Seo

Diagnosing organic traffic drops

First, it’s important to understand why you’re losing traffic. This is a good article that goes into greater depth on how to determine the real reason for a traffic drop (or flattening) which may be:

A loss in rank due to algorithm updates.

A drop in impressions due to a change in what’s displayed in search results (such as ads and search features like featured snippets, https://gianijohalofficial.com people also ask, etc.).

A drop in click-through rate due to a mix of the above reasons.

Additionally, you’ll want to dig deeper to see which specific pages are at issue. Identify the time frame you’re looking at:

If you’re seeing a steady decline, note the previous high and where the decline has been.

If traffic is flat, note the period where it plateaued.

From there, you can start to look at date-range comparisons such as:

The period where traffic dropped versus the previous period.

The low versus the previous high if there was a drop.

If traffic is flat: the most recent block of 28 days versus the 28 days where traffic was still growing.

As you dive into these comparisons, just be conscious of any seasonality and day-of-week differences that may mean your comparisons would be apples to oranges.

Once you know which date ranges you want to compare, you can start to see the pages that have lost the most traffic. You can do this in Google Search Console by clicking on date: