Organic Traffic Drop Assessment

When you are reviewing monthly reports or doing SEO monitoring you may see organic traffic go up and down. It is normal for keyword rankings to fluctuate day-to-day and month-to-month. It’s only a big deal if it becomes a trend. If it becomes a trend, we need to revisit the optimizations that we have already done and see if there’s anything more we can do.

  • Normal Fluctuations
    • Is this a trend or just normal fluctuations? If the decline has been consistent for over a month, then it may be a trend.
  • Seasonality
    • Look in Google Analytics. Compare organic traffic from this year to the same time last year. If traffic appear to be behaving the same, the drop may due to the time of year. Some businesses are busier in certain months of the year than others.
  • Website Changes
    • Check your task management system or email to see if any website changes were made around the time the traffic began to drop. If a completely new design or new site was launched it’s very possible some mistakes were made in the migration.
    • Some things to check for are:
      • The entire site (or sections of it) are being blocked in the robots.txt file
      • Pages are marked as noindex that should not be
      • URLs that used to work but are now broken
      • Drastic changes to page titles
  • Ranking Drops
    • Before diving into research ask yourself:
      • Is this a trend or possibly just normal keyword fluctuations?
      • Was this keyword ranking on the top 1-2 pages of Google before it dropped?
      • Was the drop drastic? Or just 1-2 positions?
      • Is the keyword that dropped an important keyword to the client?
      • Is the keyword that dropped important for conversions?
      • Will the client be concerned about this drop?
    • Check your rank tracker. Review the keyword rankings for the site. Did any high volume keywords take a dive? Did many keywords in a group take a dive? Groups: Branded, Local, Other
  • Ranking Page Has Switched
    • Check your rank tracker. See if google has switched which page they were ranking for that keyword before.
  • CTR
    • Look in Google Search Console. Compared CTR from before the drop to after the drop. See if only specific pages lost CTR. This could be from someone changing the page title or meta description and now users are not attracted to clicking on your result as much.
  • Traffic to Landing Pages
    • Look in Google Analytics. Compared organic landing pages from before the drop to after the drop. See if only specific pages lost organic traffic.
  • Referral Sources
    • Look in Google Analytics. Compared referral sources from before the drop to after the drop. See if only specific sources lost organic traffic. Examples: Google, Bing, Yahoo, GMB, etc.
  • Google My Business
    • If you have been using a UTM code in the website link in your Google My Business listing, look in Google Analytics. Compared visits from GMB from before the drop to after the drop.
    • Check your rank tracker. Review the keyword rankings for the GMB listing. Did any high volume keywords take a dive? Did many keywords in a group take a dive? Groups: Branded, Local, Other
  • Google Algorithm Updates
  • SERP Intent
    • See if google has changed the intent of the top SERPS. There are three main types of intent a user will have when searching:
      • Informational – If they want to find an answer to a question or learn something.
      • Navigational – If they want to locate a specific website or resource.
      • Transactional – If they want to buy something.
    • Google will show different types of results at the top depending on what they think you want.
      • For example:
      • “How to pass the bar exam” would be informational.
      • “Accident lawyer in tampa” would be transactional.
    • Manually search for the keyword on Google.com. Are the type of results at the top local businesses or informational guides? If Google has changed the search intent, this could affect rankings a lot.

Further Reading
https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/18-ways-to-diagnose-a-decline-in-organic-traffic/
https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/google-penalty-checker/