As the world' population on the internet increases, there is never a guarantee that your site's traffic continues to increase.
So here, no website is immune to traffic changes, including traffic drops that may be significant. Since the variables are too many, the causes can be easy to overlook. For you to find the source of the problem, you need to gather all the evidence, look closely to the statistics, and conclude whether the change occur seasonally or based on other patterns.
Once you're sure that the drop isn't statistical, you can then proceed to have a closer look at possible symptoms, and start managing the issue.
These are the steps so you can pinpoint the problem without barking at the wrong tree.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Using the tool, you can get insight on a lot of data regarding the traffic and performance of your site.
Your Website Having Significant Changes
Any change you make to your website may affect performance and visibility. And big changes like redesign and migration may have huge affects on your SEO.
In this case, the most common problems are indexation and crawlability.
In your Google Analytics account, go to Crawl Errors to see the graphs and seek for abrupt changes that happen after your significant website changes. You can also use tools to track down broken links and URLs by having them deep crawling your site.
If your site experiences crawling issues, the number of indexed pages may have drastically decreased. The solution is to make sure that you haven't disallowed anything mistakenly in the robots.txt file. You may also check page-level restrictions and how they apply to each of your URLs.
You also need to make sure that your site's servers have no issues.
Search Engine Penalty
The next possible cause, is your site violating Google's webmaster quality guidelines and got caught by the company's reviewers.
Some reasons for being penalized include and not limited to: unethical SEO strategy by you or any of your hired individuals/companies, negative SEO campaign launched by others against your site, being hacked, or having a thin and low quality content that Google found to be spam or unethical.
If this is the case, you will see a notice in your Google Search Console account, under the Search Traffic - Manual Actions section.
Another possible cause is your site being hacked. Since this one is not caused by you, Google has a comprehensive recovery guide you can follow to solve the issue.
User-generated spam
If your site is open for user comments or user-generated content creations, your site is more likely to experience this issue.
Your website can be penalized if it has spammy and irrelevant outbound links from any of your pages. The best solution is to detect the violation and clean up the mess quickly and carefully. To prevent similar future problems, you need to have some preventive measures.
This includes: spam protection tools, moderation, nofollow to all outbound links and so forth.
Cloaking and sneaky redirects, and unnatural outgoing links
Again, these are on-page violations.
If the penalty refers to cloaking, you need to ensure that your pages return the same content to a user in a browser and to a search engine bot. Use 'Fetch as Google' tool to see what Google sees, and check for any differences that may happen.
As for sneaky redirects, you need to make sure that none of your page's redirects point to anywhere suspicious or unwanted.
And if the penalty refers to unnatural linking, you need to first review the list of all external links your site has, and get rid of those paid ones, or those that were are gained through link exchange.
Thin or duplicate contents
Google likes meaningful contents. A few thin contents may not matter much, but if you have plenty of them, or if you have duplicate contents, Google will definitely see that as a problem.
As a result, Google may penalize you.
What you need to do, is do word counts on your contents. You should also pay attention to the ratio between the word count and the number of links from that page. You can also use online tools to find duplicate titles, duplicate meta description and duplicate contents.
Unnatural backlinks
Backlinks should come naturally. Link building on its own is a SEO strategy, and its allowed as long as it adds to the overall quality of a page and doesn't spam.
As a search engine, Google considers your website's quality from the backlink diversity. If your SEO strategy involves putting a lot of backlinks to as many websites as possible at a shortest amount of time, prepare yourself for Google's penalty.
If unnatural backlink is the cause of your sudden traffic drop, you can use Google's disavowed tool so Google won't take those links into account when assessing your site. But still, Google recommends that you make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site.
Your Website Loses Valuable Backlinks
How Google ranks your site, determines how much traffic you will likely generate from Google as your referral. One of the biggest signal for Google to rank your site, is the number of backlinks.
What this means, if you are losing a lot of backlinks in a sudden, especially if those backlinks are valuable (received from high-ranked websites with high authority), your site will definitely experience a drop in traffic. The affect can be worse if your site doesn't have loads of backlinks in the first place.
Here you need to ask yourself: "Why and what happened?"
Factors include: the site(s) may not consider you worthy to have a backlink there anymore, you have changed your site's URL so the backlinks are removed, your guest post/comment/articles/feed has been removed for certain causes, and so forth.
The causes may be beyond your reach, but you can hope to regain them by contacting the website(s) directly.
Competitors
No business runs alone. Whether your site follows others that have already done the same, or your site as a pioneer in a business, you are not and won't be alone on the web.
To find out, seek your closest competitors and see what they have in advantage that you don't. And if the traffic drop is specific to certain keywords, some of your pages may also have gone down on Google's SERPs.
To solve this issue, you need to ramp up your SEO effort beyond your competitors. Optimize for valuable keywords that are relevant to your site, and try to outdo your competitors at their own game. Try to target queries directly to Featured Snippet, Knowledge Graph or Answer Box.
The cause may come from your competitors in doing a negative SEO on you. They may also use using PPC campaign to drive the traffic away from the top organic results, including from your site. If this is the case, you may consider overbidding the competitor if given keywords are of high importance to you. Or, you can shift your focus to target other queries that you may have previously overlooked.
Google Algorithm Update
As a search engine with massive influence, Google needs to evolve. That is to meet the demands that may have shifted, and to keep competitors away from even close to beating it.
Sometimes, when Google updates or have rolled out tweaks to how its algorithms work, your website's traffic may decline corresponds to the triggering factors.
Any major updates to Google, or any major fluctuation in results for any common niche should be covered by the news. You need to keep an eye on the trends and see whether those Google algorithm updates may have affected you.
Conclusion
There are a lot of reasons why Google dropped your rank. For whatever reason it is, you need to quickly regain your position by knowing where the issues are and solve them.
And what you need to know, Google in dropping your rank and traffic doesn't mean that Google hates you. As a website on the web, there are probably hundreds if not thousands of websites like yours. Even if your site is big enough to influence a massive crowd, you're not likely to give Google any dent on its business.
So no, Google doesn't have a grudge on you, or your site.
As the largest search engine on the web, Google's goal is to give the best Search experience for all users. Since most websites get their traffic from Google, the search engine wants the better to rank higher up, and the worse to rank lower down.
If you think your credibility is worth to be up there, you need to do better than you previously did. Audit your site for SEO from time to time, and remember: always play safe and consistent in doing what you're doing as long as it benefits you.