Help needed - traffic reduced by half for no apparent reason - not sure what to do

[mfrgolfgti]

My client site, https://www.helpinhearing.co.uk/ - has regularly been showing traffic of between 1000 & 1500 sessions per month. I've just looked at their Analytics for September and the sessions have dropped to just over 600! And not only was there a period of around 11 days from September 19th onwards when there was either zero traffic or 1 or 2 visits, but also from October 4th to today (8th Oct) also no visits at all. This has never happened and we've managed this website for several years now. I cannot fathom out why this may be the case. We haven't changed anything on the site from a technical point of view, just added content and usual blog etc pages. Search Console lists 147 pages as 404 errors but there are no urgent messages or alerts/warnings. I really don't know how to proceed and try and find out what is going on with the site. Can anyone offer suggestions?

[mfrgolfgti]

We have finally found out what the issue was. We realised that on the days that Google Analytics said there was no traffic to our site, we'd had people visiting the site and submitting lead forms, also we sent out a newsletter in that period and lots of people clicked through according to the email marketing report. So then we looked at the plugin that handled the Google Analytics on the site and there was an error with the plug-in. We've fixed that now and it's all fine! Phew!  Thanks very much for all your help, it certainly helped us get to the right conclusion.

[mfrgolfgti]

Just had a quick look at some of these questions: the fall in traffic is across the board, all channels except social are down by around 50%. Also mobile/desktop are both down by a similar amount. We were ranking on page 1 for 43 keywords but now it is 28. I can't see a particular major fall in any specific keyword though and our number 1 rankings is steady at 8.

Looking at Analytics, over the past 6 days, only 1 pageview has been logged, this was yesterday. I can't see how the traffic could drop to virtually zero like that.

[mfrgolfgti]

Thanks Meisha, I will look at all these factors.

[Grace-N]

Hi there. A few other questions might help narrow down the issue. When you mentioned the sessions, were those specific to organic or via all channels? If that number is a total, are you able to narrow the drop down to any single channel? Are there significant differences between mobile and desktop traffic, and discrepancies there? Were you getting referral traffic from any other site(s) and that link was removed or is now broken? If you are tracking keywords, has your rank dropped from any high-value keyword? Have you checked search console keyword analytics to check for trends related to brand or non-brand search volume or rank drops? Have the SERPs changed for any of the target keywords that you were previously performing well with - example, did a new knowledge graph appear? Are people running paid ads when previously there were no paid ads? These are all areas to check for changes that could result in a substantial drop. I hope this helps!