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Our site has lost a lot of SE traffic over the past 10 years and is now stuck at mid-low search engine traffic.
Posted by on November 16, 2025 at 5:42 amOver the past 10 years, our website has lost around 90% of its Google traffic, and since then we’ve been stuck at a mid-low level with no real growth. We’ve tried improving UX, doing more PR, and building links from relevant sites, but none of it seems to have made a meaningful difference.
Do you have any advice on how we could start moving things upward again in terms of search traffic? Or is SEO traffic eventually doomed to decline no matter what?
Any ideas are welcome.
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1 Reply
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The first thing you need to determine is what has changed about the SERPs, especially because the timeframe is so long.
There are three main options;
1. The SERPs have remained the broadly the same, and you’ve lost ground to your competitors. This has caused your traffic drop.
2. The SERPs have remained broadly the same. Your positioning has remained broadly the same. However, the total traffic of the SERPs has dropped.
3. The SERPs have changed and are now suggesting fundamentally different types of websites to yours.
The measures you have taken would likely only have a positive effect for option 1.
Obviously, these don’t happen in isolation. All 3 may have happened to some degree.
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A 90% decline over ten years typically indicates a structural problem rather than a superficial one, such as outdated content, a lack of topical authority, or a website that no longer aligns with Google’s perception of user preferences. Coasting is doomed, but SEO is not.
Could you look over which pages continue to generate traffic, restructure around those themes, eliminate unnecessary content, and update the content to reflect current user intent? A targeted rebuild occasionally outperforms countless adjustments.
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How are your backlinks?
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What has been your strategy for acquiring backlinks?
Could it be that your competitors are pushing you down the rankings, causing you to lose traffic as a result?
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That’s a big drop but you can recover, it’ll probably take a methodical, data driven strategy. Start by auditing your site in depth to diagnose when and why the decline happened. Refresh or rewrite your older content to make it more relevant, fix any technical SEO issues and do a backlink audit to reclaim or disavow links. Also, be realistic, this won’t turn around overnight, SEO recovery often takes several months.
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Very similar problem for me too.
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10 years is a long time and indicates a complicated issue. You need to identify the causes before you can figure out solutions.
Is that decline coming from brand or non-brand queries?
Brand means brand erosion. Build documentation to show this and bring it up to your manager or the correct team. This needs brand awareness campaigns and earned media efforts from leadership.
Non-brand means you can try to solve it with content, optimizations, and earned media if you can get cooperation from leadership.
Also do some technical audits to ensure you don’t have technical issues contributing to the decline.
Do a content audit and look at search intent.
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