Why Did My Organic Traffic Drop? 14 Ways to Solve It

This article was updated on November 26th, 2025.

“Why did my organic search traffic drop?!” is a panicked question that you never want to be asking. But traffic drops happen to the best of us. 

The Forge and Smith site has had two big, unexpected organic traffic decreases in the last 10 years, so we know exactly what you’re going through. You feel like you’re doing everything right and then suddenly… *poof!* Half your traffic or more is gone. No apology, no note.  

It’s easy to rush to the conclusion that you’ve been penalized by Google, but penalties are far rarer than you might think. You have to be up to some seriously nefarious, black-hat SEO business to get deindexed. 

So let’s take a few deep breaths. If you’re looking at Google Analytics and your organic traffic has made a sharp drop, you need to figure out why it happened. 

We’ll walk through the main causes of an organic traffic drop, and recommend fixes to help you increase your organic search traffic. 

Why did my organic traffic drop? 

First let’s make sure we’re on the same page: we’re talking about a sharp drop only in organic search traffic. 

• That means traffic earned from search engines – not through ads, backlinks, email campaigns, or social media
• A drop is different from a steady decrease over several months 

Organic traffic is usually pretty steady for most small businesses. You have a business blog, you’re publishing fresh content each month, and keeping the rest of your site well-optimized. In this scenario, normally you’d only see minor monthly fluctuations and historically it was even possible to expect to see steady gains, before we all started bleeding traffic to AI search tools.

If you see what almost looks like an inverted spike in your Google Analytics data, it means something big happened and you should investigate ASAP.

Here are twelve common reasons your organic search traffic dropped:

1. Google released a broad core algorithm update, and your content was negatively impacted (most often relating to quality, speed, or trustworthiness)
2. You deleted a piece of content that was earning a high volume of organic search traffic
3. You significantly changed your site structure or a large volume of content (ie. redesigned your site, rewrote key pages, or deleted a bunch of old blog posts or resources)
4. A mistake was made while migrating to a new domain or undergoing a relaunch, and you now have a technical SEO error 
5. Your Google Analytics tracking code was altered and isn’t tracking properly, or a Google tool is experiencing a bug
6. Your site has a technical issue that’s preventing traffic from actually getting to it, such as a server problem 
7. Your site has popular seasonal or timely content and the trend has changed
8. A competitor is outranking you for the keyword(s) delivering your highest traffic volume
9. You’ve blocked content that was formerly indexed 
10. Google added yet another new search feature that is stealing clicks from your site
11. Your site has been blocked by a specific country due to social, political, or other content concerns
12. Your site has received a manual action (ie. a penalty) from Google for violating its terms

An honorary 11th possible reason is losing a backlink from a high-authority site. Although website visits from backlinks are technically ‘referral traffic’, losing such a valuable link could make Google see you as less relevant and authoritative. This would in turn indirectly impact your organic traffic, due to the lost link resulting in a lower ranking for a major query, and thus fewer clicks.  

14 Ways to Find and Fix a Search Traffic Drop

We’ve listed the most likely reasons for organic traffic to tank. Now let’s dig deeper into where to look for problems, what they mean, and what to do about it.  

1. Check Your Website 

Make sure everything is in order as far as your hosting and server, security, and uptime. Look for notifications in your platform dashboard. Find out if any customers have complained about issues with the site. Look for broken content blocks, and check 404 logs.

Fix technical issues immediately, either through your web developer, IT department, or hosting company. 

2. Check Google Search Console 

Look for notifications about technical SEO warnings or errors. If your site is connected and verified, Google Search Console will let you know if pages are experiencing indexing problems, if you have server errors, if you have usability problems, and if you’ve received a dreaded manual action. 

These notifications will explain what’s wrong and offer the ability to test fixes, but you’ll want to search the exact warning phrasing and find tips from experts on how to actually fix it. Here’s an amazingly thorough guide to most errors and warnings you’ll find in Google Search Console to help you get started. 

3. Check Google Analytics

Make sure it’s accurately tracking traffic. Use the Realtime report to confirm if you’re getting website visits from organic search. 

You can test this by doing a search for your business, then clicking to your website from the search results in one tab while viewing the report in another. (You may have to use incognito browsing, depending on your GA filters and settings.) 

If you can’t see traffic when you or your coworkers have clicked to the site from results on Google or another search engine, then you may need to fix or replace your GA tracking code. Someone may have edited the site code while doing another task and accidentally erased or modified the tracker.  

4. Seek Google Algorithm Updates

Search online to see if Google just released a broad core algorithm update and if so, what it was focused on. If it was about content quality, page speed, questionable backlinks, or trustworthiness and nothing else on this list is the culprit, you have a pretty big task ahead. Bouncing back IS possible, but it will require improving your content or your website as a whole. 

The site below experienced a Google traffic drop after an algorithm update. You can see that it took a few months to recover – and that was with concentrated effort on addressing all potential issues.

5. Investigate Google Bugs

Search online to see if Google Search Console is experiencing a bug that impacts tracking website clicks. GSC bugs are fairly common, and when one happens the SEO community will have published numerous articles and tweets complaining about it. Google Analytics is less likely to be buggy, but never say never. 

6. Check Google Trends 

Google Trends can help you see if topics that normally lead customers to your site have plummeted in interest, or if there’s a hot political, seasonal, or global topic that’s stolen your audience’s interest away from your content. 

Be mindful of articles that you published without intending to hit on a hot topic. A previous client wrote a blog post about their company’s commitment to truth and reconciliation right after Canada’s Day of Truth and Reconciliation was announced in 2021, and suddenly this small business blog post was getting hundreds of monthly visits. These visitors had no interest in the company’s services, they were just curious about that topic, and after a few months the traffic disappeared.

Using Google Trends to investigate a traffic drop is even better if you can also use an SEO tool to see which keywords drive the most visits to your site each month, and plug those words into Google Trends. Speaking of which… 

7. Use an SEO Tool 

Tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can help you see if you’ve experienced a drop in ranking for a valuable, high-traffic keyword. These tools show you new and lost keywords, as well as increased and decreased positions for terms. There are usually several ways to find the same results, using different reports.

A big drop in ranking for an irrelevant keyword is fine – a long time ago Forge and Smith ranked around #40 for the query ‘adult gif’, which was mortifying and was caused by me failing to change the filename of a downloaded GIF that I’d added to a blog post. The GIF was definitely not ‘adult’ or even close to NSFW, I swear. The point being, if you see that you’ve lost or dropped for a keyword that has nothing to do with your product or services, ignore it.

Small fluctuations in ranking for relevant keywords are normal too. But if you see a drop in ranking for a highly relevant query, you may have found the direct cause of your traffic loss. This is especially true if you spot a juicy keyword that has plummeted from a page-one position to page two or lower. 

Using this information you can see which page or post was ranking for that search, and determine why it abruptly lost traction. Maybe you accidentally undid existing optimizations by editing content. Or, perhaps there’s something technically wrong with the page. Much less likely, it could also be tied to point #4 on this list: a Google algorithm update may have suddenly flagged it as spammy or low-quality.

8. Look Up Your Product or Service

Do an online search as if you were a customer, and see if you’ve dropped in ranking – either dropping off of page one or falling to a lower position on page one. This is a workaround if you don’t have access to an SEO tool (although many offer limited free accounts!). 

The reason for your organic traffic drop may not be something wrong with your page or strategy at all, but instead be that a competitor did something awesome and is now outranking you.  

For example, if you were previously in the top three search results and are now further down, that can actually have a HUGE impact on organic traffic. Stats have shown that the top three results earn around 55% of all search clicks, so even if you’re still ranking on page one but lower down, that could mean someone else is now getting a big portion of traffic that was previously yours. 

9. Review Deleted Content

Did you delete a key piece of content that was earning organic search traffic? If so, did you redirect it properly? Should you consider bringing it back, or is it okay that you lost the traffic to delete irrelevant content and improve your site’s user experience? 

You can check the popularity of pages using Google Analytics – and you should do this before you delete content.

The default page report under Engagement is okay, but I prefer this custom landing page report I built from a tutorial in Search Engine Journal. Switch the traffic source at the top from ‘All Users’ to ‘Organic’, then set up a comparison period of before and after the drop.

You’ll easily be able to spot if a page or post that existed before the drop, and has since been deleted, was responsible for hundreds of visits that are proportionate to what you’ve lost.

10. Analyze Major Website Changes

There are plenty of good reasons to change your website. 

Small businesses often experience growth in our offerings, our messaging, and our teams, all of which mean website updates. Plus, a stagnant website is going to slowly lose traffic over time. You just need to keep in mind that any major change to your site is likely going to have an impact on your organic traffic. 

The next time Google’s crawler bots come to your site after a big change, it will be a whole new world to their AI brains. Context and relevance previously known to Google will not match up, and the result can be a sudden, drastic plummet in ranking. 

Here are the most common content-related causes of a traffic drop:

• Significantly editing the content on a high-ranking, high-traffic page
• Editing the content across a large number of pages
• Deleting a large volume of content
• Changing your site structure (hierarchy of content, navigation) 
• Changing your location and contact details 

These massive changes are typical for a full website redesign, and can cause your traffic to drop off. If you’ve taken proper SEO precautions during the process, a post-launch drop is almost always temporary, while Google re-evaluates your content and relevance.

Below is an example of an organic traffic drop after a full redesign and restructure. Apologies for the Universal Analytics screenshot, but it’s still a great example.

Make sure that you’re always making strategic, data-driven decisions about your content. Work with experts in both user experience and SEO on a website redesign, so they can help you make the best decisions when it comes to your content and technical SEO.  

Any deleted content should always have proper redirects set up. This way you retain at least some of the SEO value. 

And keep in mind that proximity to a user plays a huge role in local SEO, so if you change your address anywhere you should expect a change in ranking and traffic. That includes discrepancies between your website address and Google Business Profile – Google cross-checks this information everywhere that your business is listed. 

If you experience a traffic drop after making major website changes, the best thing to do is focus on producing awesome content. 

• Focus on quality rather than quantity, but do make sure you are regularly publishing optimized content
• Know what your audience wants, and write on those topics
• Create the right content for the right search intent
• Know your keywords (especially any you lost traction for after launch) 
• Don’t give up – it can take many months to see results 

11. Look for Migration Mistakes 

Speaking of setting up proper redirects, lots can go wrong during a website migration that can cause your traffic to drop. 

I won’t go into detail because that’s a whole other article – plus the experts at Moz have it covered in their Website Migration Guide. The important takeaway is that if you’re doing any kind of migration listed below (or others found in the guide), you should work with someone experienced in technical SEO or better yet, a team that includes developers and an SEO consultant:

• Changing domain
• Changing website platform
• Re-launching a site with different content and menus
• Merging sites
• Adding e-commerce
• Integrating martech platforms
• Changing or expanding regions
• Changing or adding languages

Each of these changes has many moving parts that impact how Google sees your site (or can’t see it anymore). 

12. Review Recently Blocked Content

Just like deleting content, blocking content from indexing is definitely going to have an impact on your organic traffic. 

Indexing is the process through which search engines crawl your site, analyze your content, and list you in their index. When we type a search into Google, we’re searching Google’s index.

With WordPress sites, you can easily control which content is indexed and which is not using the Yoast SEO plugin. If someone on your team recently changed Yoast settings and blocked high-volume content from indexing, whether on purpose or by mistake, that could cause a sudden organic traffic drop. 

Blocking content from indexing isn’t a bad thing! Not every part of our websites needs to be in search results. In fact, there are lots of areas of your site that you’re better off blocking. 

Some examples include private internal resources, PDFs, blog tags, author bios, taxonomies that filter content, and WordPress components that have their own URL but make up one piece of a larger page.  

13. Check the SERPs

The advancement of AI tools has unfortunately led to a decline in search traffic for the majority of sites over the last year or so. After digging into GA for our own site and multiple clients I’ve concluded that it’s because Google’s AI Overviews and similar tools now summarize the answers to questions we all explain in our blog posts – using our words to teach the robots to provide the answers. Sure, you might get to be one of the cited sources, and the occasional person might click to see where the summary got its insights. Either way, you’ve likely noticed a steady decline in traffic to your blog posts. Start learning generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization, my friends.

But that’s a decline, not a drop. It is possible for a drop to also be due to the release of a search feature that is now taking clicks that you used to get. This first happened to sites when videos became the top results. Then Google added tools like flight booking, shopping, and now the AI summaries. Who knows what will come next, but it’s worth checking. Make sure to look up features that might not yet be available to your country or region, but have moved from beta testing to being available for the majority of the US.

14. Check Your Audience Locations

If you see a sudden sharp drop in organic traffic from a specific country, it’s possible that your site has been blocked due to the nature of your content. Even just one blog post that discusses a politically sensitive topic, or uses words that are considered vulgar in other cultures, can get your whole site banned. Your country could also recently have been added to a group in which all websites are banned (like Russia’s ‘Unfriendly Countries’ list). This is one of the least likely causes for a SMB business site, but it’s possible if you have a global audience and publish content that another country could want to censor.

How to Increase Traffic After a Drop

Whether your traffic has dropped, slowly declined, or is just stagnant – that’s never what you want to see. 

If you want to jumpstart your organic traffic, you can work on 10 basic SEO strategies: 

1. Learn about keywords and search intent
2. Focus on consistently producing high-quality content that showcases your trustworthiness, expertise, and experience
3. Maintain a great user experience 
4. Stay on top of website security and technical SEO
5. Keep mobile friendliness in mind
6. Evaluate your link structure
7. Learn about image optimization
8. Check that your contact details are consistent everywhere that your business appears online
9. Amplify your content on social media 
10. Write enticing meta descriptions

We’ve actually got an article that explains each of these steps in more detail – read How to Increase Organic Traffic.  

Now that you know multiple ways to investigate an organic traffic drop, you’ll be in a much better position to find the source and start fixing the problem. When in doubt, ask a professional SEO for help!