This was a great article on the Ahrefs blog by Despina Gavoyannis. In this article she creates a step-by-step SOP that guides you through how to analyze a sudden decline in organic traffic. She provides eight different steps that site owners can walk through when analyzing a website traffic drop:
1. Verify The Traffic Drop: Use different tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Analytics & Search Console to verify that the drop is actually occurring. Sometimes it can just be a glitch in the data.
2. Look At Recent Algorithm Updates: Algorithm updates happen all the time and it's easy to miss one. You can use "Google Search Status Dashboard" to see if Google has reported a ranking update. You can also use Ahrefs/GA or other tools to overlay algorithm updates on your traffic timeline charts.
3. Review Large Scale Technical Issues: Next, you'll want to be sure you're not seeing a large scale technical issues hurt site performance. Using an auditing tools to check for any many technical issues. For instance, I look for site wide 4xx errors, noindex tag, blocked crawls.
4. Check For Content Changes: This is often one of the biggest reasons for a drop. A site changes a massive amount of content without an SEO realizing - which impacts the content quality and optimization. Despina notes how you can use Ahrefs "Content Changes" feature to see exactly what content has changed.
5. Look At Your Page Growth: You should also look at the total number of pages on your site. If you're seeing that traffic dropped and you lost a bunch of pages, these pages may have been key to organic traffic. You can do this by using Ahref's "Organic Pages" report.
6. Review Competitors: You'll also want to see if any key competitors have seen big market share increases while you've dropped. In your ranking tools, you can add your competitors to see their organic traffic trends. If you notice any going up around the same time you saw declines, they might be winning on queries you used to perform well for.
7. Document Your Findings: Along the way, you'll want to structure your findings into a formal report that you can provide to your client or key stakeholders.
8. Monitor Improvement: Finally, you'll want to ensure that you have monitoring systems in place (traffic, rankings, conversions) to be able to report on whether or not you're improving from any proposed changes.
Loved this article and found some interested reports within Ahrefs to use for analyzing large drops in organic traffic.
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