SEO Traffic Dropped Overnight

How Can I Recover My Organic Traffic?

Losing traffic overnight is alarming for any business, no matter if they are a side-hustle, an independent tutor, a live performer, or an enterprise level company doing e-commerce or lead generation. A businesses income is tied to online performance, and when that suddenly dips, panic sets in.

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Luckily, North West SEO has 10 years experiencing of seeing traffic disappearing overnight - and fixing it - so we understand how time is of the essence when it comes to recovering your traffic.

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With that in mind, we will walk you through our process of identifying the core issue (is it you? is it Google?) and then remedying. While there is no need to panic, time is of course of the essence, as we aim to resolve the cause before Google's next crawl.

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This article makes the following assumptions:

• You have Google Search Console set up

• You have Bing Webmaster Tools set up

• You have a web analytics tool set up (like Google Analytics (GA4)).

• You have access to Screaming Frog or a web crawler, or else or confident enough with Google Sheets to use that as a web crawler (this will require a custom script).

 

How To Troubleshoot Sudden Traffic Drop

​We begin the process by asking ourselves if traffic has dropped because rankings have tanked overnight, or is measured traffic simply no longer being read. The former is an SEO issue, the latter an analytics issue. We begin by confirming that the issue is on our end.

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• Is it a tracking or analytics issue?

  • Occasionally website tracking breaks during website updates, so while Google Analytics (GA4) says there’s no traffic, leads and sales are still coming through, so the issue will be one of having no visibility of the various channels, not of the channels having broken down.

  • Test your customer journey to confirm that there is no traffic, and not loss of tracking visibility. If loss of tracking visibility, then you need to troubleshoot your GA4 or Google Tag Manager.

• It’s not a tracking issue - I’ve visited my website and analytics is showing my visits, but there’s far less visits than usual.

  • So, organic traffic has dropped, and it'll be because rankings have dropped. We now troubleshoot the scope of the drop. We need to know: 

    • Is it your whole website, or just specific pages?

    • Has Google lowered your rankings?

    • Is there a technical issue with your website?

• If it’s an issue with your website, that’s a problem that is easily remedied. If it’s from Google’s end, then recovering is a slow, hard-work process. We’ll cover both.

 

Check For Website Technical Issues That Have Caused Rankings To Drop

We’ll begin by checking your website, with a Screaming Frog crawl. While we’re at it we’ll connect Google Search Console API to the crawl. This will help us check two potential issues with one crawl:

• Are all your pages indexable for search engines? If not, which ones aren’t? We simply head to those pages in your CMS, and set them to index by removing the ‘no-index’ instruction, or by disabling the robots.txt block instruction. The question remains how and why they were set to no index, but as an SEO professional, it’s not my job to judge; it’s my job to fix.

• Are your canonical URLs pointing to irrelevant pages? If you've updated your CMS, your dev site could be out of sync with your live site, and upon publishing the dev site, any inconsistencies will have been published, such as incorrect canonical URLs, incorrect title tags, incorrect indexing instructions... thankfully, once these issues are identified, they are easy to fix, if manual. Spend your day fixing these.

• Following this, head on over to Google Search Console, and re-submit for indexing, and wait for Google to re-crawl. Do the same on Bing Webmaster Tools.

 

It’s Not My Website, It’s A Google-Side Issue

So, we’ve established that your traffic has dropped due to Google, not a technical error on your website. This is serious, because unlike an accidental no-indexing of your homepage, there is no button we can press to make it better.

 

Check The SERPs

First we check Google search results - has a new feature launched that siphons traffic from all the results? Zero-click results often mean that Google prefers to answer queries in the search results, meaning there is less traffic going to all websites, regardless of rankings. These new features can be frustrating, however, our websites exist for transactions, not to answer questions. Therefore the bright side is that traffic that will arrive to websites will be high-converting. It will also mean that branded searches will be more valuable than ever.

 

How do you fix this? Keep working hard to rank well, but also a level of accepting that the top of the funnel, informational intent, traffic will forever be low, unless the searching public choose en-masse to avoid Googles many informational-answering features.

 

It's Not A SERP Feature It's A Ranking Update

There’s no new feature.  Your rankings have definitely dropped. But there is still troubleshooting to be done.

Head to Google Search Console - is there a notification that there’s been a manual penalty?

 

If a penalty, Google’s team will let you know what your issue is, and you need to address the issue immediately. 

 

If we can rule this out, and it's most likely we can, then we know that the rankings and traffic drop is due to your website’s content. That means we need to be honest and reflective and ask ourselves ‘why is Google choosing to not show my content?’

 

It’s not a punishment, it’s simply Google choosing a different student in the class to answer the question, with the exception that Google is a teacher that only chooses its favourites. Still, you know where you stand, and the hard graft begins.

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• Audit titles and descriptions​

• Audit page cannibalization (Are 2 or more URLs competing for 1 keyword - check GSC), and remove redundant pages

• Audit page content - are any pages too thin? Are there new topics you can cover? Tables, charts?

• Audit content up-to-datedness - are you citing old sources? Is your information older than 2 years old? Plenty of businesses focus on their keeping a handful of core pages up-to-date, but forget to maintain 80% of their site, leaving most pages to become 5-years+ out-of-date, despite their CMS auto-updating 'last edited' dates on the top of the page.

 

Sometimes it's just time for a full overhaul of everything.

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Our guide to recovering from ranking updates examines the process in greater detail.

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Is It My Backlinks?

Backlinks are always important to SEO, and it could very well be your competitors have a stronger backlink profile than you - in which case keep acquiring new links as you go. However, it is very unlikely that it is any one backlink in your profile. Google ignores junk links. You could have strong links to a non-related niche that may be confusing Google, but so long as your focus is to build relationships with other businesses and be helpful, all new backlinks are good backlinks.

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Get Help To Recover Your Lost SEO Traffic

If this seems overwhelming, that's because it is. If you need additional support in recovering your traffic drop, North West SEO is an organic traffic specialist that has the experience to be able to help you. Contact us today.