If My SEO Traffic Dropped, Here's Exactly What I'd Do (It's Easy)

If you're worried about your SEO performance right now, you are not alone. You might have seen your traffic drop from search, so fewer people are coming onto your website from Google. You might have seen your impressions drop in Google Search Console. You might be wondering, have I been hit by some algorithmic penalty here? Or is it AI overviews? Are more people spending time in the AI answers and not coming through to your website? Or does Google just hate your brand, your website, or you? Well, today I'm going to tell you a true story about a brand who came to us worried about exactly these things. And by the way, just to reassure you that this is happening across the spectrum, this is an 11-figure beauty skin care brand. In fact, a collection of brands. I'm not going to tell you who they are, but I'm going to give you some stats. So, clicks from search were down 23.5% year-on-year. Well, for brands of any size, that's scary, but if you're a $10 billion-plus brand, that is terrifying. Impressions were down 11.8% and their average rankings were slipping. Now, if this sounds familiar, you got two choices. You can blame the outside world, Google, AI, competitors, the economy, net zero, and hope that all of this stuff goes away and things come back. Or you can use this as a chance to review everything that you've been doing. And that's exactly what this brand did. They came to us saying, "Exposure Ninja, help! We're really worried about our SEO." Now, the first thing that we did is something really sexy. We ran a comprehensive SEO [music] audit. everything with a fresh set of eyes from an outsider perspective. That audit uncovered thousands of issues that were impacting their search performance. And this was stuff that their internal teams either hadn't noticed because they don't have time to review this stuff, or they just hadn't had time to think about the implications. Because here's the truth, your website changes over time. Pages are added, sections are taken away, new structures are built in. You've got different brands that you might be acquiring, folding them in. You've got changes to plugins. And over time, what might have started out as a perfectly SEO'd website can start to erode. A bit like a perfectly manicured garden. If you leave that for 2 years, it's going to look like an absolute wasteland. And the same is true when it comes to websites and SEO. Now, I'm not saying this brand's SEO was a wasteland, far from it, but it definitely slipped down from optimal. So, I'm going to tell you exactly what happened in this SEO audit and most importantly, what we did so that you can use this approach with your brand and your websites if you've noticed things dropping. So, first up, what is an SEO audit? Well, it's basically a comprehensive analysis of your website's technical health, its search visibility, and its content performance. And an SEO audit does two things. Firstly, it identifies blockers. These are things that are holding your website's performance back. And secondly, it identifies opportunities, the gaps, the improvements that can be made. Now, the SEO audits that we do for clients also include a prioritized roadmap because often when you get an SEO audit, you just get loads of recommendations. Nobody has infinite resources available, so you've got to work out what to prioritize, what to do first. And that's why this prioritized roadmap for improvement is so effective. Okay, so what's the good news? Well, after doing this SEO audit and implementing the recommendations, this brand that had seen such a significant drop in their traffic and their visibility saw some improvements. Organic traffic grew 27% year-on-year. Average rankings improved by 2.7 positions and their visibility in Google's AI overviews more than doubled. In other words, they took what started out as a traffic and visibility drop, reviewed everything from first principles, and then gained that visibility back and more. Okay, so how do we do that? Step one is to start with the technical SEO foundations. If search engines can't crawl, index, and interpret your website properly, it doesn't matter how good your content is, you're not going to be getting the traffic that you deserve. So, in our skin care brand example, the audit uncovered hundreds of technical issues affecting their search performance, including 349 duplicate page titles, 219 duplicate content issues, 195 pages with no internal links, and 118 hreflang errors. So, fixing these issues improved crawl efficiency, indexing accuracy, and ranking signals, and the site's health improved from 64 out of 100 to 72 out of 100 in a matter of months. Now, that's not going to change the world on its own, but fixing this sort of technical SEO foundation gives you a really good base to work from. So, how do we do this? How do we do these technical audits? Well, we typically use a combination of three tools: Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and SEMrush. Screaming Frog is kind of like running an X-ray on your website. It shows you all of this stuff in one place. Google Search Console shows you how the website is performing in search at the moment. And SEMrush has its own site audit feature, as well as being really useful later on for the keyword analysis. By the way, you can get a free trial of SEMrush at thankyouninjas.com. You're welcome. Well, what are we looking for at this stage? We're looking for crawl issues. We're looking for redirect chains and broken redirects. So, when you visit one page, it's supposed to redirect you to another page, but maybe that one's broken or it redirects you back and you get stuck in a loop. We're looking for duplicate pages and duplicate page titles. Sometimes when a site expands or moves into different territories, accidentally duplicate pages can be created. Or if a page is cloned to turn into a template for another page, sometimes the page title can inadvertently be left and you end up with duplicate page titles. We're looking for pages being blocked from indexing. We're looking for [music] broken internal links. So, click on that link to go to that page, but it doesn't work. Maybe that page has disappeared, maybe there should be a redirect, but there's not. We're looking for missing canonical tags and any hreflang errors if your site has an international component. Once we've handled those technical foundations, we then move on to on-page SEO signals. So, we're not looking at content yet, we're just looking at the on-page optimization. In the client's example here, we found 201 missing meta descriptions. That's the text that appears in the search results to tell people that, "Oh, you might want to click on this page." Now, whilst Google says it doesn't use meta descriptions for ranking, they are really useful at getting people to click on your website. And if more people are clicking on your website, Google sees that as relevant, so your site is more likely to move up in visibility. We found 136 missing H1 tags. We found 1,500 images that were missing alt text and 256 genuine metadata errors. Now, fixing these things can often be quite simple, if a bit boring and annoying, but it's really important. It improves topical clarity, keyword targeting, and it improves how your page is viewed and displayed in search results. So, what are our favorite tools for this? Well, again, it's those three. It's Screaming Frog for the X-ray on your website. It's Google Search Console to show us pages that are dropping in visibility or underperforming with click-through rate. And it's keyword tools like SEMrush or SE Ranking. These allow us to validate the keyword targeting and the intent, which we're going to come back to in a minute. So, if you want a bit of a shopping list of things to analyze at this stage, you're looking for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions or any that are missing. You're looking for missing or incorrectly used H1 headings. You're looking for pages targeting unclear keywords, images missing alt text, weak internal linking to priority pages. And whilst each of these issues might appear small, across large sites, they can really compound. It's boring work, but it's worth doing. Or having Exposure Ninja do it. Okay, so we've done the technical foundation, we've done the on-page signals. Now, it's time to look at the content and the search intent. This is step three. And what we really want to do is make sure that the pages and the content that we're trying to rank for each keyword actually has a chance of ranking because it represents the sort of thing that Google wants to show visitors and that visitors really want. So, the most common outcomes of this section are exactly what we ended up recommending to this skin care and beauty brand. Keyword and search intent guidance for new and existing content. So, showing them, "Oh, you've got a gap on this topic, which we really want to get visibility on." Or, "You've got some content that's targeting this topic and these keywords, but it doesn't really match what users are looking for. So, maybe we need to tweak this." Also, recommendations on page structure, the use of headings, and internal linking. We can also end up with recommendations on these types of things when it comes to AI, which is the next step. And advice on content gaps, which can tie has a priority to move into a certain space or they want to increase visibility of a certain product line or section on their website. Well, we'll analyze that for content gaps to make sure we've got enough content targeting the keywords around those topics. And that's all stuff that comes into this section three of the SEO audit. So, what are you looking for? Well, you're looking for keywords in Search Console that have really high impressions, but low click-through rate. In other words, you have pages that are sort of in the mix here, in that they're getting impressions, but people really aren't clicking on them. You're also looking for pages that are ranking positions, say eight to 20. And these are pages that are, again, in the game, but they're not yet generating high volumes of clicks. If you can improve the visibility of these pages even a few positions, you can attract quite a lot more traffic and then use that as a springboard [music] to target the top positions on Google. We're also looking for important keywords that don't have dedicated pages targeting them. And this can seem like super obvious. Of course, I've got pages on my website targeting certain keywords. One of the main mistakes that a lot of brands make, even massive ones, is that their target keywords to them are so obvious, they just think that they're being targeted across the site. And to an extent, they probably are, but that doesn't mean that you can't benefit from having specific pages on your website focused very clearly on those keywords. This also works really well for AI search, which we'll come back to in a minute. You're also looking for content that doesn't match the dominant search intent. So, what does that mean? Well, let's say that we're trying to rank for really commercial keyword, i.e. a keyword that people are using to find a product to buy. How do we know that people are using this keyword to find a product to buy? Well, when you run a search for it on Google, you might be seeing product ads, or you might be seeing lots of advertisers targeting that keyword. When you look at the organic search results, you might be seeing pages that are very commercially focused, i.e. they're product pages or they're service pages. But maybe when you look at your page, which is targeting these keywords or these search topics, you realize actually these are information pages. People are looking for a phone case to buy, and I'm giving them a blog post about phone cases. Well, if that's the case, then you might find that Google is a bit reluctant to push your pages because it just knows that that's not what people are looking for. We've a couple of solutions this. You can either change the focus of those pages, i.e. by adding in uh product recommendations into content pages, linking product links, which we've talked about in a recent video, or you can create new commercially focused pages which target those keywords. One of the results of this section is that we will then map keywords into topic clusters. And prioritize content improvement based on the gaps that we're finding between search intent and the content that's being delivered. And by the way, if you're watching this thinking, "Oh, I might really benefit from a second pair of eyes on my website's visibility and our SEO situation," then the team at Exposure Ninja can obviously help. This is what we do. You can request an SEO audit from us. It's a really detailed piece of work. Takes us about a month. All you need to do is go to exposureninja.com and drop us a message through the contact page. Alternatively, if you're not quite ready for that and you just want a quick overview to see what we might do, then you can request a free digital marketing review. In this digital marketing review, we'll do a essentially a very light version of this. So, we won't get your website up on the rack and examine it in all the detail of the full SEO audit, but we'll do a quick crawl and we'll analyze some of the opportunities that you have against your competitors, not just in SEO, but in different channels. Yes, AI search, but also content marketing, paid search, and even email marketing, as well. We'll then recommend the top priority things that you should be implementing over the next 6 to 12 months to see a significant increase in visibility. This service is completely free. The SEO audit is not free cuz it's a massive piece of work, but the free marketing review is free. You kind of guess that from the name, right? Um and you can request it at exposureninja.com/review. Not everybody is eligible, so you do need to apply for it, but you can do that at exposureninja.com/review. Once we've done the content analysis piece, step four is optimizing for AI search. It's true, AI search is here. Whether it's Google AI overviews or ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity or Claude, people are using AI tools to find what they need. And this is a large part of the reason why so many brands are seeing drops in their organic traffic. As we've seen from this brand's case study, though, just because AI search is here doesn't mean that you need to tolerate any traffic drops. And actually, this brand has seen an increase in traffic as a result of the improvements from this audit, even though there's this macro picture of AI search results eroding traffic to websites. But of course, we want to make sure that if AI search is happening, our brands are being mentioned in the answers and cited as the websites linked to in the AI results. So, that's what this section of the audit is all about. All of these AI tools tend to rely on structured, machine-readable, highly authoritative content. So, that's really what we're looking to analyze. In the skin care company's example, we ended up improving their content clarity, so refocusing some of the pages to make it incredibly obvious and giving these AI tools exactly what they needed to understand the focus of the page. We improved the schema coverage, and we did some topical expansion. All of this helped improve visibility in Google's AI overviews. So, when they first started with us, they were visible in 45 different search terms in the AI overviews. That then went up during the campaign to 95 and then eventually to 110, which is a more than doubling of their visibility in AI overviews. So, what are the sort of things that you might be looking out for in this section? Well, first is the use of schema. This is the hidden markup text that can exist on your pages. Now, schema can fall into a bunch of different categories. You can mark up articles, FAQs, uh videos, your business or the organization. All this gives the AI tools a bit of extra info about your business in a standardized format that they're used to interpreting. We'll also look to strengthen topical authority. This is a fairly broad topic, so what does it really mean? Well, if you want to get visibility for a certain topic or search term or question, you really need to make sure that you've got content that covers that topic in the full level of detail. So, how a lot of these AI tools work is when you search for a query, they will do what's called query fanout, where they'll go and run a bunch of underlying searches in parallel for different things. In fact, let's do an example. So, for example, if I go into Perplexity and ask, "How do I improve my grip strength?" it's going to run a bunch of background searches on this topic. So, improve grip strength evidence-based, grip strength training frequency, rest days, and grip strength exercises climbers, deadlift, farmers carry. So, this is what's called the query fanout approach, where it's running these searches in parallel on the background and compiling all the answers that it finds. So, how do we use this in marketing to improve the likelihood our content is being recommended in these responses. Well, we want to understand each of the different sub queries that are going on behind the scenes. Now, of course, they're going to be slightly different every time because these tools are not deterministic, but by running these types of queries and observing the sorts of questions that it's answering, the sort of queries that are fanning out, we can begin to make sure that all of those queries are handled in our content, either by individual pieces of content on the website answering each of these questions or by having really comprehensive content that has each of these questions in the sections on that page, so that when these tools run those searches, they keep finding us, they keep finding our content either on our website or on other people's websites referring to us. And that essentially gives you multiple tickets in the raffle, and it improves your chances of being referenced in the answer. So, during an SEO audit, our team will use tools like Also Asked to compile a really comprehensive overview of the topics that we want to get visibility for and each of the different sub questions. And we'll use a topic cluster approach here to design a full content strategy that covers each of these topics from every relevant angle. If the business doesn't already have all of this content, then it allows us to prioritize the creation of this over time. A lot of companies are just they've got content teams, and they just produce stuff without any sort of real clear goal or strategy. They're just producing because they know they've got to produce. A lot of agencies, to be fair, also do this. We like to take a very different approach, where we start from how do we cover this topic from every possible angle and make sure we've got content covering all of it. We can then look at the website's existing content and map this against these topics. Maybe we don't need to write it from scratch, we can just tweak some of the stuff that's there. We'll also look at page structure because we found that there are certain page structures that these AI tools seem to like to reference in their answers. This includes concise headings and clearly described sections. Clear question and answer formatting also seems to work well. If you've worked on that topic cluster approach that we just spoke about, making sure you've got a clear internal linking structure, linking all of these different pieces together can also help improve your visibility. As can structured summaries and definitions. These AI tools really like a clear answer to a clear question. In fact, over on the Exposure Ninja website, we've even created a blog post template that we found that works really well for AI visibility. It also happens to work quite nicely for humans, as well, because these AI tools are essentially just trying to replicate the experience that a human goes through. But this template shows you the different sections that we've found work really well on a post if it's going to get some good visibility. Now, of course, just cuz you followed the template doesn't guarantee you visibility, and it's all going to depend on the quality of the content you're putting into this template, but we find this is a really good starter. And by the way, if you're in skin care or beauty or you're just interested in what's going on in AI search, we've published a white paper for the beauty industry called AI search, the new shelf space for beauty brands. And this breaks down really what's going on in the world of beauty. There are some really interesting changes happening because of AI search. For example, we found that 37% of consumers have used AI platforms for beauty product recommendations, and this seems to be growing. 45% of beauty marketers reported an increase in traffic after appearing in AI overviews. And 27% of UK shoppers are already using AI agents to make purchases. So, in this white paper, we explain how AI search is reshaping the beauty marketing and buyer journeys, what signals are influencing the AI recommendations in this space, and of course, how brands can optimize for AI search visibility and this new rise of agentic shopping. You can head over to the Exposure Ninja website to download this now. So, there you have it. There is the SEO audit process that we ran [music] through with this monster brand to help them recover some of their lost visibility. So, if you're worried about your SEO, you're seeing traffic, impressions, ranking drops, and you're thinking, "I don't know what's causing this." The message is don't panic. This can be a really good opportunity to just take everything back to first principles, get a fresh set of eyes on it if you need to. You can get the Exposure Ninja team to do it. Just head over to exposureninja.com. Just drop us a message saying you're interested in doing this, and we'll be able to help you out. But, just because you're seeing decline doesn't mean you can't do anything about it. As we've seen with this example, actually if you follow these processes, the four steps that we've outlined, you can actually use this as an opportunity to grow rather than just try and manage your decline. So, put away that LinkedIn open to work icon for now, and get stuck in. Just contact Exposure Ninja via the website, and we'll see you soon.