Diagnosing a traffic drop? Just breathe!

Have you ever checked your analytics and seen a sudden or gradual organic traffic drop? Who hasn’t? If there’s one common thing in any marketing strategy: We have dealt with organic traffic decrease on many occasions. Any website out there has seen traffic dips, often even regularly.

How to deal with an organic traffic drop when you see something like this inside your Google Analytics?

Here are four well-defined steps to take when diagnosing a traffic drop:

Step 1: Check which traffic source was effected

This is obvious, but too many people automatically assume that Google’s organic traffic has dropped.

So ensure it hasn’t been PPC traffic that has exhausted your budget. This happens more than you think!

So assuming it is an organic traffic drop, let’s go on checking:

Step 2: Which page has dropped?

To find out which pages dropped quickly, navigate to your Google Analytics account Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels. Click “Organic” there, and in the date range, check “Compare to,” and in the drop-down, select “Previous period”: Now scroll down and click the “Landing pages” tab to see all your pages and how this week’s traffic compares to the previous week.

Source: Screenshot made by the author (April 2021)

No need to scroll a lot here. If you see a traffic dip, chances are your higher-ranking page or pages were affected. So look at the top of the list. Most importantly, if all your pages took a hint, Google Update, or even a penalty (the latter is much less common nowadays).

This article lists a few good ways to research wh. Most importantly, if all your pages took a hit, that’s a good reason to worry. There was an update on how to evaluate whether you were affected. A more common scenario is that you will see some post pages go up and down search engine result pages all the time. Ages are dropping. Others will remain intact or even start gaining in traffic. This is a good indicator you shouldn’t be worried about any possible action from Google. Most pages go up and down search engine result results; search further.

Step 3: Was there any impact on rankings?

It is not rare: We see a gradual decline in traffic without any noticeable impact on rankings. Two possible reasons can explain this:

• People don’t search for that query that much anymore. And this search is the case for seasonal questions (think “costumes,” “ski gear”, “swimsuits,” etc.) This was very common in 2020 when searching patterns shifted dramatically.
• Search engine result pages have added a new search element that steals attention and clicks.

So how do you diagnose if your rankings drop?

This question is harder to answer these days. If you are monitoring your rankings, an obvious step is to check there. Google’s Search Console is another platform to check, but quickly diagnosing the ranking drop is not easy. The tool is a little behind in showing data. Still, if you give it some time, you can analyze your rankings, thereby using the “Compare” tab within the “Performance” section of the reports:

Once you choose your date range, scroll down to your data and filter it by the “Position difference” column. Mind that all you need to note here is lost or declined first-page ranking because your second-page orders wouldn’t have driven traffic to lose anyway. So again, breathe.

Instead, you can filter Search Console data by “Previous positions” to see, for example, lost #1 rankings:

Another – probably more brilliant – way to diagnose hit queries is to judge by traffic. The search console shows the number of clicks each question sends and compares it to what it used to send. If Google is not the only search engine you are concerned about, using Finteza, you can spot search queries that are sending less traffic than they used to:

Finteza’s default search keyword report consolidates data from all search engines you appear in. You do need it running for some time to accumulate this data. It is easy to integrate. Finteza is paid (costs  $25 per 100,000 unique users a month), but it is the only web analytics solution offering reliable keyword data. I suggest using all of the above (and more) methods to understand better what is going with your organic traffic. Again, with search personalization and localization, it is tough to know where you are gaining (or losing) from, so combining data from multiple sources is the key.

Step 4: Identify why these rankings dropped

Here comes another tedious part of our analysis. More often than not, your rankings may fluctuate or drop due to Google finding a better page to rank. This may happen because:

• Your query deserves freshness, and there is a fresher page that was boosted on top of yours. If this is the case, you’d have got used to fluctuations by now.
• Your competitor cgottenented a better page that has better backlinks.
• You have lost some essential backlinks, which has led to losing some equity.

Your position monitoring solution may indicate which page has overcome you in SERPs. Most rank monitoring platforms have a “SERP tracking” feature that regularly grabs a snapshot of your important SERPs.

You can monitor your target SERP movements for you, for example:

For high-search-volume queries, SpyFu keeps a record of crucial SERP movements:

Use link monitoring tools to make it easy to spot your lost backlinks that may have accounted for declined positions. They keep a record of when precisely each link was lost, making it easy for you to evaluate if this may have impacted your rankings and organic traffic: When you know which page replaces you in search results, try to find out why. There can be an array of reasons, including the most common ones (as well as a combination of such): 

Conclusion

Keeping your traffic in control is beyond your powers. What you can do is keep an eye (building a dashboard would make it easier and more consistent) and create a well-set routine for analyzing a possible dip. When you see organic traffic decline or drop, it doesn’t usually mean that your site is under any filter or penalty (which is most often assumed). In most cases, this is a perfectly natural ongoing SERP fluctuation. Stay calm and carefully analyze what has changed (and why). Don’t rush to take any action or fix anything until you check various data sources and take time to develop a strategic plan.
And most importantly: Breathe! Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.