Wondering what affects organic traffic or experiencing drops in organic monthly traffic? Read the 5 reasons why you may see your organic traffic on the decline and the best ways to reignite organic website traffic growth.
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic flows to your site from search engines. It accounts for every user that searches for a term and clicks on your website on their search engine results page. It doesn’t include users explicitly looking for your site or those who click on a paid ad to get there.
In a nutshell, organic search traffic is earned from a search engine like Google, not paid.
How can I measure organic traffic?
Google Analytics is a great tool to measure your site and digital marketing performance, though an even more ideal tool to look at Google organic traffic is Google Search Console.
You can register your domain and subdomains in Search Console for free and monitor organic search Google Analytics trends for the last 18 months. You can analyze patterns and fluctuations in your data through the Performance report – if there’s a drop in SEO organic traffic, you’ll see it there first.
5 Reasons for a Drop in Organic Traffic
Why did my organic traffic drop?
If you’ve been monitoring your site data and noticed a steady or sudden drop in website traffic, it can be a significant cause for concern. Since our site traffic indicates the health of our overall business, reach, and user interest, it becomes difficult to convert visitors to customers if you don’t have any.
Look at our top reasons why you can see a drop in organic traffic Google Analytics and how best to nip the issue in the bud to continue building interest and revenue for your business.
Reason #1: Google’s Algorithm has changed.
Google is on a mission to build the most powerful, user-friendly search engine in the world – and maintain it.
It’s estimated that Google updates its algorithm 500 to 600 times a year, continually making incremental changes to improve its user experience.
If you’re left wondering, “Why are my impressions dropping?” when nothing is different on your website, something outside your website, in Google’s organic web traffic algorithm, may have changed.
Google’s updates may hurt your ranking if your site doesn’t fit their evolving search standards. While this can be an incredibly frustrating experience, use it as an opportunity to make your website better. If Google’s algorithm aligns with user behaviors and desires, any changes you make will improve their experience on your site.
The Fix: Monitor Google algorithm changes, proactively change your site before algorithm updates are implemented, and adapt your SEO approach accordingly. Most often, these updates relate to speed, quality, or trustworthiness. There are plenty of informative online resources to help you through updates, and Google often releases webmaster guides to help you, too.
Reason #2: Recent technical changes to site structure.
Technical changes are necessary to keep your site current, like changing your site address or redesigning the layout, infrastructure, and content delivery. Whenever you make major technical changes your organic analytics and traffic might drop temporarily or permanently.
The Fix: When you make major site changes, monitoring your metrics and fine-tuning the details to optimize your new content is crucial. Find out which change is causing the visitor loss and work to remedy it immediately. Though an overhaul may cause an initial drop, with directed efforts, you can work to get more organic traffic than ever.
Reason #3: Getting dinged by Google.
While Google will push you down the ranks for low-quality content, you can face harsher penalization if you break any of their rules. For example, the results can be catastrophic if you plagiarize content, buy backlinks, or have numerous broken links and site errors.
If you’re using unfair tactics to push your Google rank higher artificially, the black marks on your record will pile up quickly.
The Fix: Google hates Blackhat SEO. If you’ve been engaging in dishonest practices, stop immediately. Unfortunately, it takes time to recover from a Google penalty, so work to rebuild your site and wait it out – or start with a new URL and do things the right way from the jump. Custom create your content, don’t plagiarize, don’t buy links, and use keywords reasonably.
Reason #4: You’re ignoring Google trends and seasonality.
Evergreen content is integral to a strong content strategy, but if you’re ignoring trends, you’re missing out on a considerable part of the market. When you can track the opinions and interests of your core audience and target market, you understand their motivations and can build strong content around them.
If your consumers’ interests change and you don’t create content that appeals to those topics, they’ll find that information elsewhere. Again, seasonality plays an important role here – the most crucial search terms in December are often vastly different than those in June.
The Fix: Use social listening tools and Google Trends to understand your user base’s changing interests and the shifting popularity of relevant search terms. When you see people searching more or less for certain things, you can design content that keeps drawing them toward your site – and away from your competitors. To address seasonality, compare seasons to those in previous years and build a solid strategy to increase organic traffic.
Reason #5: Your content is boring.
If your content, titles, and descriptions contain the “right” keywords but aren’t interesting to read, you’ll slowly slide to the bottom of the ranks. A good keyword strategy is only half the battle – your content should be catchy, entertaining, and informative. You need to put genuine efforts into making content that pops, which boosts user experience and, ultimately, your Google rank.
The Fix: Take the time to write great content on every page. If it isn’t a great piece, trash it – no content is better than bad content. If you don’t have strong writing skills or the time to invest in a strong content strategy, hire a professional writer who can create killer content!
Get More Organic Traffic
As a website design company in Burlington & Hamilton, we’re SEO experts that can help you get organic traffic back on track. Contact us to learn more and get a free cost estimate.
