How to Analyze/Diagnose and Recover from a Website Traffic/Impressions Drop

So, your website experienced a sudden decline in the number of impressions/clicks. You are worried about what to do and how to recover from the situation.

There are many factors that can affect the number of impressions per day and can cause a sudden decline. However, it is not impossible to recover from it.

First of all, check if Google made a recent core update. If there has been an update and your site has been hit, check Google’s new guidelines and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

Focus on creating original and high quality content that offers unique value to users. Google is /penalizing content that is of mediocre quality/spam. Such content can be deindexed without any warning.

Check if there has been a manual action. You can find it out from your Google search console account.

Compare the Google search console data with the data for previous year to look for a seasonal patterns.

Check if you made a recent update to your website. Suppose, you added a piece of code manually yo your website or just changed your theme or installed a new plugin. Sometimes plugin conflicts or theme conflict can also hurt impressions and traffic. Try reverting these changes and waiting a few days. You can also switch to a Wordpress core theme if you are using Wordpress.

Did you make any changes to your server configurations or robots.txt? Check if any update to your server configurations/robots.txt/.htaccess file is causing an issue. In several cases, it is some technical issue that causes a sudden drop in traffic and reverting those changes brings the traffic back. Check out your DNS settings also.

How old is your website? If it is a fairly new website that is just a few months old, you will need to wait since Google might take some time to analyze the website fully and include it in search results. In the meantime add more good quality content to your website and focus on improving your backlink profile to bring traffic to your website. Social media sharing can also help improve visibility.

Continue to watch for changes in the Google search console and make improvements according to suggestions provided by Google. Keep a watch on your backlink profile inside the search console and see if you recently lost any valuable backlinks. You can also use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to analyze backlinks and website ranking changes.

Focus on E-E-A-T. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. These are important factors that Google considers to rank websites. Include a about us page on your website and showcase your expertise.

Check if your website provides a good user experience. continuously audit your website and optimize it to provide an excellent user experience.

At last, rather than focusing on keyword optimization, try writing original content that provides real value to visitors.

Key Takeaways:

• User experience is important and make sure that your website is fast and provides a good user experience.

• Focus on quality and not quantity. The latest core update by Google (March 2024) penalizes websites that generate low quality content at scale using automation/AI tools, humans or a mix of the two. Low quality content can be deindexed by Google. Google has adopted a no spam policy which could lead to removal of around 40% such websites from searches.

• Rather than spending time on keyword optimization and manipulating SEO for rankings, spend time creating high quality and original content.