Having your firm’s site drop in organic traffic can be frustrating. When your site sees a drop in organic traffic, a decrease in leads generated will likely follow. Because of this, it’s important to investigate the cause of the loss in traffic quickly. Once you can pinpoint the cause in traffic changes, you can then work to get your firm’s site back on track.

Check For an algorithm update.

First, check to see if Google has updated their algorithm. To do this, you can use Google analytics to see if your dip in traffic was only for Google and that traffic was steady for other search engines. This can be a telltale sign of an algorithm update. You may also need to do some research to see if any online marketing news sources have reported an algorithm update as well. If there was an update, then you may be able to find out specifics about what kind of sites the update targeted, such as sites with thin content or with spammy backlinks. This will give you a jumping off point for updating your firm’s site.

Check Google Analytics.

While checking for Google Analytics for an algorithm update, you should also look at traffic to specific pages on your firm’s site. Did one of your top pages see a significant drop in traffic? Or did a group of pages see, such as your firm’s blog, contribute to your decrease in traffic? You can also check traffic from different locations, such as traffic in specific states, as well as traffic from different sources. It may be that your mobile traffic dropped while your desktop traffic maintained its traffic.

Look through Google Search Console.

You should also check Google Search Console. In search console’s performance report, look at your clicks and impressions for queries your site appears in the results for. When you looked through Google analytics, if you found a specific page that had a drop in traffic, you can examine that page’s queries. If you find that the page lost clicks or impressions for certain queries, then you can optimize the page for those keywords.

In addition to looking through the performance report for firm’s site, check the reports under the Enhancements section. This will include more technical information about your site. If you find issues listed here, you may need to speak with your website manager about the fixes. These can range from HTML code being wrong or issues with loading a page.

Try using third party tools.

Third party tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush, can also help give insight on your decrease in traffic. Like in Google Analytics and Search Console, you can look at how pages are preforming and which keywords your firm ranks for. Another other advantage of using these tools is that you can also look at how competitors are ranking. It could be that one competitor is now outranking your firm, causing the loss in traffic.

Make changes to your firm's site.

Taking what you’ve found from investigating your traffic drop, you can then make a plan of attack. This could take form in updating your mobile pages to make up for a drop in mobile traffic or optimizing pages for keywords that saw a decrease in traffic. Once you make these changes, you may not see the affects right away as SEO can take some time. Continue to monitor your traffic over the next few months to see if your optimizations work.