4 Easy Steps To Fixing Organic Traffic Drop

1. Check The Simple Things First

While working hard and trying to rank a website in the SERPs, it can be very easy to focus on recent tactics while neglecting the importance of the simple on-page SEO strategies, worrying yourself about citation optimization, link velocity, or anchor text ratio, when the solution to your rankings issues could be a simple fix directly on your website?

Immediately you start to see organic traffic drop, ask yourself this question:

does your website return a 200 status code?

The 200 series status code indicates that your website can be stress-free communicated with. Also the normal 200 OK status code simply shows a successful HTTP request. I will suggest you make use of a free tool such as “HTTP Status Code Checker” to find out if your website is actually returning a successful request. And If it’s not, you can troubleshoot using the failed status code, like 410 (page permanently removed) or 404 (page not found).

Another thing that need confirmation is whether bots are actually crawling your website. Ideally, robots.txt is a text file which is located in your web server’s top-level directory and it’s work is to instruct bots on how to interact with your site.

2. Check For Google Penalty

This mainly results in a big drop in rankings, and it does happens overnight. For example, if you observe that your website drops over 10-20 positions on too many keywords, this can lead to a penalty.

The obvious difference between manual and algorithmic penalties is that the first ones are manually done by a Google employee, while the second ones are automatic and are normally released with numerous Google Updates. And due to the fact that Google regularly makes updates without obviously saying it, you should always try to monitor it for ranking changes. So, how do you identify and recover from a Google Penalty?

The first step to detect what happened is to check your Google Webmaster Tools account.

This is where you’ll start having notifications from Google involving manual actions they’ve taken against your website.