Quick Diagnostic Checklist: 10 Steps to Run When Organic Traffic Plummets

A quick, practical 10-step diagnostic checklist to run immediately when your organic traffic plummets, with the action to take for each step.

1. Confirm the drop is real and scoped correctly — check multiple data sources and date ranges.

• Verify the decline in your primary analytics (GA4 or Universal Analytics) and compare against Google Search Console (GSC) impressions/clicks to rule out tracking/attribution issues and incorrect date filters. Use weekly and year-over-year comparisons to remove seasonality effects.

2. Verify analytics/tracking isn’t broken.

• Confirm your analytics tag (GA4 measurement ID, GTM container, server-side tagging) is present on pages and firing correctly; crawl a sample of pages with Screaming Frog or the Tag Assistant and compare sessions in GA to server logs if available.

3. Check for sitewide technical problems (indexing, crawlability, robots).

• Inspect GSC Coverage and Crawl Error reports for spikes in “not indexed,” “noindex,” 4xx/5xx, or blocked by robots.txt; review sitemap submission and robots.txt changes and check for accidental noindex tags or canonical misconfigurations.

4. Look for recent site changes, deployments or migrations.

• Ask dev/content teams whether a deploy, redirect, URL structure change, new CDN, SSL change, plugin update, or migration coincided with the drop; verify redirect rules (302 vs 301), canonical tags and that old URLs still resolve.

5. Audit page speed and mobile experience.

• Run PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse and mobile usability in GSC for impacted pages; resolve major performance regressions, render-blocking JS, or layout shifts that can harm rankings and engagement.

6. Identify which pages, queries, devices, and locations are impacted.

• Segment traffic by landing page, query (from GSC), device, and geography to isolate whether the decline affects the whole site, a section (e.g., /blog or /product), or specific queries/devices — this narrows root-cause options.

7. Check for algorithm updates, SERP feature changes and competitor movement.

• Compare the drop timing to public algorithm-update trackers and note any new SERP features (snippets, SGE/AI features) or competitor content improvements that could have displaced your pages.

8. Review content quality and search intent fit for affected pages.

• For pages that lost traffic, compare against current top-ranking pages for depth, accuracy, freshness, formatting, E‑A‑T signals, and whether intent shifted (e.g., informational → transactional). Update or consolidate thin/duplicated content accordingly.

9. Inspect backlinks and off‑site signals.

• Check for a sudden loss of important backlinks or a spike in toxic links that might correlate with traffic loss; use your backlink tool to spot major link removals or declines in referring domains.

10. Check for security/manual actions and suspicious traffic.

• In GSC, verify there are no manual actions or security issues (hacks, malware). Also review analytics for spam/referral anomalies or bot traffic distortions that could skew reporting.

Quick priority workflow to run these steps in the first 24–72 hours

• Immediate (0–24h): Steps 1–4 and Step 10 (confirm, tracking, recent deploys, manual/security).
• Short term (24–72h): Steps 5–8 (tech, UX, segmentation, content quality).
• Follow-up (72h+): Step 9 and implement recovery plan (content updates, technical fixes, backlink outreach, monitoring).

Monitoring & measurement tips

• Correlate fixes to GSC impressions and organic clicks rather than sessions alone, and track ranking and CTR changes per page.
• Keep a timeline (deploys, fixes, detected issues) to match actions to recovery signals.

If you’d like, I can:

• Turn this into a printable checklist with step-by-step commands and tools (Screaming Frog, GSC, PageSpeed, Ahrefs/SEMrush) or
• Run a targeted checklist for a specific URL or site section if you share the affected pages and whether you use GA4 and GSC.