Organic Traffic Drop? Here’s How to Assess & Fix
Declining organic traffic is heart-breaking to see but mostly inevitable. Here's how to assess and fix 👇🏻
With so many updates and changes that Google has been introducing, keeping track of your website performance is very important.
But first, breathe.
👉👉👉 Join us this Wednesday, 1 pm est, here to discuss traffic drops! No registration required, bring your questions!
While monitoring Google’s updates and their impact on your and competitors’ sites is essential, don’t forget that organic traffic fluctuations are normal and core algorithm updates may have nothing to do with your sites. In many cases, it is all about how Google understands the query and its intent.
Even if you see a traffic decline, it is not a penalty. Assess search result pages and take note of what changed. Have your organic positions actually changed or are there new search features or AI overviews pushing organic results lower down the page? Has Google changed the type of results on top? For example, the recent algorithm changes replaced review sites with ecommerce results for many queries.
Not all traffic fluctuations can or should be reversed but knowing what is happening with your target search result pages is important for identifying new opportunities.
Now, here’s how to assess what you lost…
Search Console is the most reliable way to monitor your organic search performance because its data comes directly from Google.
To quickly see which of your pages saw the biggest traffic declines, go:
Performance
Click “Date: Last 3 months”
Choose “Compare” and select the time periods before and after the traffic decline
Click the “Pages” tab below
Click the “Clicks” column header twice to sort by pages that saw the biggest drop
Now you can click any page on the list, select the “Queries” tab, and click the “Clicks” header twice to see the queries that dropped for you.
Easy!
The tools…
1. GSC Guardian
GSC Guardian helps you keep track of Google’s updates and overlays Search Console reports with dates from Google’s Status Dashboard.
You can also create annotations to note tasks or important observations inside your Search Console dashboard.
You can export your notes as well as Google’s updates to a CSV file or Google Sheets.
The extension makes it much easier to correlate your own actions or Google’s updates with your site traffic changes.
2. Google Search Console Enhanced Analytics
Google Search Console Enhanced Analytics lets you easily compare dates, understand percentage changes, or generate search volumes.
The tool gives you more flexible controls over which dates or periods you want to compare your traffic. It also adds percentages allowing you to easily spot any negative trends with color coding:
The percentages are added to the report overview as well, so you can quickly see if your overall site performance is trending in a positive or negative direction:
3. SEO Testing
SEO Testing is a premium tool that imports your Search Console data and overlays it with the records of confirmed Google Updates.
On top of that, the site offers a Google Chrome extension that makes Search Console data easy to access from your browser. When viewing your page, click the extension to load search queries it is driving traffic from, together with positions and clicks. The report loads data for 90 days. There’s no way to change the time range from within the extension:
You can also use the URL inspection tool from the extension which makes a quick SEO health check incredibly quick and easy.
The single-site package costs $40 a month, and there’s a 14-day trial available for you to test the tool out first.
So what to do?
Again, not all traffic fluctuations can or should be fixed. There are a lot of things to consider here:
Was there a Google update at the time you saw a traffic drop? What kind of update was it?
Did you actually lose positions? OR did your target SERP change? Was there a new section added to the mix?
Is there an AI overview showing for your search?
When evaluating your possible fixes:
Look at a competitor that replaced your position in search. What are they doing differently/better?
Evaluate your internal linking structure. In many cases, URLs lose rankings when they go deeper into your site archive (and hence lose internal links)
Consider if your page needs to be updated with new data, links, etc.
