Businesses from different industries treat their online presence seriously and which spots their websites rank in Google or other search engines becomes even more significant if the nature of their business involves selling products and services in high online competition. Online businesses from all different business industries put in special efforts to ensure their top rankings in Google that guarantees them high traffic and subsequently more business growth.

However, even when you are doing you best to keep your rankings as high as possible, there are a vast number of things that can go wrong under the radar and yet have devastating effects on your rankings disrupting the whole business flow and requiring hours and hours of digging in to find out what actually went wrong. The worst part is that you don’t actually have to make a mistake or mess up something for you to get penalized, just a Google update or a change caused by any of your competitors for instance, can make you lose your top ranking.

In an unfortunate instance where you observe a major or even a substantial drop in your organic SEO traffic, there are a number of things that your should be looking for. Start with the 10 listed below and more often than not, you will get to the roots of the problem:

1: Did a Recent Google Algorithm Update Cause It?

Ask an SEO expert about how significant and sometimes not so warmly welcomed Google updates can be and they will tell you how much they Dred them. Google keeps updating their algorithms, no doubt for the better in the long term and for every fair business or SEO expert out there, but even the most fair policies sometimes can have some hidden shortcuts that will be penalized by the next or the one after that Google update.

The good folks at Search Engine Land are some of the fastest and most reliable when it comes to publishing all the new or upcoming Google updates, be sure to subscribe to their newsletter or visit their page often enough to keep yourself updated with what’s happening in the SEO community. Keeping in mind the fact that changes caused by a Google update can be pretty stealthy and you just will now know what happened until you figure out the update caused it, you should be looking at more pages than just the Search Engine Land.

2: Is the Hit Specific to Any One of Your Segments?

When you have multiple categories and a combination of products and services contributing to your overall accumulated traffic, the best practice is to segment the data until something interesting is to be found. Here, you will be concentrating on a single or even a couple of segments that have lost traffic the most or even completely. These can be segments with many products or services in them or just individual products or services usually associated with considerable amount of traffic.

Another thing worth looking into is if there is a problem in your mobile or desktop searches and traffic through them. Different pages with different targets on them can cause this too. It’s best to investigate the problem in detail and work accordingly.

3: Is Your Site Being Penalized?

If you haven’t made any significant changes to your website or pages, chances are that this will not be the case but yet it is one of those creepy things that can pop up any minute and cause problems for your SEO traffic. The best way to judge if you have been penalized most of the times is to check if your website is showing up in searches at all, if you are, you need to move on and if you are not, you are definitely being penalized.

The best place to look for is your Search Console for any messages relevant to penalties by searching for your brand name on Google. If there is something going on in there, you should be able to find out here and then plan your next moves accordingly.

4: Did the Drop Happen Just When You Made Any Significant Changes?

These major or significant changes can be one of many, if you have migrated one of many new URLs, if you updated all your title tags, if you removed your navigation menu or if you shift to a different JavaScript framework, all of these and many more changes can cause a sudden drop in your SEO traffic. You should be able to tell any significant new changes that you might have made to your website and it should be pretty easy to identify them even if there are more than one.

Unfortunately, in any of these scenarios, you will have to go back to basics and resolve the problem organically, you will not lose your website weightage and following all the instruction safely, you can get all your traffic back pretty quickly.

5: Is a Competitor Doing That Much Better Than You?

The next best thing to check for is if any of your serious competitors are doing better than you for their site’s SEO. There are a few great tools that can get you started looking for any competitors taking you over in the SEO game. The SEMRush,s Ranking Distribution Report is often just what you need or alternatively you can check out BrignEdge’s Share of Voice or the GetStat’s Share of voice as well performing the same functionalities for the most part.

In case if you have lost rankings and the traffic coming is much lower than before, you should start investigating specific keywords that are no longer showing up and work out if there is a definite trend. The questions to ask can be:

• Did any of your competitors launch a new category or products page that is effecting your ranking significantly?
• Did competitors add new content to their existing pages giving them better SEO rankings?
• Do your competitor’s websites have more internal links posting these pages that the number you have?

Sometimes, it can also be that a new competitor altogether joined the game and took it by storm disrupting the existence balance and share of SEO every old player had.

6: Has Any of the Search Engine Pages You Care About Changed Recently?

This is another factor that can affect your SEO performance greatly and you can check the SERPs that are significant to you manually or use some professional tools like the Moz’s SERP features report to do the job for you. One possibility could be that Google has started to answer most of your relevant queries directly in search results like you get from a Google search in a highlighted result perfect for voices based results or even typed ones, added a local pack or put an image carousel on them, etc. Any of these changes by Google in the search engine pages will have negative affect on you SEO traffic.

Google has started answering queries taken from trusted sites right below the search bar to in increased fonts and a relevant image attached with it, this has indeed helped users get better, faster and easier results but unfortunately, has guided many people away from clicking on top ranked results.

7: Is Your Branded or Unbranded Traffic Contributing to the Drop Specifically?

Branded traffic works great for famous brands and adds to your SEO traffic a great deal as well when managed correctly. For websites and managers who save their historical Search Console Data, analyzing this data through AdWords (if you employ paid searches) is a great idea. Another effective and much simpler proxy to branded traffic is homepage traffic (homepage traffic for most sites is often branded).

There are other instances that may cause your brand to get ignored by people and hence decrease the branded traffic coming in. If this is the case and your branded search has gone down and contributed to the overall traffic slow down, the problem lies with brand and branding not specifically SEO.

8: Did a Page or a Bunch of Them Drop Out of Index?

This is one of the most common problems/mistakes observed when there is a large drop in SEO traffic. Coders or website editors can make this mistake so easily and with somewhat devastating effects for your site’s traffic. The Search Console’s Index Status Report will provide all the insight into if have lost a couple or even many of your URLs from being indexes. Accidental noindexing URLs or disallowing them by mistake might be the problem here and would be causing your pages to disappear into the deep dark web.

Disallowing or noindexing URLs is often done through robots.txt, meta tags on the page or HTTP headers and the fix to this is pretty simple, you should definitely look into this and resolve the problem to get your ranking and traffic back up.

9: Have You Observed a Drop in Your Referring Domains and/or Links?

Backlinks are often removed or can be no longer accessible because your referring domains could have shut down or for whatever reason in fact. This is a common problem in SEO and the only solution is to stay on top of things and keep a record of every backlink you use and regularly checking them verifying if any or many of them have dropped out.

One of the quickest and most efficient ways to verify if you have actually lost backlinks is Ahrefs, this also offers useful reports for your backlinks or referring domains also facilitating you to identify reason as to why you could have lost those important links.

10: Is Your SEO Traffic Getting Cannibalized by SEM?

SEM is a very effective paid marketing tool for any business websites and can be responsible for great incoming traffic boosting your business. The SEM team can at any time put more efforts into your paid marketing campaign in their vows to get more traffic, you can also check this by plotting your SEM vs SEO. If the answer you get is unclear, maybe the best practice is to pause your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and observing your SEO traffic for if it rebounds for those particular pages.

Some levels of SEM cannibalizing SEO are inevitable, the question is how much you want either of the two to work for you. If the clicks you get from your SEM outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, then you are better off continuing with you SEM and if the SEM costs you too much, SEO can yield better more affordable results.

At www.seo.com.pk, we are SEO experts and have the means to drive your site’s traffic very efficiently. This writing is based on providing you the right insight as to why you should be experiencing a significant drop in your SEO traffic, we do understand all this gibberish could be a bit over-the-top for the not so well informed in terms of search engines and how to optimize your sites for them. Contact us through all the different ways provided on your homepage and we will provide you much easy to understand quick solutions for your online business.