Sudden Drop in Organic Traffic? How to Work Out What’s Happened and Why

Could it be seasonal or demand changes?

Your products or services may experience significant variations in traffic levels depending on the season or demand. It’s essential to consider this when looking at year-on-year metrics, as you may notice fluctuations in traffic during peak shopping or holiday seasons. Weather, holidays, sale seasons (like Black Friday), and even significant economic changes can impact your website and users’ engagement. To determine if seasonality is a contributing factor, compare organic traffic year over year in Google Analytics, analyse monthly search volume from the Keyword Planner, and compare search impressions in Google Search Console. If you notice similar fluctuations in previous years and changes in search volume, it’s likely due to seasonality.

It’s also worth looking into reduced consumer demand for your products or services. You can utilise tools like Google Trends (or Glimpse) to analyse the search volume over time for your target keywords. If there is a drop in traffic, but rankings remain stable, it indicates a potential decline in demand. However, further investigation into possible SEO causes is warranted if rankings and traffic decline.

If you have found that seasonal or demand changes throughout the year are typical for your business, you need to work on accommodating this into your forecasting, reporting and strategy moving forward.

Was there a change in search intent or unexpected events?

A significant drop in organic traffic can occur when search intent shifts or unexpected events happen. As reviewed above, user interests are constantly changing, which can affect trends and demand. Just like a company selling umbrellas likely has considerable peaks in traffic when there is a lot of wet weather forecasted, they are likely to see a decline in traffic during the Summer months.

However, not all events can be predicted. This year, we noticed a significant increase in searches and a shift in search results across major cities in the United States for the high-volume term ‘flowers.’ This change occurred after Miley Cyrus released her song Flowers causing related YouTube videos and web pages to replace flower delivery services in the top search results. This unforeseen event affected organic rankings and consequently influenced site traffic. It’s essential to monitor rankings and the search results to understand what is happening.

Was there a referral traffic drop on Google Analytics?

Although referral traffic is a separate channel from Google organic traffic, a sudden traffic drop could signify lost links. If other sites had natural links pointing to your site, known as inbound links, any SEO professional will tell you that these are a nod to your authority and legitimacy for the same content quality and expertise.

For example, the site owner of a digital marketing blog links to a relevant piece of content on your site. This passes ‘link juice’ from one to the other, or authority, and can increase traffic. Search engine crawlers follow this link structure to understand relevancy and authority. Most traffic via links will have little to no effect on organic visibility for landing pages. However, if referrals are significant enough, it becomes one of those indirect ranking factors. The ones based on relevancy and authority.

This goes for direct traffic, too. If enough people bookmarked or referenced a particular page on your site and this was then removed, website traffic could decline. Suppose you do remove a page that regularly receives high levels of traffic (probably not the best move for your marketing strategy). In that case, it’s essential to put the proper redirects in place to avoid lost traffic to your site.

Perhaps a Google update affected you

Google algorithm updates happen periodically and can sometimes be big enough to significantly impact your rankings and, subsequently, your traffic. Core updates should be the first thing you check when you see substantial dips in your data, as you cannot control this. If this is the case, what you can do is read what the core update was for and align your site with Google and other search engines expectations — usually trust and authority. Work on improving your content and pulling any irrelevant or thin content. If you work hard enough on your strategy and improve what you’re publishing, you should see a nice increase at the next core update.

Could paid media be the culprit?

Paid ad campaigns can play a role in organic traffic fluctuations. This likely affects individual pages rather than a sitewide decline, although that could happen. Take a look and see if any competitors have recently launched a paid campaign. The position of paid ads at the top of SERPs could be pulling traffic away from your organic listing onto their site instead of yours.

If your company is the one that launched a new campaign, you would expect to see an increase in paid traffic to offset the decline in organic. Ensure your teams work together to gain desired results and not pull efforts away from one another.

What about a manual penalty?

Although this isn’t as common nowadays, it’s a quick thing to check. Look in Google Search Console for any notifications about a Google penalty or any manual actions that may be suppressing your rankings and hurting your organic traffic.