13 questions to diagnose and resolve declining organic traffic

Initial Steps to Diagnose a Drop in Organic Traffic:

1. Check for Tracking Issues: Verify that the decline isn't due to a tracking bug by looking for data discrepancies between Google Search Console and internal analytics platforms, and checking if the drop is consistent across other channels.

2. Assess Brand Problems: Use Google Search Console to filter down to branded keywords and compare recent performance to historical data to see if there's a decline in brand searches.

3. Analyze Non-Brand Performance: Identify which URLs and keywords are losing traffic by filtering Google Search Console data and examining metrics like clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.

Identifying Content-Related Traffic Drops:

• Trend Analysis: Examine the trendline for traffic over time. A gradual decline could indicate content issues.

• Content Audit: If traffic is falling due to slipping rankings across many pages, conduct a content audit to assess whether your content is outdated or not meeting current standards for helpfulness.

• Search Engine Updates: Consider recent helpful content updates by search engines that may have affected your content's performance.

Signs of Technical Issues Affecting SEO Performance:

• Sudden Traffic Drops: A steep, sudden drop in traffic might indicate indexing or crawling issues, often after major site changes or a Google algorithm update.

• Technical Audit: Conduct a technical audit, especially if you notice patterns of loss from specific site directories or page templates, to uncover any underlying technical problems.

Determining the Impact of Lost Backlinks on SEO Performance:

• Use SEO Tools: Employ tools like Ahrefs or Majestic to check if there's been a significant loss of backlinks or referrals from high-authority sites.

• Analyze Historical PR Work: Consider the effects of historical PR work, as old content cleanups by publications can result in lost backlinks.

Factors to Consider When Analyzing Competition's Impact on SEO:

• Competitive Analysis: Look at on-page and domain-level factors of competitors to understand their potential advantages.

• On-Page Factors: Evaluate if competitors' content better meets user needs, offers quality and perspective, has a clear structure, is authored by an authority, and provides a superior user experience.

• Domain-Level Factors: Create a scorecard comparing metrics like domain rating, number of indexed pages, backlinks, and referring domains.