What should I check when organic traffic suddenly drops?

First identify which traffic source, pages and queries declined, and make sure tracking still works. Do not look at total traffic alone and immediately blame SEO rankings.

Break down the decline

Compare periods of equal length, accounting for seasons, campaigns and holidays. Use Search Console to inspect organic impressions, clicks and rankings, then compare website analytics and inquiry changes.

If only a few pages declined, check recent changes to URLs, content and indexing settings. If the whole site dropped suddenly, first check availability, tracking code and whether indexing was disabled.

Look at demand and the results page too

Clicks may change even when rankings do not, because demand or the search results layout has changed. Select affected queries and inspect their results. That is a more useful way to locate the problem than rewriting the whole site at once.

Finally, determine whether the decline affected relevant inquiries. A loss of unrelated traffic is not necessarily a loss of business.