6 Things to Check for When Your Organic Traffic Suddenly Drops

Sometimes traffic to a website drops unexpectedly and the reason for this is not always perfectly clear. There are a few things to check when trying to ascertain why traffic has dropped precipitously. The first is to check your Google Search Console – it will tell you a lot about your traffic patterns. You can also check the tracking code, which could be a case of unreliable data. Also be sure to see if the Google algorithm has changed and whether or not that has affected traffic to your website. You can also look at link losses and referral traffic. Aside from that, look at changes you may have made recently to the site and its quality.

Key Takeaways:

Changes to your website code or even analytics plug-ins can create problems for the tracking code, issues in analytics reporting can arise.
Whenever your organic traffic drops, you go through the usual reactions. There’s panic, confusion, and a sense of uncertainty about how to make things go in the right direction again.
That’s why Search Console should be your automatic starting point to discover what happened to your website traffic.

“Sometimes sites are changed for business reasons, and SEO isn’t the top priority. If you recently went through a site redesign or migration, and subsequently saw a drop in traffic, you’ll need to check and see if you unintentionally broke or de-optimized something on your website in the process.”