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One day your site’s doing great in the SERPs, and you’re generating a steady flow of organic traffic and leads to your business.
Then your traffic flatlines and you’re left scrambling. If you’ve seen a sudden, unexplainable drop in organic search traffic, don’t panic, but don’t sit on your hands either.
Traffic crashes are rarely random.
They’re signals that something (either on your side or Google’s side) has changed.
This guide walks you through a systematic, technical assessment to diagnose and recover from an organic traffic drop.
Let’s get the worst-case scenario out of the way first. When your organic traffic takes a dive out of nowhere, your site may have been impacted by a Google penalty. A manual action can dramatically impact your site’s visibility (and halt your revenue).
If you get hit by a manual action, you’ll get a notice from Google explaining what rule you violated. For example, if you get caught with an unnatural backlink profile, Google will tell you they’ve devalued those links and you can expect your rankings to take a dip.
Manual actions are imposed when a human reviews a website suspected of violating Google’s Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines). Getting a manual action is a big deal. It can lead to dropped rankings or a complete removal from Google’s index. If your website brings you leads and/or sales, that means lost revenue.
Head over to Google Search Console and go to Security & Manual Actions > Manual Actions. If you’ve received a penalty, you’ll see it here in full detail.
Common manual action triggers include:
It’s possible to recover from a manual action, but it takes some work. You’ll need to address the issues outlined by Google, make sure the rest of your site is in compliance, and submit a request for reconsideration.
Sometimes the culprit isn’t a penalty, but another algorithm update. Algorithmic changes don’t come with an announcement, but they can still hit you hard. If you wake up one day and your site isn’t ranking where it used to be, but you haven’t received a manual action, you aren’t in trouble with Google. However, you’ve got some work to do.
Algorithm changes typically result in the following consequences:
Although it’s impossible to confirm with certainty, there are signs that your drop is connected to an algorithm update. Check Google’s update timeline and cross-reference the date your traffic dropped to see if there’s a connection. Usually, this is the case.
There are three types of updates that hut sites the most:
Unlike manual actions, you can’t just make some changes and request a review. You’ll need to work on improving your website’s quality and wait to see what happens. Working with a professional SEO agency can help.
There was a time when Google indexed everything it could find and rarely deleted anything. Now, that’s not the case. Sometimes pages get deleted from the index even when they aren’t in violation of the rules.
Use the URL Inspection Tool inside Google Search Console to verify your top-performing web pages are indexed. If not, that’s likely your problem. Look deeper into your index coverage report and see if there’s a trail of errors like the following:
If you see these errors, fix canonical issues and make sure your pages can be crawled easily.
Check your robots.txt file to make sure you aren’t blocking your home directory or any other directory critical to traffic. Google has a robots.txt test tool you can use to find out if there’s an issue.
Next, check your HTML and make sure you aren’t using noindex tags accidentally. For example, check for:
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>
If you’re using this tag sitewide, it will kill your traffic.
If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, make sure you aren’t blocking robots from indexing your site in the admin panel. Everything may have been working just fine last week, but that doesn’t mean a CMS core update or plugin didn’t silently change things.
Backlinks can make or break your domain authority. When you have a bunch of toxic links or lose good links, your rankings can drop significantly. To find out what’s going on, use a backlink checker tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush to get a look at your backlink profile. If you don’t already have an account, you can get a free 7-day trial from Semrush and Moz, but Ahrefs doesn’t offer any discounts.
Look for a rapid increase in low-quality domains, suspected link networks, and exact match anchor text from spammy blogs. These types of links can really hurt you. If you have these links, they may have come from hiring a shady SEO company that buys backlinks, or they could have been created by a competitor, although that’s rare.
Reaching out to request removal is your first line of defense when you discover spammy links. If that doesn’t work and you have a substantial amount of toxic backlinks to deal with, consider disavowing those links. However, there are some things you need to know before you disavow a link. For instance, Google doesn’t have to honor the request to disavow links. And if you don’t know how to discern truly toxic links, disavowing links can harm your rankings. Before using this tool, consult with an SEO specialist, especially if you’re already working with an agency.
Surface-level content sometimes gets off to a good start, but then drops off the radar when Google fully analyzes the content to discern its value. If that’s the case, you’ll need to beef up your content strategy.
Look at all of your content to identify pages that don’t provide unique or clear value compared to your competitors. For example, if you’re running a law firm and have individual pages for each practice area, but the content is thin, you can be sure your competitors with full pages are ranking instead of you. Either update these pages with more in-depth content or remove them and redirect those URLs to existing comprehensive content.
Last, audit your content to see if it’s still relevant and useful. If anything is outdated, update the content. Make sure the content addresses a user’s search intent based on your business goals. If you need help figuring this out, tools like Surfer SEO and Clearscope can help.
Technical SEO isn’t glamorous, but it powers your website. Check your site’s architecture to ensure it’s not buried 6-10 layers deep so search crawlers can access it for indexing. Tools like Screaming Frog are excellent for identifying broken links, duplicate titles, meta tag issues, and redirect chains.
It also helps to submit an updated sitemap in Google Search Console. Doing this will ask Google to crawl your site instead of just waiting and hoping your site will get crawled again someday.
Sometimes it’s not your ranking that changes. Instead, it’s the layout of the search engine results pages (SERPs) that pushes you down out of sight. Google is constantly tinkering with how it presents information to users, and these updates can majorly impact click through rates even when your position remains the same.
SERP features that can push you down include featured snippets, image carousels, shopping ads, “People Also Ask” boxes, and local map packs. These elements take up the top half of the page and push organic results below the fold. If your organic listing sits below these features, it might be “high ranking,” but it’s still below the fold out of sight.
To overcome this obstacle, you’ll need to:
If your search rankings are dropping, it’s time to start spying on your competitors. See who’s gaining traction in your industry where you’re falling and try to reverse engineer their content and site structure. If this sounds daunting, a professional SEO agency can do it for you.
If your site got hacked, it may not be obvious to you, but Google might already see the signs. Run a security audit on your entire site to look for injected code, spammy redirects, and hidden iframes. These are often hidden in header and footer templates.
Whether or not you find any security
issues, now is a good time to implement protections if you haven’t already. Keep your plugins and core files updated, use a Web Application Firewall (WAF), and back up your site regularly.
Not every traffic drop is your fault (or caused by Google’s algorithm). A growing number of users are turning to AI tools instead of using traditional search engines, and that’s changing how (and where) people find information.
Internet searches are no longer limited to traditional sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. People are using tools like ChatGPT, You.com, and Perplexity.ai to get answers, summarize information, and get service recommendations. If your website isn’t showing up in these AI searches, you’re missing out.
Another element to consider is how Google AI overviews impact click throughs. Your site might still be ranking, but people don’t notice because their questions are answered at the top of the page by Google’s AI overview.
There is a direct correlation between the introduction of this feature and a measurable decline in clicks. For instance, Ahrefs found a 34.5% drop in clicks for the first position when AI overviews were present. And a study by Semrush found that nearly 57% of all mobile searches and 53% of all desktop searches result in zero clicks. That’s significant. It means a large number of people are satisfied with the answer they get from Google’s AI overview and that’s the end of their search.
To stay competitive, you’ll need to adapt your marketing strategy and optimize your content for AI search. This involves:
If your ranking hasn’t changed, but your traffic has tanked, AI search behavior might be to blame. Part of SEO involves adapting to changes in both search algorithms and user behavior.
Traffic drops are scary, but they’re not the end of the world. If your traffic dropped off a cliff, use this checklist to diagnose potential causes and take action toward recovery.
But if you’re short on time, bandwidth, or just want a pro to handle it for you, we’re here to help. At SEO.co, our experts will audit your site, identify what’s thinning out your traffic, and build a strategy to get you back in the game.
Whether you’re dealing with a manual action from Google, algorithmic ups and downs, spammy backlinks, or anything else, we can help.
Contact us today for a free consultation and let’s get your traffic flowing again.
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