What to do when your website’s search traffic suddenly dropped

By Roman Berezhnoi February 17, 2022 646 views

What to do when your website’s search traffic suddenly dropped

No matter what your site is about, you need visitors. If your search traffic drops, that’s a problem. What would cause a sudden drop in search traffic?

The fair answer is “It depends on many factors” and it is honest. But this answer can’t satisfy frustrated website owners who lose visitors, sales, and money. 

Hopefully, you are able to diagnose why things might have changed.

How did you know that search traffic dropped?

Unfortunately many website owners, SEOs, and marketers still use 3rd-party SEO tools that generate information about a website’s SEO performance. If you’ve seen a sudden drop in traffic on a 3rd-party SEO tool’s dashboard, you should ask for the support of this SEO software. Anyway, they’re not reliable sources of information for your own sites’ traffic.

You need to know, that the most reliable information you’ll find is provided directly by the search engines themselves. It’s all available for free. Also, you can use web tracking tools like Google Analytics.

Well, many searchers use Google and it means you should use Google Search Console. F5 Studio’s SEOs prefer using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Before you start asking questions about your problem you should check your Google Search Console data. Have you noticed a sudden drop in search traffic? Compare your clicks to the previous period and to the last year. Year-over-year (YOY) measures statistical changes against the same time period last year. It is a simple task if you use Google Search Console or other webmaster tools.

Why do you need the analysis? In some cases, the cause of a sudden drop in search traffic can be just seasonal fluctuations. 

If you have noticed a drop in search traffic by using a web tracking tool like Google Analytics, you should check web tracking code implementation. Did web developers or website administrators change something on a website? Was the script implemented correctly? Does it send data to reports?

If it is really a drop in search traffic, you need to check further.

Manual actions

Manual action will be issued against your site if Google’s system finds violations on their webmaster guidelines here. If your site continues to rank on other search engines like Bing, this is an almost sure sign that you are suffering from Google’s manual actions.

You can see if your site has been affected by manual actions by using the report of the manual action in Google Search Console.

If you got a penalty, it means you or your SEOs have used unethical SEO tactics. You have to fix that.

Technical issues that prevent crawling and indexation

Did someone change a robots.txt file? Did someone change website SEO settings?
The easiest way to find technical issues is using site: operator. Open Google search, type site:yoursite, and look at the results. If you can see a home page and other main pages in the SERP, it seems your site has no important problem.

Check the coverage report in your Google Search Console. Do you see 5xx issues? These issues can affect the indexing process. How many pages are valid? Look at the list of excluded pages to be sure that Google didn’t exclude the main pages of your website from its index.

Also, you can use URL inspection tools to inspect the home page, category pages, several products or services pages, blog pages. Do you see the technical issues? Were these pages indexed by Google?

If you find technical issues, you have to fix them.

Hacking the site

Check your Google Search Console report. Do you see the notifications of security issues? Sometimes Google can’t identify security issues. If you have no experience in scanning website security vulnerabilities, you should contact experts. 

Content was stolen

Someone can steal your content and even use your website design. F5 Studio’s team had the experience when one “web agency” just copied the F5 Studio’s website.

How can you fix this issue? F5 Studio’s SEOs share their experience in the article what to do when your site content was stolen.

SERP changes

Many SEOs think that you should notice ranking changes if you noticed changes in clicks. The facts prove that this is not the case.

There are times when you might notice a drop in clicks that are not a result of anything directly related to your website. Google has often made changes to the type of results based on searchers’ behavior. Also, your competitors could add new content on their sites or change something on their sites.

Honestly, SERP changes very rarely lead to a sudden drop in website traffic. In most cases, you can see a gradual week-by-week decline in search traffic. 

If you notice ranking losses and drops in traffic, you should use Google Search Console to analyze SEO performance by keywords, pages, countries, and search type (Web, Images, Video, News). 

Anyway, you should perform the SEO audit, content audit of your site, and analyze competitors’ websites.

In most cases, you can prevent a sudden drop in organic traffic. How to do that? Read this article about the ways to prevent drops in search traffic.

Google Core updates

Google doesn’t hide away from the fact that it releases multiple updates throughout the year, some more significant than others. But Google updates aren’t designed to penalize websites. But every time SEOs, marketers, and website owners understandably freak out when these major systemic changes happen. Usually, Google updates rarely lead to a sudden drop in website traffic.

Sure, Google updates may affect your website’s SEO performance. Updated algorithms can find the content of other sites more interesting. Honestly, these algorithms can make mistakes. In this case, what you can do is wait for the next generation of Google search algorithms and rules. Your site can recover after the next Google updates. 

But many SEOs and site owners make the same mistakes again and again. They try to understand which “ranking factor” was changed. It is the wrong approach to solve the problem because Google is a large system. No one can predict the results of updates because many “baby algorithms”, systems are updated by many groups of Google’s engineers. Also, Google doesn’t confirm every wild speculation about massive updates the SEO community produces.

If you notice a drop in traffic again, you should think in a new way. The old ways of thinking haven’t proven to be any help to people who keep losing visitors from Google search.

What can you do to recover your website SEO performance?

There are common ways to improve your site:

  • Improve your website information architecture and change website navigation. This low-cost way can boost your website SEO performance
  • Improve your website content. It is not a cheap way, but it can help you. Unfortunately, many website owners mistakenly believe that their content is “quality and unique”
  • Refresh/redesign your website, improve the essential elements of UI UX design of your site. 

You need to improve your website for your visitors if you want to be rewarded by search engines. 

Some SEO myths about sudden drops in traffic

If you search for possible reasons why your site traffic dropped, you will find many articles. Also, you will find many SEO myths.

Keyword cannibalization

In this way, SEOs describe the practice of publishing multiple articles targeting the same keyword on a single website. There is no search engine guideline that forbids anyone from getting two or more pages in the search results.

If you get lucky and accidentally land two pages into your targeted query’s search results, it means you did a great SEO job.

Also, it is Google Search’s features now. It makes your site more visible in the SERP.

Lost backlinks

Many SEOs think the reason your search ranking and traffic might have dropped is that you’ve lost backlinks. They will check your site for lost backlinks using a tool (e.g., Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz, etc.).

People trust the tools’ evaluations and take action on the basis of what those tools tell them. But you should not be using SEO link evaluation tools to evaluate links.  That’s the craziest thing.

These tools have no access to search engines data. The tool vendors are careful to disclaim their data and their methods.  You just waste your time.

You can analyze your referral traffic using Google Analytics. If you notice a drop in referral traffic, it may mean that someone deleted links to your site. But it doesn’t be a reason for drops in your website search traffic.

Negative SEO (SEO attack) 

Negative SEO is a set of activities aimed at decreasing a competitor’s site rankings in search engines’ results. These activities may include knowingly building spammy, unnatural links to the site, content scraping, and even hacking the site. 

Usually, negative SEO means building spammy, unnatural links to the site. This myth is based on toxic backlink myths. Honestly, Google mostly doesn’t give a damn about the backlinks that are bothering SEO tools. If someone wants to hurt your SEO, they can use less-expensive ways to outrank youк site and damage your business reputation.

In most cases, Google ignores spammy links, and pointing “toxic links” at other people’s websites is mostly a waste of time.

The myth of the Google update

As I wrote above Google updates may affect your website’s SEO performance. But website owners, digital marketers, and SEOs should approach all unofficial announcements and analyses of search algorithm updates and effects with great skepticism. 

When Google began updating its algorithms and indexes in continuous mode, all the old approaches died. SEOs just squander their power in the constant chase for algorithmic secrets. Neither Bing nor Google can control what people do with a web search. People add content, delete content, change content constantly which makes the results of any updates unpredictable.

If you lose the search traffic you may need to take action. That is not necessarily a given. If you just wait it out your traffic may return. That often happens.

Conclusions

If your site suddenly dropped in traffic, you should check technical things in the first place. Use Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster tools instead of paying for “tools” or SEO services.

In some cases, a sudden drop in traffic may mean that you need to improve the UX design, content, navigation of your site. But sometimes you just have to wait for website traffic recovery.

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