If you’ve ever experienced a sudden drop in organic traffic, it’s horrific. You’ve either lost something you worked so hard to build up, or you now place way more value on a channel you’ve neglected and just left to grow naturally.
Fear not. Every SEO in the country is there to save you with their shit capes and fire extinguishers. So, just fill out the contact page below, and we’ll help you out. We’ll only charge a 20% premium instead of 25%.
Yes, that’s not what this post is about. I’ve experienced this drop so many times and below is a very practical (hopefully!) thought process I would take to isolating the issue so you can follow similar steps to get to the route cause of the problem and take action from there.
To set expectations, you should probably still talk to at least one of the cape crusaders to get a second opinion, but at least after this post, you’ll be able to say, “This is the issue—what do you think?” instead of “help!” There’s a big difference, and SEOs have a fantastic desperation radar.
Step zero in this list is to rule out a tracking issue. I’ve seen some terrible tracking setups in the past; if you see a drop in SEO traffic, view this to Direct traffic; if Direct is correlating, this is usually a tracking issue. You can also fall back on GSC, another semi-reliable source of SEO performance. So if GA or your analytics tool has dropped but GSC is completely fine, then it could be tracking issues.