Organic Traffic Dropped 30%! How Bad the Things Are in Fact?

Couple of days ago I received an email from my client. He was really worried because they faced a really huge drop in organic visits during the last two month. Take into consideration they usually have 25k a day, so you can imagine the size of the problem.

I do not build links for them because the client is so popular in the US that links grow like mushrooms after the rain. Unfortunately not always those pages get links that we need but this is quite a different story.

So what was the task? I needed to find out whether the traffic drop was caused by decrease in rankings or this is a seasonal change in people’s search activity. In case of decrease in rankings I had to find out where the biggest loss is.

Okay, I opened a Google Analytics All Web Site Data Acquisition Overview report and saw how the traffic amount changes when comparing the last 30 days to the same period of time before. All major traffic sources showed from -23% to -30% decrease.

You see, even direct traffic, which has nothing to do with an SEO and rankings was 25% lower.

Then I logged in to Google Webmaster tools to check out how the number of impressions and rankings changes during the same period of time. Yes, indeed, top 20 keywords that were giving the most of the traffic drop from -0,5 to -2, 90% of them -1, but (this is very important) all of the keywords are still in top 5-6!

This means the website should still receive the same amount of impressions, isn’t it? However, the number of impressions decreased to -25% on average for all the top keywords. This proved that the problem is not as big as I could seem to be, however a slight decrease in rankings is observed which is a signal to monitor rankings and make sure things are not getting worse.