Why did my organic traffic drop?

Traffic drops have six or seven common causes and only one of them is "Google penalised you." Work through them in order — the cheap checks first — and stop at the first one that fits.

The order to check, and what each looks like

1. Seasonality. Down month over month, flat year over year. The single most common false alarm. Why one window lies.
2. Tracking. A near-vertical drop on a clean calendar date. Compare the conversion drop to the session drop; if conversions fell far harder, it's a tag, not the business.
3. Paid pullback. Branded queries fall, non-branded doesn't. On a windows company, organic fell 21% and conversions 50% the month after ads were cut — branded CTR went 13.8% to 10.1% while non-branded held at 0.4%.
4. Zero-click compression. Position and CTR both improved, clicks still fell. Not a penalty. Fewer clicks exist.
5. A core or spam update. Started within days of a named update, and your competitors moved too. Across 72–79 sites we manage, the last two spam updates pushed average clicks up 15% — updates move rank around, they don't only take it away.
6. Cannibalization or decay. Down on both windows, no update, no paid change. Prove cannibalization with query×page data, never with similar-looking URLs.
7. Something you shipped. A redesign without redirect mapping, a canonical pointing somewhere wrong, a staging site indexed, a GBP link tagged with UTMs creating a second copy of your best page. That last one split 55% of a site's traffic in two.

What not to do

Don't rewrite the page. Don't buy links. Don't file a reconsideration request — those are for manual actions, and you'd have a notice in Search Console if you had one.

Diagnose first. Six of the seven causes above need no content work at all.