If you open your Search Console and find that your Google Search traffic has dropped, don't panic. In this blog post, we'll discuss some of the reasons your traffic may have dropped and how to use the Search Console Performance report and Google Trends to start debugging your Search traffic drop.
There are five main causes for drops in Search traffic:
- A change in Google's algorithm
- A manual action by Google
- Technical issues on your website
- Changes in searcher behavior
- Seasonality
Most of these causes can be reversed, but it may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site. However, using the Performance report and Google Trends can help you get an idea of what is affecting your traffic.
The text discusses four different types of issues that can result in a decrease in traffic from Google Search: technical issues, security issues, manual actions, and algorithmic changes.
Technical issues are errors that prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users. Examples include server availability, robots.txt fetching, and page not found errors. Technical issues can be site-wide (e.g., your website is down) or page-wide (e.g., a misplaced noindex tag).
Security issues can also result in decreased traffic from Google Search. If your site is affected by a security threat, Google may warn users before they reach your site with interstitial pages or other warnings. This can decrease the number of people who end up visiting your site.
Manual actions are another potential cause of decreased traffic from Google Search. If your site does not comply with Google's guidelines, some or all of your pages may be omitted from search results altogether. This is done through a Manual Action from Google.
Finally, algorithmic changes can also result in decreased traffic from Google Search. Google is constantly improving its algorithms and this can sometimes change how pages perform in search results. To keep track of future updates, you can subscribe to the Google Search News YouTube series or follow them on Twitter.
Search interest disruption refers to changes in user behavior that lead to a decrease in demand for certain queries. This can be the result of a new trend or seasonality.
To understand what caused your traffic to drop, you can look at your Search Console Performance report. Changing the date range to include 16 months will help you see if the drop is part of a yearly trend or something else. You can also use the Search Analytics API to pull data and store it for further analysis.
If you see a drop in your website's traffic, there are a few things you can do to investigate the cause. First, compare the period of the drop to a similar period in the past to see what exactly changed. Make sure to click all tabs in Google Search Console to find out if the change happened only for specific queries, URLs, countries, devices, or search appearances.
Then, analyze different search types separately to understand whether the drop happened in web Search, Google Images, or the Video or News tab. You can find instructions for how to do this in the Search Console Training video linked below.
If you find out that there are technical issues, security issues, or manual actions applied to your website, check out the advanced guide to Search Console linked below to learn more about how to solve them.
If you want to go the extra mile, use Google Trends to help you understand whether the drop is a wider trend or if it's happening just for your site. These changes can be caused by two main factors:
- A search interest disruption or a new product. If there are major changes in what and how people search (for example, a pandemic), people may start searching for different queries, or using their devices for different purposes. In addition, if you sell a specific brand online, there might be a new competing product cannibalizing your search queries.
- Seasonality. For example, therhythm of food website shows that food related queries are very seasonal: people search for diets in January, turkey in November, and champagne in December. Different industries have different levels of seasonality.
To analyze trends in different industries, you can use Google Trends, which provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. It's anonymized, categorized, and aggregated. This allows Google to display interest in topics from around the globe or down to city-level.
You can use Google Trends to compare multiple terms at once and see how they relate to one another over time.
For example, say you want to track mentions of "green smoothies" and "kale smoothies." You could enter those terms into Google Trends and see that "green smoothies" is searched far more often than "kale smoothies." You could also see spikes in searches for both terms during certain times of year.
In addition to comparing multiple terms, you can also use Google Trends to compare regional interest in a topic.
For example, say you run an online store that ships green smoothies nationwide. You could use Google Trends to see which parts of the country are searching for green smoothies most often.
You could also use Google Trends to compare interest in green smoothies over time.
Say you want to track mentions of "green smoothies" and "kale smoothies." You could enter those terms into Google Trends and see that "green smoothies" is searched far more often than "kale smoothies." You could also see spikes in searches for both terms during certain times of year.
In addition to comparing multiple terms, you can also use Google Trends to compare regional interest in a topic.
For example, say you run an online store that ships green smoothies nationwide. You could use Google Trends to see which parts of the country are searching for green smoothies most often.
Check the queries that are driving traffic to your website to see if they have clear drops in different times of the year. In the example below, you can see three types of trends:
- Turkey has a strong seasonality, peaking every year in November.
- Chicken shows some seasonality, but less accentuated.
- Coffee is significantly more stable; it looks like people need it throughout the year.
And since you're already in Google Trends, you may want to check some other interesting insights that might help you with your Search traffic:
- Check top queries in your region and compare them to the queries that you're getting traffic from, as shown in Search Console's Performance report. If there are queries missing from your traffic, check if you have content on that subject and make sure it's being crawled and indexed.
Google has released a new tip to help webmasters prepare their sites for rising related queries. The tip is to check queries that are related to important topics. This can be done by using the Search Console and looking at the search query report.
This report can help you surface related queries and prepare your site for them by adding related content. If you have any questions, you can ask in the Search Central community or on Twitter.