SEO and Technical Audit and fixes for News Site - search traffic down
Budget: $30 – $250 USD
Search traffic major decline in news site, need help
I have a Wordpress news website built using GeneratePress: cricexec.com
We are a news and features content site, publishing about 15-20 posts per day
In the past few months we’ve had a major falloff in users/traffic, particularly search traffic.
Google Analytics Monthly Total Users:
Month / Direct Users / organic - direct split
June 2025: 7,000: organic search - 2,300 (34%), direct - 18,00
July 2025: 18,000: organic search - 10,000 (51%), direct - 5,349
August 2025: 29,000: Organic Search – 20,600 (72%), direct - 4502
September 2025: 37,000: organic search – 29,000 (78%), direct - 4,900
October 2025: 198,000: organic search - 170,000 (86%), direct - 24,000
November 2025: 84,000: organic search - 59,000 (70% ), direct - 21,000
December 2025: 65,000: organic search – 32,000 (49%), direct - 29,000
January 2026: 42,000: organic search – 10,000 (67%), direct - 29,000
Context is we switched to Generate Press in mid July after a long time on a really slow theme (“Newspaper”)
We had a steady increase in traffic as you can see.
However starting In November/December we had a big decline in search traffic.
I know Google released an update in December.
Some additional context:
We are a US-based site, but because we focus on cricket a lot of traffic comes from India. I understand that sites like this may have gotten impacted by the December update. That said, even our India traffic seems to have fallen off.
I think in the December update, Google raised the standards for passing core web vitals. I think we were passing before on desktop, failing on mobile, and after the update we started failing both. We’ve made some optimizations and now have passing scores for both but it hasn’t been 30 days so I don’t think we’re passing yet.
We have some strange indexing situation/issues. We have 20,000 posts on our site, but still only 10,000 seem to be indexed
In google analytics page report there is a lot more traffic to “page not found” than before – may or may not be a concern
I need an expert in both SEO, technical SEO, sitespeed, etc. to look at our situation, make some recommendations. We have an in-house developer who is not an SEO expert but will collaborate and be able to make implementations.
Scope of work
- Assess whether core web vitals scores are good enough
- Investigate and resolve Google indexing issues
- Investigate and come up with explanations for major search traffic falloff and how to improve – whether technical, content, SEO, etc.
- Make any other recommendations and jointly implement to improve search traffic
Company info
- Company name: cricexec.com
- Company website: https://cricexec.com
- Cricexec.com is a news website with over 20,000 live posts, built using Wordpress and GeneratePress.
I have a Wordpress news website built using GeneratePress: cricexec.com
We are a news and features content site, publishing about 15-20 posts per day
In the past few months we’ve had a major falloff in users/traffic, particularly search traffic.
Google Analytics Monthly Total Users:
Month / Direct Users / organic - direct split
June 2025: 7,000: organic search - 2,300 (34%), direct - 18,00
July 2025: 18,000: organic search - 10,000 (51%), direct - 5,349
August 2025: 29,000: Organic Search – 20,600 (72%), direct - 4502
September 2025: 37,000: organic search – 29,000 (78%), direct - 4,900
October 2025: 198,000: organic search - 170,000 (86%), direct - 24,000
November 2025: 84,000: organic search - 59,000 (70% ), direct - 21,000
December 2025: 65,000: organic search – 32,000 (49%), direct - 29,000
January 2026: 42,000: organic search – 10,000 (67%), direct - 29,000
Context is we switched to Generate Press in mid July after a long time on a really slow theme (“Newspaper”)
We had a steady increase in traffic as you can see.
However starting In November/December we had a big decline in search traffic.
I know Google released an update in December.
Some additional context:
We are a US-based site, but because we focus on cricket a lot of traffic comes from India. I understand that sites like this may have gotten impacted by the December update. That said, even our India traffic seems to have fallen off.
I think in the December update, Google raised the standards for passing core web vitals. I think we were passing before on desktop, failing on mobile, and after the update we started failing both. We’ve made some optimizations and now have passing scores for both but it hasn’t been 30 days so I don’t think we’re passing yet.
We have some strange indexing situation/issues. We have 20,000 posts on our site, but still only 10,000 seem to be indexed
In google analytics page report there is a lot more traffic to “page not found” than before – may or may not be a concern
I need an expert in both SEO, technical SEO, sitespeed, etc. to look at our situation, make some recommendations. We have an in-house developer who is not an SEO expert but will collaborate and be able to make implementations.
Scope of work
- Assess whether core web vitals scores are good enough
- Investigate and resolve Google indexing issues
- Investigate and come up with explanations for major search traffic falloff and how to improve – whether technical, content, SEO, etc.
- Make any other recommendations and jointly implement to improve search traffic
Company info
- Company name: cricexec.com
- Company website: https://cricexec.com
- Cricexec.com is a news website with over 20,000 live posts, built using Wordpress and GeneratePress.