Analyzing Google Search traffic drops

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore). Check out the new documentation on debugging search traffic drops.

Suppose you open Search Console and find out that your Google Search traffic dropped. What should you do? A drop in organic Search traffic can happen for several reasons, and most of them can be reversed. But it may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site.

In this post I'll discuss some of the reasons your traffic may have dropped and how to use the Search Console Performance report and Google Trends to start debugging your Search traffic drop.

Main causes for drops in Search traffic

To help you get an idea of what is affecting your traffic, I've sketched a few examples of drops and what they could potentially mean. For more information on each example, read on.