Analyzing Traffic Drops in Google Search Console

In a YouTube video, Google's Search Advocate, Daniel Waisberg, provides helpful advice on identifying and analyzing the causes of a drop in Google Search traffic.

This informative guide comes at an ideal time, as Google has just completed its March 2023 core algorithm update. Many people are now assessing how it will affect their websites.

The Search Console Performance report is a great place to start if you're trying to figure out how the update affected your site.

Waisberg shows how the Search Console Performance report when combined with Google Trends, can help you investigate changes in traffic patterns.

The Primary Causes of Organic Traffic Drops

A drop in organic traffic can be caused by a number of factors. Waisberg emphasizes the following major causes:

• Technical concerns: Crawling, indexing, or serving errors that prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users. These could be technical issues at the site or page level.
• Manual procedures: If your website does not adhere to Google's guidelines, some pages or the entire site may appear less prominently in Google Search results.
• Algorithm updates: Over time, core updates may affect how some pages perform in Google Search, resulting in a slow decline in traffic.
• Disruption of search interest: Changes in user behaviour or external influences may affect the demand for specific queries.
• Seasonality effects: Regular fluctuations in traffic due to weather, vacations, or holidays.
• Reporting flaws: Sudden major changes followed by a rapid return to normalcy could indicate a simple flaw.

Using the Search Console Performance Report to Examine Traffic Drops

The Search Console Performance report is an excellent resource for analyzing traffic fluctuations.

Follow these simple steps to access the Performance report in Google Search Console:

• Go to search.google.com/search-console to access the Google Search Console.
• Select the website to be analyzed.
• Click "Performance" in the left-hand sidebar menu.

The Performance report for your chosen property will now appear, displaying data such as total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position for your website.

Waisberg suggests several approaches to data analysis:

• Extend the date range to 16 months to see the drop in context and look for patterns or trends.
• Export and save data on a regular basis to gain access to more than 16 months of information.
• To pinpoint the exact changes, compare the drop period to a similar period (e.g., the same month last year or the same day last week).
• Examine all available tabs to see if changes only occurred for specific queries, pages, countries, devices, or Search appearances.
• Make sure you compare the same number of days and, preferably, the same weekdays.
• Analyze each Search type separately to determine whether the drop was limited to the Search, Google Images, Video, or News tabs.

Using Google Trends to Conduct Industry Research

Google Trends analyses web, image, news, shopping, and YouTube search trends.

Waisberg suggests using it to:

• Analyze broad trends in your industry or country to spot shifts in user behaviour or competing products.
• Segment data by country and category to gain a better understanding of your website's audience.
• Examine the queries that are driving traffic to your site for seasonal variations or trends.

In Conclusion

Understanding the causes of Google Search traffic declines is critical. You can identify and analyze the causes of these drops using the Search Console Performance report and Google Trends, allowing you to stay ahead of industry trends and maintain your online presence.

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