Why Has My Organic Traffic Dropped?

Before you can determine why your organic traffic has dropped, you need to determine whether this drop was gradual or sudden.

Sudden drops in organic traffic can be caused by your website having noindex tags accidentally added. When a site is moved from a test environment to a live site, the developers sometimes forget to remove these noindex tags. If they were left on the site, they will deindex your site. To check for this, if you use WordPress for your site, go to Settings, then go to Reading, then Search Engine Visibility. Make sure the box that states “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not checked.

If your site is hacked and you have malware on your site, this can cause your site to be removed from the SERPS. Google protects the user, so if they deem your site harmful, they will deindex it.

Gradual drops, on the other hand, can be caused by a Google core algorithm update that has seen other websites gain traffic and rankings above your site. This update is used to help Google improve the way their system assesses content overall. This can lead to some pages not performing as well, while under-performing pages may do better.

The most common reason for a gradual drop is that your competitors have a more aggressive SEO strategy, allowing them to take over the organic visibility on Google. This means they have earned some of the rankings you used to hold. To remedy this, start by performing a complete analysis of your competitor’s SEO strategies to find ways you can improve your SEO and increase your organic traffic.