Imagine our company's website has seen a sudden 30% drop in organic traffic. Walk me through how you would diagnose and address the issue.

Situation

At my previous agency job, a client's e-commerce site experienced a 35% overnight drop in organic traffic, causing immediate concern from the account manager.

Task

I was tasked with quickly identifying the root cause and presenting a recovery plan within 24 hours.

Action

First, I checked Google Search Console for manual actions or security issues; none were found. Then I reviewed Google Analytics to see which pages lost traffic; it was mostly product pages. I compared the site's current page versions with cached copies and discovered that a recent CMS update had accidentally removed all meta descriptions and noindexed a portion of product pages. I immediately coordinated with the development team to revert the noindex tags and restore the meta descriptions. While awaiting the fix, I used the URL Inspection tool to request reindexing of critical pages. I also set up alerts for any future noindex changes.

Result

Within 48 hours, traffic started recovering, and a week later it was back to baseline. The client was impressed by our swift response, and we implemented a pre-deployment checklist to prevent similar issues.