For all those that own a website out there, at the back of your head, no doubt, will be the scenerio where 
your website will suddenly lose all traffic, making your website worthless. This is commonly why a website which makes the same profit per year is often worth a lot less than a business that makes exactly the same profit per year – a business won’t suddently ‘die’ like a website could potentially.
However, a sudden traffic drop is usually identifiable in terms of what caused it. Ultimately, a traffic drop is going to occur due to the fact that your website had a drop in traffic gained from organic sources, such as Google and other search engines, since organic sources are usually the majority of traffic to a website. With this, here are some potential reasons behind a traffic drop when your traffic drop is related to Google.
Firstly, before continuing, it should be noted that you can identify if a drop in organic traffic is the reason for your overall traffic drop by looking into your Google Analytics account or Google Webmasters Console.
- Your SEO ranking decreases – Every website wants to have as good SEO as possible, so that their articles and website rank higher on Google search results and gain more clicks. However, if your SEO decreases, the average ranking of your articles on Google will decrease too. This can be viewed by looking into Google Webmasters Console, Search Analytics and through clicking on Position <– this will display your average position for all your indexed web pages by Google. If this is increasing in value or has suddenly increased (which means your pages are further from #1 spot), then this is the root cause of your traffic drop.
- Your indexed pages by Google are decreasing – The indexed pages by Google determines the number of pages on your site that have been indexed by Google that can be viewed on Google search results. If you are publishing content all of the time, this number should continually increase as you add more pages to your website. However, if Google deems content to be duplicated, irrelevant to web users or low-quality, it can ‘de-index’ pages, which would show with a gradual decrease in indexed pages. Less indexed pages will consequently result in less pages that can be shown on Google search results, resulting in a drop in traffic.
- URL errors – Although soft 404s do not contribute to SEO, ‘not founds’ and server errors will reflect badly on your website, which, if they accumlate to a large value, could affect the SEO of your website (since Google will view your website as more broken than unbroken). For this reason, check up on how many errors you have related to your URL. If this value is large when compared to how many indexed pages you have, then it would be a good idea to fix such errors.
Although these all could contribute to a drop in traffic, it should be noted that traffic does fluctuate for the vast majority of websites, depending on many external factors. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, only treat your website as having a drop in traffic if you notice a drop in traffic for more than 2-3 weeks.
