have declined. So you can evaluate your content and try to adjust it via relevance.
• Check for technical issues on your website: Technical difficulties can harm your website by stopping Google from crawling and indexing it properly. Check the Index Coverage report to see if Google is reporting crawl issues.

Gain a Competitive Edge in Your Organic Traffic

Maintaining a competitive advantage in your niche requires a focus on organic traffic. Focusing your time and efforts on high-volume keywords that will dominate the industry is critical with so many competitors. Because individuals are more inclined to click on top organic search results than Google Ads, improving your site traffic is worth the investment.

What’s more worth the investment is having actual results to back it up. Verde’s got you! Marketing is our jam, If you’re interested in gaining a competitive edge against your competitors, schedule an online consultation with us!