Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Researching search volume drop
-
I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe.
Two questions...
- Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)?
- Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports.
Thanks.
Mark
-
Awesome responses everyone - really appreciate this. It seems I have my work cut out across the various tools to try to identify root cause. At first, quick glance I don't see anything obvious popping up (for example to organic vs. direct) but I have more to check, based on the excellent input from the three of you. Thank you again!
Mark
-
Have you checked on WMT's? For Impressions for those keywords and CTR? That is the starting point in my view. If you CTR is steady and your impressions have dropped significantly you have to work out what pages you have dropped off - it may not necessarily be the main keyword.
I would start on WMT's..
-
If you wanted to look at relative search volume, you can look at Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends/ I would also see if you notice any trends in Google Search Console under Search Traffic > Search Analytics > Impressions
What your graph has me wondering is if this is an attribution issue with GA? On the grey line, Moz is simply taking your GA traffic that is tagged as organic and showing it in the graph. If you have an attribution issue in GA, organic traffic may be showing up as direct traffic. If there is anything wonky in the traffic attribution, GA will put it as Direct. You have this classic article by Groupon that was a good example of how organic can be attributed incorrectly. http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415
Look at your overall traffic in GA and then add a segment for organic traffic and then direct traffic. If your overall traffic is constant and you see organic going down while direct traffic is going up, you have your answer. As I understand it, this phenomenon is due to browser issues, so see if you have had more traffic recently from a given browser and that may give you another clue.
Another thing to check, you should be able to look at your organic traffic in GA and see if it is the same as Moz, or not. If not, ping the Moz folks to make sure your data from GA is coming in properly. May be some data import issues there.
My other guess here is that your ranking is ok, but your click rate has been jacked. Google Search console will show you CTR over time, and that may help. Look and see, did you change meta descriptions? Did you change up your schema markup so previously you had rich snippets in the SERP, but now you do not. You could potentially keep ranking, but loose CTR.
These are all things I would look at, but at this point, your guess is as good as mine. Looking through the above will probably prompt you to check other things that might give you an answer.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
How to target for misspelled Brand name searches
Hi to all the SEO experts here, I am working on SEO of my 4 months old website. For example, its 'abz.com'. We like the brand name 'abz' for the business and we are able to SEO well for keyword 'abz'. However, we would also like to target for the keyword 'abc'. There are 2 reasons for that: 'abc' is an actual word. So there is a possibility that our users may type 'abc' instead of 'abz' to reach us. For 'abc', the top result is 'abct.us', which is a site of adult in nature. Also our website doesn't feature at all in the results. This is hitting us hard in terms of or brand visibility. So the questions are: How to feature in results of keyword search of 'abc'? Will the following approach work: Buying an available domain 'abc.co.in', and use it to feature in 'abc' results and 301 redirect to 'abz.com' Having 'abc' in the page meta (title and description). This is hard for us, since we need to rethink our taglines and copyrights. 2. If we search for 'abz', Google says "Do you mean abc". Is there a way to not have this suggestion? It would helpful to have some more ideas for this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manasag0 -
Crawled page count in Search console
Hi Guys, I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console. History: Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages. This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day. To complicate the situation: We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well. Questions: - Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? - Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? - What am I missing? BxlESTT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen0 -
How to maximize CTR from Google image search?
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context. Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through? Thanks, Tony FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Redirect Search Results to Category Pages
I am planning redirect the search results to it's matching category page to avoid having two indexed pages of essentially the same content. Example http://www.example.com/search/?kw=sunglasses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WizardOfMoz
wil be redirected to
http://www.example.com/category/sunglasses/ Is this a good idea? What are the possible negative effect if I go this route? Thanks.0 -
Sudden rank drop for 1 keyword
A page of mine (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th. Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve. I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy) I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netboost0