A guide for marketers to diagnose and fix their website traffic issues
It usually starts with a sinking feeling: your weekly monitoring dashboard flags that you are suddenly behind your organic traffic targets or, even worse, when the monthly report goes out, it is very apparent to everyone that you have lost a significant chunk of your organic traffic.
The next steps are very clear to everyone – find out what happened to that traffic and get it back. Let’s look at a few of the most likely causes and the options you have to reverse the decline.
Do you actually have a traffic problem or a tracking problem?
Before you start to panic about your traffic drop, you need to confirm that it is not a tracking issue. Sometimes, your analytics tools may have a problem with their setup or data collection. To check this, you can look at other data sources, such as Google Search Console, or use another tool to compare your traffic numbers. If you see a difference, you may have to repair your tracking code, change your settings, or reach out to your analytics provider for help.
Has there been an algorithm update?
Google (and other search engines) update their algorithms on a regular basis to provide better results for users. These updates can affect how websites appear in the search engines, and sometimes, they can cause some sites, possibly including yours, to lose visibility and a lot of traffic. To monitor if there has been an algorithm change, you can use tools like MozCast, Ahrefs, SEMrush Sensor, or Rank Ranger to measure the changes of the search results. You can also follow industry news and blogs to find out about the latest changes and best practices.
Has AI stolen your traffic?
The way users interact with search engines is constantly evolving, driven by advancements in technology. Recent developments, such as AI-driven search experiences (e.g., Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Chat, and ChatGPT), are reshaping how information is discovered and consumed.
These features often provide immediate answers directly in the search results, reducing click-through rates to traditional organic listings. Voice search and visual search tools, such as Google Lens, are also becoming increasingly popular, particularly on mobile devices, and may prioritize different types of content, such as FAQs or visually rich pages.
To adapt, ensure your content is optimized for featured snippets, conversational queries, and multimedia elements. Additionally, stay updated on changes to search engine interfaces and algorithms driven by AI to refine your SEO strategy accordingly. By anticipating and responding to these technological shifts, you can protect and even grow your organic traffic in the face of change.
Are there technical issues on your site?
Your traffic can also drop if your site has technical problems that affect how it is crawled and indexed. To find and solve any technical problems, you can use Google Search Console to see any errors, alerts, and messages. Some of the usual issues to watch out for are:
- Robots.txt file preventing important pages or resources from being accessed.
Check whether important pages have been de-indexed or are not being crawled. Google Search Console’s “Coverage” and “Pages” reports can help you identify these pages. - Links or redirects that don’t work
- Low loading speed or bad mobile usability
- Content that is duplicated or too shallow
- Meta tags that are missing or wrong
- Do you have a content cannibalization issue? This can happen when internal competition between similar content pieces targeting the same keywords or topics dilutes rankings and traffic. Your best bet in this situation is to start with a full content audit and then consolidate or rewrite the overlapping pages.
Another option is to use a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to perform a thorough crawl of your site and identify any possible issues. You should be using tools like these anyway – it is important to monitor your technical health over time and compare it with the previous crawl to see if things are getting better or worse. Catching technical issues early will minimize the impact of mistakes that might have been made on the site, or issues that have crept in over time.
Have your rankings or keyword positions changed?
A quick check in your rank tracker will tell you if your rankings have dropped for your core keywords. A drop in rankings will almost certainly result in a drop in traffic, so this should be your first sanity check. If you don’t see any obvious ranking losses in your rank tracker, check the top search queries in Search Console (sort by clicks) and see if the average position has declined over the past months. If there are obvious patterns you will have a good starting point for a recovery plan, which will probably start with reviewing your content.
Has your content quality changed?
Another possible reason for your traffic drop is that your content quality has changed. Things to review include:
- Are you following Google’s EEAT guidelines: Expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness?
- Is your content being written for human readers and not search engines?
- Does your content align with the searcher’s intent?
- Do you have clear page titles and compelling meta descriptions
- Review your content length and depth
- Ensure your content is fresh and updated frequently for relevance
- Check your content structure and readability
- Review internal and external links
- Assess social signals and user engagement
- Have you recently started using lower quality AI generated content?
- Has your content strategy changed and you’ve started creating content that is not as closely aligned with your client’s needs or the services you provide?
Use Google’s Useful Content checklist to evaluate your content quality and use analytics or search console to identify content groups or even individual pages that might be driving the decline in traffic. Depending on your business category you might want to look at using storytelling techniques and adding more imagery or videos on your pages.
Local SEO Issues
If you are a local business, you should check and audit your Google Business Profile and reviews. Local search ranking shifts can impact your traffic significantly. In some cases, we see businesses that get over half their organic traffic through their GBP, and any loss here would cause a sharp drop in traffic and leads.
Have you changed your marketing strategy or website design?
It’s possible that your traffic drop may be the result of a shift in your marketing strategy or a result of a website update or redesign. It is common for a reduction in paid advertising spend to cause a drop in your organic traffic. Significant changes to your website layout, structure or navigation may have affected how your website is crawled, the user experience, or the conversion rate. To determine if this is the case, review your marketing campaigns and site analytics to see if there is any correlation with your traffic changes.
Do you have new competitors?
A common reason for a drop in traffic is that you have new, stronger competitors in your category or industry. The search engine results pages for worthwhile search queries are competitive and some of your traffic may have gone to other websites that have similar or better content, or possibly better products or services. To evaluate the competition, use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to see who is ranking for your target keywords, how they measure up to you in terms of traffic, backlinks, and content quality, and what they are doing differently or better than you. You can also use tools like BuzzSumo, Social Blade, or SimilarWeb to see how they are doing on social media, content marketing, and audience engagement.
How to create a plan for recovery and track your progress
Once you have a decent hypothesis as to the root cause for your lost traffic, it is time to make a plan for recovery. Depending on the source and extent of your traffic problem, you may need several different approaches such as:
- Fixing any technical errors or issues on your site
- Updating or creating new content that matches the user intent, answers their questions, and adds value.
- Optimizing your site for speed, mobile-friendliness, and user experience
- Building or earning more relevant, quality (non-spammy) backlinks
- Adjusting or expanding your keyword and content strategy
- Changing your marketing channels and updating your campaigns
- Monitoring and benchmarking your competitors and industry trends
To track your recovery use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, or a reliable rank tracker to see how your traffic, rankings, and conversions are improving over time. You can also use Looker Studio (Google Data Studio), Power BI, DashThis, or Databox to create custom dashboards and reports that visualize your data and performance.
Of course, if things are looking dire, you can always reach out to us. We help businesses go from decline to recover and on to growth all the time.
Want to grow quality leads for your business? We’ve got you covered.
