When you look at the chart above, what do you see?
A site that gets a ton of traffic, right?
I am a marketer, so I should be somewhat decent at getting traffic… or so you would hope.
But here is the thing, just because I am decent at marketing doesn’t mean my Google traffic keeps climbing up and to the right.
Just like you, I face challenges.
I have ups and downs, I can also get penalized, and I have to continually battle algorithm updates.
When you are doing SEO, nothing is ever going to be perfect and it won’t always go the way you want.
My overall traffic growth
Let’s look at my overall Google traffic. Here’s my organic search traffic in January of 2018.
I had a whopping 743,744 visitors during that month. 550,607 of those visitors were unique.
Now if you fast forward to January 2019, my organic search traffic increased to 2,035,321 visitors. Of those visitors, 1,495,372 were unique.
That’s a 173% increase in search traffic in just 12 months.
Now you may think that it was easy for me to achieve those results because I’m a decent marketer. But just like you, it’s a constant fight to maintain and grow my traffic.
And in many cases, it goes down.
My decline in search traffic
Yes, you saw my search traffic from January to January, but let’s look at the dips as well.
Here’s my search traffic in October of 2018.
As you can see, I had 1,941,994 visits from Google of which 1,417,994 were unique.
Now when you fast forward to November, my search traffic went down to 1,799,837 visitors of which 1,347,775 were unique.
That’s a 7.3% decline in search traffic.
Sure, November had one less day than October and there was a holiday in the United States in November… but my traffic is global and NeilPatel.com is currently in 10 different languages.
In other words, there are holidays everywhere in the world every single month. Plus, the United States only makes up 23% of my total traffic.
And, of course, in December it got much worse, but I expected that as that happens each year.
As you can see from the graph, the last few weeks are really slow, but that is because of Christmas and New Years.
So, how do you know when your traffic is dropping?
If you don’t, you should start looking at your Google Analytics daily.
The one report I look at to make sure everything is going right is a week over week comparison.
The reason you want to look at a week over week comparison is that your traffic is going to fluctuate day by day. For example, Tuesdays are typically my highest days and Saturdays are typically my lowest days.
The last thing you want to do is compare a Saturday with a Monday.
As you can see in early November, my search traffic started to drop. In the first week, I saw a 4% dip.
And on Tuesday I saw a 6.94% drop in search traffic.
In the following weeks, the traffic didn’t bounce back. That’s when I knew something was off.
Now when you start to see traffic drops you shouldn’t panic. The first thing you should do is head over to this site.
It will tell you if there is a holiday somewhere around the world that could be negatively impacting your traffic.
The second thing you should do is check out Search Engine Roundtable, as they tend to cover more algorithm updates than anywhere else. They’ll even break down what people are experiencing and potential solutions.
Assuming your traffic did drop and it didn’t bounce up within a week or two, you need to start making changes.
The longer you wait the harder it is to recover your decreasing search traffic.
How do you increase your search traffic when Google keeps reducing your rankings?
9 out of 10 times when your traffic drops it’s related to your content. Whether it’s content on one page or content on your whole site it typically is content related.
The moment you see drops you need to login into Google Search Console and see if there are any messages.
Chances are, there won’t be any messages.
source https://neilpatel.com/blog/declining-google-traffic/
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