HOW TO QUICKLY DIAGNOSE GOOGLE RANKING DECREASES

Posted by Whitney Wright | Mar 25, 2019 | 0

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QUICKLY DIAGNOSE DECLINES IN GOOGLE RANKINGS

You noticed that your site has experienced a significant drop in Google ranking. Are you responsible? Do your pages display correctly? Is it a specific page or the entire site? Is the loss limited to new users or returning visitors?

Everyone immediately concludes that they have been blocked by an update of the Google algorithm. But, the truth is that it's actually one of the rarest reasons that publishers see a decline in organic traffic.

In a recent episode of Ezoic Explain, Tyler also goes through the process of evaluating the loss of organic traffic due to a loss of Google ranking. It guides us step by step through this process in Google Analytics. Watch the video below, or look at my resume below.

In the video, Tyler walks you through a variety of ways to troubleshoot your site and determine why your Google ranking may have decreased by examining the following:

• Landing pages
• Location
• Apparatus
• New vs. returning visitors
• Search Console Data

Here is what Tyler reports to draw various conclusions about the possible origin of a loss of traffic or a loss of Google ranking.

SEGMENTATION OF VISITORS FROM ORGANIC TRAFFIC

In this example, we're going to watch Google Analytics for a site called kididdles.com, a site for children's song lyrics.

Then navigate to the Audience / Preview tab.

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We will need to define the Segment at the top of the page to include only "organic traffic". Then we will want to set a specific date range. Preferably, we will set the date on the right after noticing a loss of traffic and then we can select the "previous period" box to automatically compare it to the previous traffic.

NOTE: If, after segmenting the traffic and comparing the date ranges, you notice that it is not organic traffic that has been affected, you can consult this guide on evaluating other forms of traffic decline .

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Scroll down in the Segment Name list to uncheck the All Users box. Then scroll down to check the Organic Traffic box and click Apply. From now on, all the data we examine in Google Analytics will only refer to organic traffic.

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As can be seen, 89% of users who visit the site do so in an organic way.

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To better understand the usual performance of the site, we want to compare this period to the previous period: in the Period drop-down menu, check the Compare to previous period check box.

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As can be seen, organic traffic has decreased by almost 33% since the previous period. Now, let's dig deeper into why.

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HAVE I LOST GOOGLE'S RANKING ON ONE OR MORE PAGES?

We will start in the Behavior tab; select Site Content from the submenu, then click Landing Pages. By examining the landing pages, we can begin to see which pages are causing the decline in organic traffic.

Some reasons why your site may have a loss of organic traffic:

1. One of your pages is no longer at the top of the ranking
2. A page has been deindexed
3. One of the pages is redirected (appears as 404 error)
4. Multiple pages have a seemingly similar problem, such as a previous fix or improved pages

The top landing page traffic is good in this example and has not experienced a significant drop, so the drop is not the result of our most popular page. By scrolling down we can see some pages gain traffic while others lose traffic.

NOTE: If you have a big drop on one of these pages, go to this page. Make sure there is no inherent problem (white / 404). Then right-click and select "Show Source". Go Edit in your browser and select Search. No type in the word "index". You should be shown to a part of the page that allows you to see the status of the index of the page. If you see "no-index". Congratulations. This is the problem. This is often the result of a plugin or a htaccess file that goes wrong.

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As no particular page shows a significant loss of traffic, we can exclude that a single page is the cause of the decline on this site.

HAS MY SITE SEEN A DROP IN RANKINGS WORLDWIDE?

Since the results on the Pages tab have not been conclusive, we will then see if the traffic loss is limited to a region or country.

Return to the Public tab, select the Geo sub-menu, and click Location.

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A loss of traffic in a specific place may be the result of something like being a multilingual site, blocks and security warnings.

If a region or language in particular shows a decline in traffic, consider what may affect this group: has a change you made to your site prevented or prevented users in that region from visiting your site? The regulations of this region have changed so that they can no longer see certain types of sites or particular information.

Is HREF-lang correctly configured on your site? If you have multiple languages, do you accidentally display the wrong language?

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No specific region or language is causing a decrease in traffic for kididdles.com, so we will consider other factors.

DID YOU ONLY LOSE THE MOBILE GOOGLE RANKING?

Then we will look at the Mobile tab.

By selecting Mobile then Overview, we can determine if this decrease occurs on all devices or if it is just a particular device. Publishers often make and post changes to their site on the desktop version of their site, but do not check how these changes affect their mobile site.

Specific device issues may result from changes you made to your site, such as setting site speed and deferring CSS : while your desktop version may load correctly, the mobile page may display on a screen White.

When making changes to your site, it's important to always check what it looks like on all devices.

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In this case, all the drops in organic traffic are about equal, and the mobile is actually the most powerful device.

DOES THE DECLINE OCCUR ON NEW OR RETURNING ORGANIC VISITORS?

Another set of data to look at is New vs. visitors who return under the Behavior tab. Here, we want to see if the decrease in organic traffic is due to people who have already visited your site and who know what they are looking for or if they are just new visitors.

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We can see here that the decline is not limited to either group of visitors, so all users are affected in the same way.

NOTE: If this is only one of these segments, it may be linked to a specific keyword or content type on your site that has been most affected. This could be the result of an algorithm change or changes you made to category URLs or the internal site that links to similar pages.

IS THE DECLINE CONFINED TO A SPECIFIC KEYWORD?

The last item we will check are our keywords. To view them, go to the Acquisition tab and then to the Search Console submenu, where you can see Queries.

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To use the Search Console tab, you must link your Google Search Console to Google Analytics. If you have not done so, click one of the tabs under Search Console and it should prompt you to do so. The benefit of having Google Search Console and Google Analytics related is that it allows you to see the query information, which will show you exactly which keywords are causing the loss.

Once your Google Search Console and Google Analytics are linked, you will need to disable audience segmentation for organic traffic that we previously implemented. Return to the drop-down menu of segmentation options and select All Users again.

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Now we can see a list of keywords that users actually searched for before clicking on the site, and if there were changes between the two date ranges.

Here we can see that a number of different keywords are causing the loss: "I'm a little teapot" is down 20%, "Miss Mary Mack" is down 41%, and "my little light" is down nearly 48%.

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Now that we know which keywords are causing a significant decline, if we select Landing Pages under the Search Console tab, we can see the actual pages associated with those keywords.

For example:  By looking at the page 'I'm a little teapot' (/lyrics/h012.html), we can see if we can do anything to increase the page and change those keywords.

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As an extra step, we can pull out the exact query from the search console and search it on Google to see if we can know why the traffic has decreased.

As we can see, Google Knowledge Graph now displays the lyrics directly inside the search page, unlike people who come on kididdles.com for lyrics. The significant drop in traffic is the result of the information.

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INQUIRE INTELLIGENTLY ABOUT YOUR SITE AND AUDIT YOUR SEO

While a drop in rankings and organic traffic may be the result of many factors, knowing how to intelligently examine the available data on your site's performance should bring you to your senses.

If you are able to identify exactly where and why you are losing traffic, it becomes easy to work backwards on what you can do to correct or improve.

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STILL DO NOT KNOW WHY YOU LOST ORGANIC TRAFFIC?

If you have gone through all of the above steps and are still at a loss, try a deeper SEO audit (use this link to self-execute).

With all these tips together, you should be able to better explore your site, determine why there might be a decline in Google's organic search traffic, and stay one step ahead in the future.

Otherwise, leave your comments below. Tyler will read them and try to offer you other avenues to explore.