Google provided tips for their website users to reduce their traffic drops. Traffic drops are as simple as they sound, they are a large reduction in the traffic that you are getting on your website.
There are many reasons for traffic drop, so I would like to start by explaining them first. Technical issues: Errors that prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users. These could be site-level or page-level technical issues. Manual actions: If your website doesn’t follow Google’s guidelines, some pages or the entire site may be less visible in Google Search results. Algorithm updates: Core updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search over time, leading to a slow decline in traffic. Search interest disruption: Changes in user behavior or external influences could affect the demand for certain queries. Seasonality effects: Regular traffic fluctuations due to weather, vacations, or holidays. Reporting glitches: Sudden major changes followed by a quick return to the norm could indicate a simple glitch.
Given these various reasons for traffic drop on your site, there is a tool that Google developed that helps its users understand traffic fluctuations. Once you set up an account in Google you can then start using this tool. The developer offers some tips when researching your drops and they are: Expand the date range to 16 months to view the drop in context and identify any patterns or trends. Periodically export and store data to access more than 16 months of information. Compare the drop period to a similar period to pinpoint the exact changes. Explore all available tabs to determine if changes occurred only for specific queries, pages, countries, devices, or Search appearances. Ensure you compare the same number of days and preferably the same days of the week. Analyze different Search types separately to understand if the drop was limited to Search, Google Images, Video, or News tab.
In conclusion, understanding the reasons for your traffic drop is detrimental when it comes to optimization. Now, we have access to a tool that can help us with this issue.
3 Responses
Great post! I think there’s a lot of reasons for traffic drop that we don’t readily know about, such as slow page load time. Looking into these things is super beneficial!
Using the developer tool is definitely a must. If you own a ski resort, it is expected that your traffic will drop. But if it’s down in January, then using that tool to see if you have any of the problems you listed above can hopefully lead to the source(s).
It is certainly an important thing to consider. There could always be a sudden market shift or a problem with site usability. It’s important to keep an eye on your site’s traffic over time, because a sudden drop could indicate a usability issue that you may not have otherwise noticed.