You need to determine whether your website’s organic traffic has dropped suddenly or gradually over time.
If this has happened suddenly…
Confirm whether or not your website has accidentally had noindex tags added. This can sometimes occur when developers move a site from a test environment to live, forgetting to remove these. If these are left in place, they will cause your website to be de-indexed. If you use WordPress, confirm:
Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility
This box should not be ticked.
If your website is deemed to be harmful, Google may remove it from the search engine results pages. Check Google Search Console to see whether your site has been removed from the SERPs due to malware. You can find out more about how to request a review once you’ve fixed the issues here.
Your site may have been impacted by a manual action. The most common reasons for this are:
1. Spam on your site, such as links to spammy sites or excessive ads;
2. Unnatural links pointing to your site; or
3. Unexpected or sudden traffic loss that could be caused by external factors such as a change in Google’s ranking algorithm.
If this has happened gradually…
Google has recently released a core algorithm update that has benefited some sites over others. According to Google, “There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better.” The advice here is to analyze what the top-ranked sites are doing that you aren’t and make changes accordingly.
The most likely reason for your drop in organic traffic is that your competitors have adopted more aggressive SEO strategies than you have. They’ve won some of the rankings that you previously held, and therefore it makes sense to conduct a full analysis of their strategies to understand where you can improve. You can use the SEMrush Keyword Gap Tool and Backlink Gap Tool to help you to do this.