If you own a website or a content marketer, you would likely watch this many times: your website traffic suddenly drops, and you're unable to explain it.
There can be many reasons behind it, including Google's Algorithm change can be the first thought in your mind.
When the traffic to your website suddenly drops, you are confused about how to correct it again. One thing is to go into depth to find the reason and prevent loss of ranking, conversions & sales loss.
Let's go through some reasons why your organic traffic dropped-
Changes in Google Algorithm
Google rolled many algorithm updates and tweaks throughout the years and continues to do so moving forward. As per a report, Google changes algorithms up to 600 times a year.
Many of the updates are minor, and major changes like hummingbird and panda can really havoc your ranking and organic traffic. That's why it's important to keep an eye on Google Algorithm update.
Blogs from Search Engine Land and WordStream are great resources for SEO updates. Once you are updated with Google's Algorithm changes, it's time to take the necessary steps.
Quality Content
One of the things that can slowly drop your traffic is the quality of the content published on your website. The previous update on Pande is specifically dealing with the quality of content on websites.
The google update on Panda intended to stop sites with bad quality content from appearing on search engine pages. Along with that Google punishes low-quality content and rewards high-quality content.
Algorithm Penalties
If your website is experiencing an unusual drop in traffic, the reason may have hit by an algorithm penalty. A penalty is issued if your website has some flagged for not following Google's Quality guidelines, and your ranking gets penalized as a result.
You can easily spot your penalties in your Google Console Account. The website may have hit by penalties due to change or update in the Google algorithm. Try to audit your website for any harmful backlinks and determine any duplicate content in your website.
Check Organic CTR
It's still in debate whether organic CTR has an impact on your website's search ranking. Still, it's important to address pages on your website that may be ranking well but running low on CTR.
Again, you can check it on Google Search Console. You can check the search traffic, impressions, and CTR of pages on your website. Sort out pages according to keywords ranking and focus on pages having low CTR.
To improve the CTR, improve page content, meta description, and title by adding clear CTA.
External and Internal Links
Losing any quality external backlink can have an impact on your website's traffic. Losing any external link or made temporarily unavailable can have a huge impact on your ranking of the website.
Use professional tools such as Ashrefs to identify the lost external link. Also, Google Analytics can also help to find the source of the external link. Refer to Google Analytics to download a report of 404 error or 301 redirect URLs.
Conclusion
If you ever experience a decline in traffic, it can be scary because less traffic means reduced conversion and less revenue. There is numerous reason that can cause a drop in traffic.
However, these are some most common that we've identified.