How to Investigate a Sudden Drop in Organic Traffic

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A loss in website traffic almost always leads to a drop in key metrics like sign-ups, purchases, and other requests. Investigate this using your web analytics provider or an SEO software such as Searchmetrics to determine if the loss is coming from organic traffic (SEO) or from other channels like social media, paid, etc.

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Taking a look at competitors or similar websites in your industry will help deduce whether your traffic drop could be an industry trend or isolated to your site alone.

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Google search algorithm updates can have dramatic impact on the organic traffic a site receives for relevant keywords. Outside of technical issues with your site, algorithm updates are frequently the cause of significant traffic changes.

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Knowing which keywords are losing (and gaining) the most traffic for your site helps determine which parts of your site and its content warrant further investigation.

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Similar to winning and losing keywords, looking into the traffic changes of individual directories and subdirectories can shed light on potential areas of the site that need addressing, as well as types of content that might need optimization.

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Traffic loss can also be due to technical issues on your website like 404 errors, slow page load times, poor linking practices, and more. A website crawl analysis is the quickest way to uncover (and resolve!) such issues.