Website_Rankings_Drop-Olga_Zarr-webcam-00h_00m_00s_367ms-StreamYard (1)
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[00:00:00] so in this video I want to talk a little bit about website rankings drop analysis, how to do it, what are the most common reasons for a rankings drop, how traffic drop differs from a rankings drop, and a few other extra tips and tricks.
[00:00:17] There is a corresponding guide about how to do a website rankings audit. And in this article, I talk a little bit about, like, how to do this type of audit.
[00:00:27] And that recently over the last few years when Google has been more aggressive with all those updates and a lot of websites were like
[00:00:35] experiencing serious losses, traffic losses, ranking losses, the role of an SEO changed a little bit to a person who is not only like diagnosing.
[00:00:45] technical issues, providing recommendations, but the person who also wants to help the site recover,
[00:00:51] usually from a Google update, but there are also like other reasons for that, which I will be talking about.
[00:00:56] So, this is like the new type of report
[00:00:59] that kind of is becoming more and more popular because a lot of the website owners are suffering from traffic and rankings, losses, and those for real businesses usually can be very harmful and can really influence the bottom line of the business.
[00:01:15] So what is a ranking drop? And what is a traffic drop? Because those are sometimes used interchangeably, but they could be used
[00:01:22] interchangeably, but they're not really the same. So traffic drop, simple. The traffic on your website drops.
[00:01:29] It does not necessarily. mean organic traffic, but most often I think overall traffic. So you log into Google analytics where you see different types of traffic. You can see organic traffic there, organic traffic from other search engines, from social media, referral, all of that.
[00:01:46] But it can only relate to organic traffic kind of depends, but this is like the general understanding rankings loss or drop. refers only to rankings. So you ranked number one, now you rank number five, so you lost rankings, your rankings declined, or you rank number five, now you are 50, so this is more of a serious ranking drop, right?
[00:02:08] So, organic traffic loss practically almost always is caused by a loss in position. So you, you are not number one anymore and so you lost organic traffic.
[00:02:20] A loss in traffic
[00:02:21] Can also be independent from. Rankings, right?
[00:02:24] Because Google may add some new features to SERPs and you rank number one, you still rank number one, but now you are way lower on the page, so you lost organic traffic. And of course, traffic loss, Especially if it is not about organic traffic, can be totally unrelated to ranking, ranking changes.
[00:02:44] However, traffic loss can happen without, ranking loss, right? ranking loss
[00:02:52] can also happen without a traffic loss. if You lose rankings from position 25 to 30, you probably weren't getting a lot of clicks, so nothing changes, but it is still a ranking loss.
[00:03:04] However, here in this article, we are more focusing on like serious ranking losses, declines, which actually impact traffic and impacts the bottom line of the website.
[00:03:15] So there could be like tons of different reasons. Why, rankings drop, but I will just discuss like, I think my top six, top six. I come across when I audit websites, when I do this traffic rankings, loss analysis for websites. so I would say number one, based on my experience is algorithmic updates,
[00:03:37] So this is. Most often core update, because we know that core updates are those relevance shifts, are those relevance adjustments, where Google is shifting something in algorithms, the weight of some factors,
[00:03:51] so something else is now important, or it can also shift the search intent of a query, so before the update, a given query only had e commerce website show.
[00:04:04] Now it only has blog posts or vice versa. So a lot of this intent shift was happening with affiliate websites. in The past we had a lot of affiliate websites, blog posts, roundup reviews, rank for those best keywords.
[00:04:19] Now we very often have e commerce stores and maybe one blog post. So this. Industry changed a lot.
[00:04:28] And when, if you're going to enter it, you have to be very careful with your keyword research and
[00:04:33] the keywords you want to target, because you want to make sure that you can actually rank there, right? With the type of content you are going to create. So core updates, if you see a traffic drop after a core update, you need to remember That this is not a penalty,
[00:04:50] unless you see a manual penalty, in Google Search Console, if you don't, and it is 100 percent sure that this is core update, then this isn't a penalty.
[00:05:00] This is like algorithmic kind of adjustment, I would say. other types of, Google updates I saw had some negative results where, of course, there was Google reviews update, which like happened some time ago. So a lot of affiliate websites lost traffic there. Some websites lose with spam updates, but those are like only the websites which really exaggerate with spamming, right?
[00:05:25] So.
[00:05:25] I would say algorithmic changes are number one reason for traffic ranking losses. Number two, reason number two, and sometimes the number of like leads I get, people contacting me, sometimes even this second cause is more popular than the first one. And this is
[00:05:45] a failed migration and or a redesign.
[00:05:48] they are basically the same. So, I do a lot of migrations, but,
[00:05:52] like 90%, 80 percent of the migration work I do is fix a failed migration. So a failed migration is basically the one after which the traffic you had, the positions you had, weren't like sustained and where obliterated or were slightly worse or worse and slightly, it kind of depends.
[00:06:16] Usually if you migrate a website and if you after migration see like the same trend in positions and rankings, in position rankings traffic, you, this is huge success. But a lot of people,
[00:06:29] clients do not really like understand that. This is huge success, but nothing changed. So failed migration. There are a lot of ways to break the migration to make the migration unsuccessful.
[00:06:43] One of those is,
[00:06:44] Not making sure that on the new website, the content is the same or removing content. Very often, websites migrates and, people remove some content thinking no one is reading that. So let's remove those FAQs or they change URLs and do not, for example, influence that change in internal linking.
[00:07:05] There are really a ton of ways to break a migration. I have, I have even seen the cases where, an agency, they did a lot of migrations, so they migrated a website, And, they forgot or didn't even think about adding redirects because there was a URL change.
[00:07:22] So those things also happen. And with migrations, you have to be very careful with like educating Google about the new site versus old site. Of course, domain migrations are different than, migrations within the same domain. With or without URL change. So there are a lot of things that can be broken, get broken.
[00:07:44] So when auditing rankings
[00:07:47] loss, you need to know when migration happened because sometimes people migrate exactly when Google Update starts, and then it becomes more difficult to find the real cause. But there is a way to to learn that.
[00:08:03] so of course, what you get from the client, the timing of the migration,
[00:08:07] you always have to check that in Wayback Machine, because sometimes the client will claim
[00:08:12] there was no migration, but you go to
[00:08:15] way back machine and you see that yeah, indeed there was but you forgot to tell me about it or some clients think that Redesign is not a migration, but it very much is so this is a very very common cause of a ranking and traffic drop.
[00:08:29] another thing kind of, there is like a little bit of overlap is content changes.
[00:08:35] significant content changes can lead to ranking drops. For example, I had a case where The company, they said they didn't touch any pages they didn't remove any content, nothing was removed, nothing was changed, but somehow they lost traffic from all their blog posts or something like that.
[00:08:54] And then I look into Wayback Machine and I see. That they removed all of the FAQs that they had on their blog posts, and those FAQs were basically like the bulk of the content, so they removed the bulk of the content. It's normal that it's kind of expected that the traffic positions will go down, so you have to be very careful with changes of content on the pages which rank well, especially if you are removing content.
[00:09:25] With adding, it's usually less risky, but it can also lead to traffic losses. If you, for example, dilute the topic too much and Google may not really know what you are about with this longer piece of content versus this shorter and concrete one you had in the past. Another reason your competitors probably are not sleeping.
[00:09:47] Especially if. these are like competitive phrases. probably all of the top pages keep working on their SEO, on their content, improving it. So you have to be doing the same. And sometimes you may simply drop because they updated their content. They added something new to it.
[00:10:03] They added FAQs to their content. They added a corresponding video. It may not always only be links because people like to. focus on links. So they have more backlinks. Let's build backlinks. Backlinks, of course, are important, but you need to know when they are important and when you actually need them, because very often you think you need them, but you don't need them.
[00:10:25] You only need good on page SEO, something you can do with Cora.
[00:10:30] But
[00:10:30] when comparing your page to competitors.
[00:10:33] don't only think about backlinks, think about their content, their structure of their content, on page SEO, and all of that. And then you can look at backlinks. I will tell you when backlinks are important, how to, how to, easily determine that.
[00:10:49] And, the last cause the least common I come across is penalties, manual actions which usually like obliterate the site completely. They do not always relate to the entire website, entire domain. Sometimes it is one page, one section.
[00:11:04] Depends, but, but they are usually severe enough, to simply kill the traffic to a given page or website. So you have to check Google Search Console. If there is a manual penalty, what this manual penalty is for, Google explains, like, is it backlinks? Is it spam? Is it this or that?
[00:11:23] And then you simply have to fix that if you care about recovering and you have to be very careful, you cannot really manipulate or try to cheat here in any way, because if you do, this will probably not work and you will, and Google will be responding to you in very long time intervals. And you may need a year or more to recover your website.
[00:11:47] So usually this is something you have to take seriously if you, if you care about that website.
[00:11:52] So of course , there are other possible reasons for rankings or traffic drop. I'm now using those interchangeably,
[00:12:01] But these six, I think are the most important ones, the most common ones.
[00:12:07] maybe I could add number seven, which is server issues. Like hosting hasn't been paid for. I have seen that too many times when the client simply forgot to pay for hosting. And, it was weekend or so. And, I see some problems and, they then discover that, Oh, we didn't pay for the hosting. And I even had people reach out to me with like traffic drop.
[00:12:34] rankings, drop analyses, and they are not really technical and they didn't even realize that it was that unpaid bill and that their site hasn't been online for a month or so. This, I think, could be number seven if I were to enumerate, like, top, seven reasons.
[00:12:52] And now a little bit about how to confirm or dismiss a specific reason how to be 100 percent sure that this is actually the reason.
[00:13:01] So, the first step is always to confirm Or rule out a technical SEO issue, technical error, because if it is a technical error and you fail to recognize it at the early stage, you may end up doing a ton of work and still not really like solve the issue and lose a lot of time, money possibly.
[00:13:24] So, the easiest way to rule out, a Google update. Google problem is to compare organic traffic in Google versus Bing. If the trend is exactly the same, traffic goes down on the same date, then 100 percent this is a technical issue or some reporting glitch.
[00:13:43] Google analytics code was removed or something like that, or A site was updated with a no index tag or crawling is not allowed any longer other types of weird technical things that can happen.
[00:13:58] So, if you see that, then this is 100 percent technical SEO issue, but you need to have some traffic from Bing.
[00:14:06] once you have ruled this out and you know this is not a technical thing then you have to basically, determine whether this is like a migration content change or Google update.
[00:14:17] You can easily do that if you like track the timing of those specific things happening. And once you have done that, you should exactly determine what pages lost, rankings, traffic, Is it like one page, which accounts for 90 percent of the traffic? Is the, is it like 50 percent of pages? Is it like close to 100 pages?
[00:14:39] Because it also depends on how traffic was distributed. Was it even, was it like, usually it is like 80 20 percent rule usually works for most websites where 20 percent of the pages bring 80 percent of traffic. This has been true for most of the websites I had in my life, the ones I built.
[00:14:57] So you need to create a list, basically the pages that lost traffic, how much traffic and what positions were lost.
[00:15:06] And you need to know what those positions you lost are now replaced by and you simply do side by side comparison.
[00:15:14] So, I used to be number five, now this competitor is number five. You open both pages, you crawl both pages and you simply check what are the differences, like what this competitor is doing better versus myself?
[00:15:29] Is it the change of intent? Is it like a different type of content? if it is a different type of content, then probably you have to create different type of content.
[00:15:39] there is also this option in Screaming Frog where
[00:15:42] you can just crawl those top 10 results and you can easily see like all those numbers, all those things about those pages and possibly draw some conclusions.
[00:15:51] You have to, of course, identify for all the pages that lost traffic, like the most important one, two phrases because, popular pages often rank for thousands of keywords, but there are basically like two, three umbrella terms, which are the most important. And if you rank for them, then you will rank for those other ones as well.
[00:16:11] So you have to determine those once you do that, and you want to
[00:16:14] create the recovery plan,
[00:16:16] I recommend using Quora. You run a Quora report for that phrase, and then you simply go through the Quora report and check what factors you are missing, what factors are that I have, what in terms of on page SEO could be improved on your side, and all of that.
[00:16:36] There is a separate video and guide about Quora. Quora is like, I think, like the best on page SEO tool, which statistically correlates thousands. Of ranking factors and I shows you what you should do to basically take the lead.
[00:16:50] So you have the pages, you have the top keywords that lost traffic.
[00:16:56] I invite you to analyze search result pages a lot for a lot of those queries. Of course, you have to make sure that you see the results for the location of your target audience. And, not only should you look at pages outranking you, pages that replaced you, but overall, the dominant type of page ranking and all the SERP features that appeared.
[00:17:18] or that are new. You can use Ahrefs or SEMrush to see historical look of SERPs, so you can see how the page looks now and how it used to look before the drop and If there are like significant differences, then it can also like give you some clues.
[00:17:37] And that's basically, in a huge nutshell, what you need to do.
[00:17:42] You need to know where you lost the most.
[00:17:45] You need to know what is now being rewarded.
[00:17:48] And you need to create a recovery plan of what are the things you could improve. so that there is no gap between you and the pages outranking you.
[00:17:57] That's all for this video.
[00:17:59] If you have any questions, please post them below in the comments. I will try to answer each and every one. See you in the next video. Bye bye.
