Hi.
I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search Advocate at Google.
In this video,
I'll discuss how to quickly uncover reasons
if you find a drop
in your Google Search traffic.
Then I'll share some tips
on how to analyze a drop
using the Search Console Performance report
and Google Trends.
♪ [music] ♪
As I discussed in the last episode,
data visualization can be very efficient
when it comes to monitoring Search traffic
and recognizing spikes and slums.
[magic wand sound]
Suppose you look at your dashboard
one fine morning
while drinking your coffee,
and suddenly,
you find out that your Google Search traffic drop.
What should you do?
[magic wand sound]
Luckily, you found this video.
Today, I'll discuss the main reasons
for organic traffic drops.
This can help you go from the monitoring
to the exploring mindset
with a better assumption on what's happening.
Then I'll go through some tips
to analyze your Search traffic patterns
and investigate overall trends in your industry.
[electronic chirp]
I've sketched a few examples of drops
and what they could potentially mean.
Let's start with the top-left chart.
Technical issues are errors
that can prevent Google from crawling,
indexing,
or serving your pages to users.
A site-level technical issue
could be that your website is down.
You would see a significant drop in traffic in that case,
not just from Search.
Manual actions happen
when your website does not follow Google's guidelines.
Some pages or the entire site
may be less visible from Google Search results
[through] manual action.
In the bottom-left chart,
you'll see page-level technical issues.
For example, an unintended
Since this issue depends on Google crawling the page,
it will be a slower drop in traffic
than site-level issues.
Also, Google is always improving
how it evaluates content
and updating its algorithm accordingly.
For instance,
core updates may change
how some pages perform in Google Search
over time.
Usually, this would not be a sharp decline.
Another factor that could drive a slow decline in traffic
is a Search interest disruption.
Sometimes, changes in user behavior
will change the demand for certain queries,
either due to a new trend
or a major change in the country you're looking at.
This means your traffic may drop
simply because of external influences.
In the top-right chart,
you can see seasonality effects.
Those may be caused by many reasons,
such as weather,
vacations, or holidays.
They're usually repetitive
and happen at specific regular intervals,
such as weekly,
monthly, or quarterly.
In the bottom-right chart,
we can see reporting glitches.
[distorted sound]
[long beeping]
[glass breaking]
Usually, if you see a major change
followed immediately by return to the norm,
it could be a simple glitch.
We usually add chart annotations
to let you know when it happens.
[electronic chirp]
The best way to understand
what happened to your traffic
is to look at your Search Console Performance report
since it summarizes a lot of information.
Analyzing the shape of the line
will tell you a lot.
[electronic chirp]
Visit the Search Performance report and try a few things.
Expand the date range
to include 16 months.
This will help you analyze the traffic drop in context
and make sure it's not a drop that happens regularly
due to a holiday or a trend.
To view more than 16 months of data,
you could periodically export and store the data.
Compare the drop period to a similar period,
like the same month last year
or the same day last week.
This will help you find what exactly changed.
Make sure to click all tabs to find out
if the change happened only for specific queries,
pages,
countries,
devices,
or Search appearances.
Make sure you're comparing the same number of days,
preferably the same days of the week.
Analyze different Search type separately.
This will help you understand
whether the drop was restricted to Search,
Google Images,
Video,
or News tab.
[electronic chirp]
If there are major changes
in your industry or country,
people may start searching using 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.
To analyze general trends for Web,
Image, News, Shopping, and YouTube Search,
you can use Google Trends,
which provides access
to a largely unfiltered sample of actual Search requests
made to Google.
You can also segment the data by country and category
to make it more relevant to your website audience.
[electronic chirp]
Check the queries that are driving traffic to your website
to see if they have clear drops
in different times of the year.
For example,
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.
I've written about the subject in the past.
Check out the links in the description
to learn more about analyzing overall trends.
[electronic chirp]
Now you know how to build the monitoring dashboard
and how to make an informed decision
if you see a drop in your Google Search traffic.
That's a great start.
♪ [music] ♪
In the next episode,
we'll look into more ways
to analyze your Search Performance
using a bubble chart.
Stay tuned.
♪ [music] ♪