I saw a drastic reduction of organic Google traffic and I'm trying to figure out why. It happened right after I stopped Adwords campaign. I restarted campaign a few weeks later but even though I put higher bids than before I get fewer clicks (sometimes none) then before and organic traffic didn't come back.

Have anyone experienced anything similar? How did you solve the problem?

The website is Savings-Secrets.com

Well, you shouldn't be surprised about it. Your niche is competitive. Having said that, ranking fluctuation would just be natural and your traffic would in turn be affected. You need to build more quality links to get a much more stable organic ranking.

Thank you for your reply Ishi. I had fluctuations before. What's surprising this time is that it dropped and not coming back at all for about a month now.

How would you go about getting a quality links?

Competitive niches and products are really hard to rank even in Adwords because the prices are too high. In organic t=rankings, there are lots of site competing for the first page.

Dwanez, I agree but I had about 20-25 organic searches a day. I went to 2 organic searches within 10 days. I don't think it's because of competition.

are you sure that backlinks are in same amount and you didn't change anything in the site?

To raise your organic rankings, You can be adding fresh content often, link within your site (interlinking) and never overuse keywords because it may cause penalization.

Actually it's been a long held idea that having Adwords ads and "organic" results on the same page can improve the CTR of the "organic" results. However I've never seen any real testing that bears up the idea but given human behaviour it could be a possibility.

kuzmanin, I changed navigation: I added current menu instead of left-side static menu. I also created 2 dozens of backlinks to one of the pages and probably another 2 dozen to the main page around the time the drop started.

Mike, what do you mean by "interlinking"?. I have a site-wide menu, you think it's not enough?

Might be a silly question, but are you sure that the PPC didn't use to be counted as organic traffic? (I.e. you had a lot less "paid" traffic in analytics than what you saw in adwords?

Good question. The keywords I got organic traffic on were too expensive for me to pay for. I paid mostly for very cheap keywords (which I cant buy for the same price anymore).

Originally Posted by Optimist5

I saw a drastic reduction of organic Google traffic and I'm trying to figure out why. It happened right after I stopped Adwords campaign. I restarted campaign a few weeks later but even though I put higher bids than before I get fewer clicks (sometimes none) then before and organic traffic didn't come back.

Have anyone experienced anything similar? How did you solve the problem?

The website is Savings-Secrets.com

It had nothing to do w/ stopping your PPC campaign unless it's a result of chrishirst mentioned... which does hold a little water, but usually not to the extent you're seeing.

More than likely, something has caused your site to rank worse for some keyword that was actually driving traffic. Usually this is because

1) you changed something about your site or
2) something changed about your site's backlinks

The best way to figure it out is through web analytics packages. I would look at which URLs were getting organic traffic before the drop and for what keywords users were finding those URLs in the SERPs. Compare this to the URLs and keywords that are driving traffic now. You'll likely see that one URL and/or one keyword phrase used to drive a lot of traffic.

This will tell you "where" to look for the problem... all you have to do next is figure out "what" changed to cause that URL's ranking for those keywords to drop and then "how" to fix it...

Good luck!

Canonical, thanks for very comprehensive response! Unfortunately, there was no one or two keywords that were driving the traffic. It was almost all longtail keywords, in many various combinations.

The main thing I changed is navigation menu. I'm thinking about going back to old, left-side static menu and see if that fixes the problem.

Right!

SO you moved the navigation menu and assumed that dropping Adwords was the cause of the drop in CTR.

OK then!

Well, it's the same internal links, they are just displayed differently (via css dropdown menu). If you look in the page source they are all there. It's hard for me to see how this could have been bad for the rankings in Google.

There are all manner of reasons why such a change could impact on click throughs. You are assuming it is a change of "ranking", rankings change all the time for absolutely no reason at all.

What if moving the navigation changed the descriptions, so they are now less "attractive" to users?

Yea i would agree with most people you are in a competitive niche and you fluctuate on the rankings. It is really a rat race and you have to be on top of your game to stay on top. When you get on top. Do not take a break. Because trust me your competitors are going after you.

You better make it fast to bring it back again, Google are going to launch Caffeine just right after Christmas holiday.

francis, it's already done: beautiful dropdown is gone and static is back. I hope it's going to work.

Check out whether this is a temporary glitch or a permanent one.