Why Your SEO Traffic Is Declining (The Reason Nobody Wants to Admit)

0:00We are breaking down things to look at if your organic traffic, your SEO traffic, is declining. One of the most common things, one of the most common problems, is you open Google Search Console and you see your traffic is going down or it's been going down for months or it just spiked down or there's new volatility. First, we got to

0:20establish not all declines are equal. And a lot of people, they freak out at the very first decline. Maybe things are going up and up and up and then you have a bad day, things go down, and freak out. So, first just understand that volatility is normal and ultimately you want to trend up. You're going to go up and down and up and down and up and down, but you want to trend up. And check what is getting hit. Check what you are losing visibility on. Is it meaningless top of funnel informational traffic? Is it unrelated pages, pages that are unrelated to your core business? Or is it pages that bring you

0:53money, that bring you money with SEO? Top of funnel informational traffic declining can be bad, but it's more likely to have very far downstream effects on revenue. Like, you have less authority to pass to high-intent pages. But if top of funnel informational is declining and it's been declining for a while, first of all, check how your bottom of funnel is doing. Make sure that's not declining as well. And then for the top of funnel, see is it related to your topical authority or is it just something basic like you are losing clicks to large language models. I always recommend on this show barely bothering a lot with pure top of funnel

1:31informational content for SEO unless there's some inherent strategy behind it. Top of funnel clicks have been going to LLMs for a long time now and they don't make money. They They or they convert a lot worse because people aren't looking to buy what you sell, to use what you sell, to make a discovery call for you. Top of funnel can improve your top of mind awareness. It can give you authority when you're ranking for these things and getting clicks, it can give you authority to funnel to pages that actually make you money. But aside from that, there's way better ways to make money with SEO than top of funnel

2:07informational content. But I'm going to address this anyway because you might be a new site or something. You might be an informational site and you're really worried about what's happening. So I recommend getting concerned about losing SEO traffic when it's pages that make you money or the decline has been going on for a while. Let's start with just pages that make you money with SEO and they've been stable for a long time,

2:31then you start seeing some volatility. Now you want to act. You have SEO pages, they've been making you money, things are volatile, things are heading down, things are trending down. You got to act. So common reasons for SEO pages that make you money to decline, the top, and this is actually for informational as well, is just search intent is not being met. I know it sounds basic, but the truth is that a lot of people don't want to admit Google's algorithms have tightened around user signals in the last couple of years. David Quinn and I, another really awesome top SEO, we were

3:05talking about this a few episodes ago. Do you think that the results in Google have gotten better or worse in the last couple of years? Oh, that's so interesting. I think they've gotten invariably better. Um It was in It made me think when I was like doing my my work the other day and I was to hate you for that. A lot of people

3:24are going to hate you for saying that. I know. I I Remember that report that that some German scholars had done that they they said it like it had objectively gone down. You don't see any more of those reports coming out, right? Um And it made me think, you know, a lot of a lot of the people who shared like just write good content also shared that report and I was kind of like yeah, that's that's kind of like a hard signal that Google, you know,

3:48definitely doesn't know good content. Um but I think I think they're they're they're It's at It's at a macro level, right? Uh and and I think it's looking at this new data, right? Or or looking at these new heuristics of slicing up. I think that they've got very harsh on uh making sure that the user is

4:08satisfied. If you want to go deeper, we talk about this more on that episode. That's episode 1,141 of the show, Can You Launch 100,000 Pages and Survive Google? Not matching search intent might mean that your answer is incomplete or you're not giving the answer fast enough above the fold before people start scrolling. Instead, the fold is too fluffy. There's too much fluff. Or maybe you're not predicting search intent enough. You're not thinking through what the person searching your target keyword actually wants. Or, this is very common, you are targeting multiple keywords with conflicting search intent with the same piece of content and you're doing that for lots of your content. I've been

4:47consulting a company that had too much fluff above the fold. They were targeting multiple keywords with conflicting intent. So, one keyword would have informational intent, another would have high intent, and they were targeting these keywords with the same piece of content, with the same page. And so, we worked on fixing all of this, and they just said to me an hour ago, "Search visibility stabilized like you said, and keywords continue to improve incrementally." And that's what you want to see because they were going down for a while. So, now they're incrementally going up, and you want to trend up and up and up and up. I think a new issue on

5:23the topic of search intent that we will see a lot of is sites that look like Claude made them, and more people getting wary of this UI. Darren Shaw, friend of the podcast, has been on many times, shared this on LinkedIn, and I really liked it. He said, "I've noticed that I reject anything that smells of AI these days. Your email newsletter sounds

5:46like it was written by AI, unsubscribe. Your social post looks AI generated, unfollow. You leave a comment that looks AI generated, block. Your blog post has AI writing tells, discredited. Your SaaS landing page looks like Claude made it, close the browser tab. Your application looks vibe coded, I assume it's trash. Everyone needs to stop publishing slop. I believe it's doing more harm to your brand than good. Go human or GTFO. For the record, I am funding a vibe coded SaaS, but our SaaS website is made with WordPress and Elementor, not Claude, and the application does not look vibe coded. We go to crazy lengths to make it

6:27not look vibe coded, because I fully agree with everything that Darren wrote there. That doesn't mean you can't use AI to make content, but that means that you want to have content that actually gives searchers what they're looking for, and does it in a fast way. What I think is going to happen with all of these Claude sites is you could have great content that would satisfy intent, but it's possible that people won't trust it because the site looks like AI, and people won't even bother to read the content, which is actually good, maybe because you used Claude to make the site, and searchers have been burned too

7:03many times by Claude sites with generic or hallucinated information. And hallucinations are real. I shared this on X a couple hours ago. I I couldn't believe this. So, I set up a daily automation with Gemini. I I use Gemini and Grok to find high-performing X posts in SEO and digital marketing for me to make content on. The Grok automation and skill worked perfectly. It wasn't the best content, and I need to improve my prompt, but at least it worked. Gemini, on the other hand, hallucinated every single post. It gave me so many posts from top people in SEO, including the

7:41URLs, and confidently made up all of it. The URLs, the view numbers, the like numbers, the reposts, everything was completely made up and hallucinated. I haven't experienced this level of hallucination since when ChatGPT first came out 3 years ago. It was crazy. So, hallucinations are real, and lots of these Claude sites might hallucinate, might give generic answers, might give fluffy answers, and people will get burned by them. And then when another site comes along that actually has good information, but it looks like it was made by Claude, they might just leave because, again, they've been burned too many times. And I think that is going to

8:20be a new issue that a lot of sites with actually good content will face. Some more things to look into if your SEO traffic is declining. Check if new pages are coming up in your SERPs, in your search engine results pages, and that these new pages, they might be targeting keywords better than your existing pages, or they're addressing search intent better and faster, and that's why you're seeing volatility for a page that

8:48historically has been really stable. This is also one of the reasons why it's so important to track your keywords and build pages around one keyword or a cluster of similar keywords. It makes it really easy to identify one, high relevance does very well with SEO, and then two, it makes it easier to identify why you might be experiencing volatility. Another thing that could be happening is a competitor is just aggressively getting links and targeting your keywords, and that can shake things up as well. The more authority you have, the more you will rank for keywords that you are not properly optimized for. So, that could shake things up. And then

9:25look at the links that they're getting because you don't want to react to that and go super hard getting bad links that might hurt you, but you might see that as a signal, "Okay, we should go a little bit harder with our link building. And the thing is, again, it's not super likely that they are going to

9:42outrank you with a relevant content. They still need to have relevance. But, it might just be like it's a company that is targeting your keywords, and you are in an authority battle. Also, check if problems are isolated to subfolders, or is it to the whole site? If it's subfolders, it might just be an issue with the content in that folder, one of the issues that we've discussed. Or if it's the whole site, then you could be

10:06doing lots of different things wrong. So, like a easy example is you have a content team, you're a big site, and you have a content team for one specific part of your business, and that is isolated in a subfolder. And so, it's easier to identify that this content team isn't delivering. This is also one of the reasons why flat architecture is not my favorite for SEO. Flat architecture is where you have every page right off the root domain instead

10:32of neatly organized into subfolders. It's very common that you will see sites with a ton of pages in the footer for SEO purposes, and these pages are also not organized into subfolders. With smaller sites, this isn't as much of a problem, but I do SEO to have huge sites that can scale and scale and scale. Despite what I say in this podcast, I like scaling SEO. I just do it in a

10:57white hat way that is durable and safe. You don't want to spend all your time doing SEO only to get hit really hard. So, subfolders make it way easier to scale SEO and then to identify problems. Something else, obviously, is check Google Search Console for manual actions. This is one of the less likely ones, but it's worth checking. Also, I know I said this before, but check the topics of the pages that you are losing clicks on. Maybe Google thinks that your site is about something else because you're getting a ton of clicks in that area because you have too much content on it and you may need to cut or no

11:34index this content that isn't related to your core business. You could leave it for readers, but you could no index it so it's removed from search engines. So, look at the topics for what is ranking and what and what is not. Another thing with search intent that I almost forgot to bring up is the content might just be outdated. Might be as simple as the content is outdated. This is super common, too. Other problems is keyword cannibalization. have too many pages competing for the same keywords on your site, which is hurting the user signals of all of these pages. So, you may have to merge pages or cut other pages. If

12:10you want to go deeper on keyword cannibalization, I have an awesome episode on it, episode 1030 of this podcast, keyword cannibalization, why your SEO pages compete and how to fix it. And there's technical problems to pay attention to that could emerge as well, like disallowing in robots.txt or accidentally no indexing content or indexing a staging site or you have a plugin that is generating tons of meaningless pages or there's a new programmatic SEO play that didn't go right you that you didn't even know about within your company. This actually happens a lot where a content team might try programmatic SEO, they don't know how to do it right, and then it tanks

12:51the entire site. I'm sure that there are things that I left out in this episode, but these are the most common reasons that I see organic traffic declining. So, if you are experiencing a decline, see if you fall into this. And again, the most common one is intent really just isn't being met well enough and a lot of people don't want to admit that

13:12to themselves. They might even know it. In fact, with the client that said search visibility stabilized like you said and keywords continued to improve incrementally, when I told them that their content wasn't satisfying search intent properly, they immediately knew it. They knew it was true, but they didn't want to admit it to themselves. So, you might be in this situation where you're looking at the pages that are experiencing declines and you're like, "Yeah, you know, there's a lot of fluff here. This isn't very good. We don't give the answer above the fold. And if I was a searcher looking for an answer to this, I'd be dissatisfied because I'm

13:44not going to get it clearly. I'm not going to get it fast, and we got to fix this." But, you know, again, there's lots of different problems that it could be, and hopefully this episode helps you find those problems. Once you know what the problems are, it becomes a lot easier to fix them. If you want to learn to do SEO that doesn't have these problems, my SEO course, Compact Keywords, shows you how to do SEO that has high relevance to keywords, no fluff, matches search intent, targeting things at the bottom of the funnel where there are is a lot of intent to buy, use something, make a discovery call, so

14:17it's not the top of funnel informational content that we talked about earlier, how to track keywords, how to use subfolders, how to get good backlinks, how to do a content audit to prune and improve pages, how to do a technical audit. There's examples in every niche. There's videos, step-by-step breakdowns, written portions, common mistakes, templates, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and me bringing in an awesome attitude cuz I spent a year making this course, and I had a lot of fun doing it. Now, I'm smiling in every video happy to help you do the best SEO that makes you money. Let's go. So, I hope you check out my SEO course that is at

14:53compactkeywords.com. And that is everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,147 of the podcast, 1,147 days in a row doing this show. We have not missed a single day since starting, making our way towards episode 1,150. If you watched this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you all again tomorrow. Bye

15:23now.