8 Reasons Search Traffic to Your Website is Falling - And What You Can Do About It
A website is a business’s window to the vast digital market. But just as a physical shop relies on a healthy level of footfall – customers and would-be customers passing by, browsing, popping in and then making a purchase – a website’s lifeblood is the digital equivalent. Internet traffic.
A website that doesn’t get a healthy stream of visitors clicking its inbound links and browsing its pages cannot do healthy business. That’s why traffic-related metrics like unique visitors, page views, bounce rates and sessions are some of the most important measures of performance used by online businesses. A sharp drop in visitor numbers is a big cause for concern. You can’t convert customers who aren’t there.
To turn around a drop in traffic, you have to look at the source. Although it no longer has the monopoly on web traffic it once had, thanks to the rise of social and other channels, search engines remain the biggest single source of web traffic, accounting for 68% of online journeys.
With its competitive system of search rankings, where only the very top spots are likely to generate any traffic at all, search is also arguably the most volatile channel to control for traffic. The ranking terms are strict, opaque and liable to change. Every little tweak you make to a page can have an effect on indexing and ranking. That’s why entire global industry – search engine optimisation, or SEO – has grown up around trying to channel the wild currents of search engine traffic.
As one of the leading SEO agencies in London and Essex, Key Element is immersed in the choppy waters of website rankings, search traffic and search engine marketing in general. We’ve helped drag countless companies out of the depths of dwindling search traffic – see, for example, how we stepped in to turn around a potentially disastrous issue on a chartered surveyor’s new website, fixing the problem before it could do serious damage.
In this article, we share the eight biggest causes of falling traffic from search and explain what you can do to fix them.
Search Engine Algorithm Updates
Search engines are constantly changing the algorithms which determine how web pages are indexed and ranked. Google in particular makes multiple small tweaks on a daily basis, but is also notorious for making more substantial changes unannounced. This catches website owners off guard, as suddenly pages that were well optimised as per the previous algorithm’s preferences suddenly don’t rank high anymore, and traffic drops accordingly.
To check if this could be the cause of your traffic issues, search SEO publications or Google itself for any information about recent updates. This free tool maps fluctuations in ranking volatility against known updates, so is a good guide as to whether an algorithm change is a likely cause of your traffic issues. Then it’s a case of going back to basics with SEO – find out as much information as you can about the change, audit your site and its content against the key ranking signals, and update accordingly.
Quality and Spam Penalties
In the normal course of things, web pages that search algorithms judge to be of poor quality get penalised by falling down the search rankings. But if your traffic suddenly tanks, it could be that you’ve had a so-called manual action penalty served against you. This is when a human reviewer judges something on your site to be in serious breach of spam and quality guidelines. The ‘action’ includes placing a punitive filter on your entire site so it doesn’t appear high in search results, or getting removed from search indexing altogether.
Manual actions can be served due to keyword or link stuffing, or deliberate attempts to ‘cloak’ or hide content from the search bots. For most sites, the biggest risks come from comment sections and user reviews getting spammed by other users and stuffed with links, or from over-use of auto-generated content – an increasingly big issue in the generative AI age,
As for the fix, you can use the Google Search Console to run a Manual Actions Report to find out if any part of your site has been penalised, and why. Then it’s a case of putting the problem right and submitting a reconsideration request through the Search Console to get penalties lifted.
Indexing Issues
Indexing is the process by which search engines sort web pages into a searchable database. This is a foundational step before pages are ranked – if a web page isn’t indexed properly, it won’t appear in SERPs at all. There are technical reasons why search engines won’t be able to index your pages that will cause a dramatic drop in search visibility.
For Google indexing, you can use the Google Search Console to check the index status of your pages and identify crawl errors that are preventing correct indexing. Examples include incorrectly placed ‘noindex’ meta tags on pages, which tell the search page that you don’t want a particular page indexing. Similarly, there might be configuration errors in robots.txt files, which give search bots further instructions about what to index and what to ignore.
Indexing problems can also stem from issues with your XML sitemap, broken internal links, orphan pages (i.e. pages with no internal links) and canonical tags that point to the wrong page. All of these make it difficult for search bots to find and verify that information is in the right place, often leading to pages being de-indexed.
Site Performance Problems
These days, site performance and user experience are core ranking factors across all search engines. If your pages are slow to load, glitchy, offer clunky navigation and don’t abide by accessibility standards, you will struggle to hit the high SERPs positions that drive high traffic. It’s also important to remember that Google and other search engines now prioritise performance and CX on mobile devices.
Building web pages for speed and usability is part and parcel of SEO-friendly development practice, so it should be baked in from the start. But things can break, which might then show up in a loss of search rankings and a drop in traffic. Keep a close eye on bounce rates and engagement metrics – a sudden dip in these is a sign that there’s a CX-related issue. You can follow this up with performance tests using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse to diagnose what the problem is.
Loss of Keyword Ranking
SEO is a competitive business. You’re not just trying to placate the crawler bots on ranking factors like site performance and content quality. You’re competing with rival websites, too.
That applies most obviously to keywords. Keywords are the OG ranking factor, and while over the years they’ve been joined by a long list of other considerations search algorithms take into account, they’re still critically important. Having a page rank highly for certain keywords is always fraught with the risk that other pages come along that are optimised even better for those same terms. You’ve done nothing wrong, but your ranking slips anyway. And so does your traffic.
The way to combat this is constant vigilance. Traffic per keyword is an important metric in deciding which keywords to optimise for. But it’s equally important to continually measure traffic per keyword on your own site, too. You can do this in Google Search Console. If you see traffic for certain keywords declining, it’s a sign you’ve got competition. It’s time to refresh and improve your pages. You might also want to look for new keyword alternatives that reflect how people are searching for particular topics, as that changes over time, too.
Changes in SERPs
Search engines don’t just have a tendency to change the way their algorithms crawl, index and rank web pages over time. They also regularly change the structure of search results pages. Some of those changes have a profound impact on how many clicks pages get, even in the highest ranking positions.
One of the biggest disruptions in this regard was when Google introduced featured snippets a decade ago. This responds to searches by pulling out direct quotations from a chosen source page, and featuring that above the first ranking search result. This could mean that, for certain searches, even the top-ranked pages lose traffic to a rival.
But even this upheaval has been dwarfed by the introduction of AI responses (called AI Overview in Google) to searches. Again, these sit above the traditional search rankings. And instead of listing a particular page, they generate a response based on several chosen sources, and then reference those sources via links. The AI search takeover has been linked with declines in organic SERPS traffic of up to 60%, and is even thought to be changing the way people use search, as fewer people feel the need to click through to a source site after getting their answer.
As with algorithm changes, the only way to respond is to shift how you optimise your pages. Turning headings into questions and answering them concisely and clearly in a single paragraph is a good option for optimising for featured snippets. You can also add FAQs to pages.
For AI search results, you need to consider the whole new world of generative search optimisation (GEO), which we wrote about in this blog. GEO is important not just because of changes to traditional search engines, but because more and more people are using generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini to search for information online. And if, as experts believe, this shift is driving a loss of traffic from search, this serves to underline the importance of diversifying your strategies for gaining traffic, and doubling down on your use of social media, direct channels like email and SMS, referral strategies etc.
Changes to Your Site
A classic example of a traffic crash is that a website undergoes a major change – a migration to a new platform, a redesign, an overhaul of content or a change in URL structure – only for inbound traffic to take a serious hit. The reason (and, to a certain extent, the fix) is straightforward – the revamped site hasn’t been optimised properly, and it has tumbled into obscurity as a result.
Any significant changes you make to a website should have SEO considerations front and centre. You need to ensure internal links match the new structure, and the 301 redirects map old URLs to new ones correctly. The XML sitemap has to be updated, and indexing configurations in new page headers have to be correct. Failure to do any of these can result in broken links, lost redirects and indexing errors – and ultimately a loss in search rankings.
Poor Content
Content quality has become an increasingly important ranking factor in SEO over the past decade. Search algorithms are now configured to assess not just how ‘bot friendly’ web content is, but how well it serves the needs of searchers. ‘Thin’ content with little detail, out of date content, keyword stuffing, keyword cannibalisation (multiple pages competing for the same keywords) and content that is irrelevant to the search terms it is optimised for will all get pages penalised in SERPs.
For these reasons, it’s important to regularly audit search performance against content quality, and identify where under-performing pages are likely being dragged down by content issues. It’s good practice to have a review system to update cornerstone content on a fixed cycle, and remove non-essential pages if they’re not performing well in search. When refreshing pages, consider the searcher’s intent, not just keywords – what do they really want to know from this page, and how can we best provide that? Keep the topic or intent you optimise each page for distinct and try to avoid overlap.
Final Word
The starting point for understanding whether you have a traffic problem is, of course, maintaining clear oversight of core traffic metrics. But that’s the easy part. There are plenty of free website checker tools online that make this easy – check out these from Ahrefs, Semrush and Backlinko for a start.
The difficult bit is diagnosing what the cause of the problem is, and therefore understanding how to fix it. We’ve shared some of the most common search-related causes of declining traffic. But in many cases, it can be a mix of any of these that is causing your pages to plummet down the SERPs rankings, taking your prospects for inbound clicks with them.
For expert diagnosis of SEO issues and a professional, no hassle fix that will soon have your traffic rates climbing again, get in touch with the Key Element team.
Frequently Asked questions
Why has my website traffic suddenly dropped?
A sudden drop in website traffic is often linked to changes in search engine algorithms, manual penalties, indexing problems, or issues with your website’s performance. It can also result from competition for keywords or major changes to your site’s structure or content.
How do I know if a Google algorithm update affected my traffic?
You can check SEO news sources like Search Engine Journal or Moz for reports of recent algorithm updates. Tools such as the Google Algorithm Update Tracker can help you match drops in traffic to specific update dates. If the timing aligns, you may need to re-optimise your content based on the new ranking signals.
Can indexing problems cause traffic loss?
Yes. If your pages aren’t properly indexed, they won’t appear in search results at all. Common causes include incorrect “noindex” tags, misconfigured robots.txt files, broken links, or outdated XML sitemaps. You can identify and fix indexing issues using Google Search Console’s Coverage report.
Why does content quality matter so much for SEO?
Search engines now prioritise user value over keyword density. Thin, outdated, or irrelevant content harms rankings. Regularly audit and refresh your content, eliminate duplication, and focus on user intent, what people actually want to learn or do when they visit your page.
How can I prevent future drops in search traffic?
Maintain consistent SEO monitoring and best practices:
- Keep your content updated and relevant.
- Track algorithm changes regularly.
- Optimise for both mobile and AI-driven search.
- Diversify traffic sources with social, email, and referral channels.
Working with an experienced SEO agency like us can help safeguard your site from sudden ranking losses.
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Dominique Childs