If you’ve seen a drop in your organic traffic over the past year, you’re not alone. Organic search has seen some dramatic changes in recent times, including several core algorithm updates, increases in zero click search as a result of AI Overviews, and more users using LLM tools like ChatGPT to get their information as opposed to the search results. 

It is understandable to be worried about the effects of these developments on your organic traffic. 

That being said, the end of search is not upon us. By adapting to the new search environment, and performing efficient audits on your website, you can watch your organic traffic rise to new heights. In this blog, we will look at how you can analyse your web traffic and fix the problems that are bringing your site down. 

 

How to Analyse Website Traffic

Before you can work on improving your traffic, you need to fully understand the causes for any drops in organic performance. There are many tools that you can use to analyse traffic, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Sistrix, and Ahrefs. It is a good idea to combine these tools to collect different data points, e.g. GSC for clicks/impressions, GA4 for sessions and conversions, and Ahrefs for backlinks. 

 

Step 1: Select a date range

Sometimes, dips in organic traffic occur through no fault of your own. If you are a business that thrives during specific times of year, such as an outdoor furniture business in the warmer months, then you are likely to see drops in traffic in the colder months. You may also see a decrease in traffic following a sale or marketing campaign, which inflates your traffic for a short period of time. Therefore, it is important to select an appropriate date range to compare your traffic. For most businesses, this will be year-on-year, but if you don’t see many seasonal fluctuations, you are welcome to compare this month-on-month or quarter-over-quarter. 

 

Step 2: Segment session data by category

If you are looking at a top-level overview of your organic traffic, it is difficult to see where exactly your site has seen a drop in views. To get a clear picture, segment your traffic by category, collecting session, click, and impression data for different page paths. You can use Ahrefs’ comparison tool to get this data quickly.

 

Step 3: Segment clicks data brand vs. non-brand

Another helpful way to identify where your site is letting your traffic down is to analyse your click data by branded vs. non-branded terms. If your branded clicks are going down, you may need to work on growing brand awareness, whereas if non-branded traffic is down, you likely need to focus on SEO improvements. 

 

Step 4: Check for technical and security issues

If your site has a security or manual action, or a technical issue that is preventing it from being indexed, this can remove your website from the SERPs. Use Google Search Console’s indexing and security tools to audit this, and make sure to fix any technical issues quickly.  

 

Step 5: Identify external factors

As mentioned in the introduction, there have been many changes in search recently, so there are plenty of external factors that may be impacting your organic traffic. Consider any recent algorithm changes and check if they coincide with the period when your organic traffic began to drop. Many sites began to see a decrease in traffic after the rollout of AI Overviews in August 2024 (May 2024 in the US) so take this into account as well. You can also look at Google Trends to find out if there’s been a recent decline in interest for your business offering. Another possible factor are your competitors – if one of your competitors has recently seen an increase in visibility and traffic, they could be stealing away some of your clicks in the SERPs. 

 

Step 6: Consider your backlink profile

This is less commonly discussed, but your backlink profile can definitely have an impact on your traffic. If you’ve recently acquired a high volume of spammy backlinks, or lost backlinks from a large number of high-quality websites, this can lead to a loss in rankings and therefore traffic. Make sure to regularly audit your backlink profile and disavow any spammy domains. 

 

How to Increase Organic Traffic After a Drop

Now that you’ve troubleshooted your website, identified where your traffic has fallen, and some possible causes, you can begin to recover your organic performance. Let’s look at how you can address these issues and increase organic traffic after a drop. 

 

Remedy technical and security issues

This is the first and most important action you can take, as if your site cannot be indexed, your content can’t rank, no matter how well-crafted it is. 

For a secure and technically sound website, make sure to:

Once your site is secure and indexable, you can move on to other optimisations. 

 

Get your content to the highest possible standard

Search is getting more competitive by the day, and lackluster content just doesn’t make the cut anymore. If you want to grow your organic traffic, you need to have high-quality, expert content that Google’s algorithm will recognise as valuable and trustworthy. 

To make your content standout to search engines and LLMs try:

We also can’t discuss content without mentioning E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). To optimise your content for this, try:

  • Implementing case studies and testimonials throughout content. 
  • Using first-person narratives.
  • Embedding customer reviews.
  • Optimising your About, Team, and Author pages with information about and photographs of each team member. 
  • Writing expert long-form content pieces (e.g. guides, whitepapers)
  • Including a glossary on your website for technical or branded terms. 
  • Displaying your awards and certifications. 
  • Writing opinionated thought-leadership content. 
  • Growing your backlink profile. 

Don’t neglect on-page SEO

On-page SEO is not dead! With so much attention being drawn to optimising content for LLMs and AI Overviews, it is easy to forget the basics, but good on-page SEO can still make a colossal difference to organic performance, so don’t neglect it. 

Here are some on-page SEO tips to boost your organic traffic:

  • Use your primary keyword across your H1, meta title, meta description, and the first sentence of your content. 
  • Optimise your meta titles and meta descriptions to be unique, persuasive, and the correct character count. 
  • Structure your content with clear hierarchical heading tags that use your target keywords. 
  • Use clean, concise, and descriptive URLs. 
  • Use keyword-rich filenames and alt text for your images. 
  • Internally link relevant pages on your site to each other with descriptive anchor text. 
  • Externally link to authoritative, highly trustworthy websites. 
  • Format your content for easy reading and maximum engagement (utilising short paragraphs, bullet points, and numbered lists). 
  • Use structured data to help search engines better understand the content on your site. 

 

Grow your backlink profile

Real organic growth cannot happen in a silo. Sometimes, getting support through valuable backlinks and mentions on other websites may be the boost you need to see improvements in your organic traffic. 

To curate a backlink profile that shows search engines your content is valuable and trustworthy, you can: 

  • Disavow any toxic or spammy links from your website. 
  • Create link-worthy content (e.g. unique tools or calculators, whitepapers, stats pieces, guides, and infographics). 
  • Monitor for unlinked mentions of your brand. 
  • Identify resource pages that could benefit from mentioning your content. 
  • Write guest posts on relevant websites related to your industry. 
  • Sign up to services like HARO to get notified if a journalist is looking for an expert comment or source. 
  • Identify domains that are linking to your competitors and reach out to them. 
  • Build relationships with bloggers and journalists. 

Optimise your site for total-search

This is especially relevant if your website has been negatively impacted by zero click search, LLMs, or competitors taking away your organic traffic. 

With total search optimisation, you optimise your website not just for Google’s results pages, but for multiple platforms, including Bing, ChatGPT, Youtube, TikTok, Amazon, and more. This approach takes brand visibility into account, and helps you ensure that your business appears where your audience is most likely to find you. By developing your brand outside of the search results, you will see branded clicks and impressions grow, and you are more likely to start getting cited in AI tools like AI Overviews. 

To optimise for total search, you can:

  • Identify where your audience is searching – you can use tools like Sparktoro to get a clear analysis of this. 
  • Optimise titles, descriptions, tags, and thumbnails with relevant keywords across platforms. 
  • Repurpose website content into other formats, e.g. short-form videos on TikTok, long-form videos on Youtube, and infographics on Pinterest.
  • Provide transcripts and closed captions on video content. 
  • Engage with your audience in comment sections. 
  • Optimise company pages and personal profiles with industry keywords.
  • Engage with and contribute valuable content to relevant groups on e.g. Linkedin and Reddit. 
  • Actively monitor and respond to reviews on e.g. Google My Business, Trustpilot, and Yelp. 
  • Address negative feedback on review sites professionally.
  • Invest in digital PR to get your business featured on relevant industry websites and news outlets. 

 

Conclusion

I hope that these insights have helped to ease your organic traffic concerns and show you that there are a million different ways to boost organic performance. No website is perfect, and by implementing these changes you can not only see your traffic recover, but even watch it grow beyond your expectations. 

If you are still unsure about how to identify the cause of your traffic drop, or if you want support in recovering organic performance, don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team, we’ll be happy to help!

 

Key Takeaways

  • Take the time to understand exactly where and why your organic traffic is falling. 
  • Make sure that your website is secure and indexable. 
  • Optimise your content for E-E-A-T. 
  • Develop a tight and effective internal linking strategy. 
  • Give context to your content through structured data. 
  • Grow your brand’s authority through gaining high quality backlinks. 
  • Place your business wherever your audience is most likely to find you. 
  • Don’t stress – no website is perfect!