If you find yourself looking at a drop in organic web traffic and wondering what on earth has gone wrong, Helen Pollitt's talk at Digital Gaggle provided an excellent guide on the areas for you to check.

Although the initial response might be to blame Google’s algorithm updates for a drop in your organic web traffic, a watch of Helen’s talk will prove to be a great resource in identifying your problem; I ended up with a comprehensive list of areas to investigate on websites and an even longer checklist of possible resolutions and preventions.

Here are my main takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Know what you’re looking at

Begin investigating with early analysis on identifying which pages and keywords are being affected. Follow that up with checking the time period and geographies. Also, consider whether there have been any changes made to your website recently. Understanding the overall context is going to put you in a better position to resolve and prevent the problem. 

Helen says it's not always an algorithm update which is responsible for a drop in organic traffic...

Takeaway 2: It might not always be a technical issue…

Users aren’t always searching in the same way month by month. Seasonality and search behaviour are areas that can certainly affect your organic traffic. Make sure that you are collaborating with the rest of your business to see if there is an annual trend where you should expect to see a dip in traffic. If you think that you’ve noticed search behaviour is changing, or has changed, firstly, identify whether this could be permanent or temporary and then consider the potential of adding supplementary content or re-focusing existing content. 

Takeaway 3: It’s probably NOT an algorithm update… but if it is you’ll probably soon know about it

Although Google loves to keep us on our toes, your falling traffic probably hasn’t been caused by an update. Ultimately, as Helen’s talk illustrated, there are an array of issues your drop in organic traffic could have been caused by. An easy way to see if there has been an algorithm update is to head over to SEO Twitter, everyone will be chatting about it!