However, you may also encounter a more troubling effect: an active decline in the organic traffic your site is receiving. It’s rare and highly unlikely that you’ll face a manual penalty from Google, but it’s the most identifiable root cause of the problem. If you are facing such a penalty, your organic traffic will steeply and instantly drop, and you’ll receive a notification in Google Search Console saying that your site has been penalized. If you aren’t facing a manual penalty, your next step is to determine the main areas of your traffic drop. First, your competitors may be investing more in their own SEO campaigns, outperforming you in the process. Second, your own site could have declined for other reasons, giving your competitors the opportunity to improve their positions. So, a sudden, unexpected change in your link profile could cause a drop in rankings, and, therefore, in organic traffic. Audit your on-site content. If manual penalties, competition and links aren’t the source of your drop in organic traffic, the cause could be the quality of your on-site content. However, there are some straightforward ones; sometimes, removing enough bad links or building new, strong ones is enough to correct the problem, but it usually still takes weeks to months for Google’s search index to reflect your changes.
In a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, the ideal result is a steady, ongoing and reliable increase in organic traffic — meaning the measure of the number of people visiting your website after finding it in organic searches.
At some points, you might reach a plateau where your organic traffic levels off and refuses to increase further; this is generally temporary and acceptable, a natural effect of the long-term landscape of an SEO campaign, which has hundreds of factors at play.
However, you may also encounter a more troubling effect: an active decline in the organic traffic your site is receiving. A small dip is no immediate cause for concern (it may just be a temporary drop in consumer interest); but if that dip lasts for more than a few weeks or turns into a more significant drop, you’ll need to troubleshoot the problem to see what’s going on.
Check for a manual penalty.
First, you’ll want to check for a manual penalty. It’s rare and highly unlikely that you’ll face a manual penalty from Google, but it’s the most identifiable root cause of the problem. If you are facing such a penalty, your organic traffic will steeply and instantly drop, and you’ll receive a notification in Google Search Console saying that your site has been penalized.
If you don’t see both of those signs, you’re probably in the clear. But if you have received a penalty, you’ll need to correct the problem that caused it, such as bad or plagiarized content, or spammy, “black-hat” optimization tactics. Then you should appeal the penalty with Google or wait for it to be lifted.
Pinpoint specific traffic drops.
If you aren’t facing a manual penalty, your next step is to determine the main areas of your traffic drop. Though your entire site may be experiencing a cumulative drop, it’s more likely that the drop can be traced to a handful of specific pages, or specific keyword terms.
You can use this information to guide the rest of your examination; if there’s one page for which traffic has disappeared, for example, you can narrow your focus to that page’s competition, links, and content, as you’ll see in…
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