If your MSP website experiences a significant drop in organic search traffic do not panic. Analyze the data to identify the pages and/or search queries that contributed most to the decline to investigate the cause.
Identifying the Drop
Evaluating a drastic drop begins with getting access to good search traffic data.
Your MSP site’s best organic search traffic data source is Google Search Console (GSC). A free tool by Google that you can connect to a site.
The GSC report of clicks over time can be used to observe any dramatic drops in organic traffic.
The significant decline in traffic shown in the graph above illustrates the type of drop I’m referring to.
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Setup to Evaluate the Reason for the Drop
To evaluate the reason for the drop, setup this report using the date compare filter to compare data for the same time period before and after the drop.
Export this data into Google Sheets and analyze.
Evaluating the Reason for the Drop
The data in Google Sheet will give you a side-by-side comparison of the data before and after the drop on a page-by-page basis and on a query-by-query basis.
You can add additional columns to calculate the difference in clicks and impressions for each page and query. Then, sort the pages and queries to identify those that lost the most clicks and impressions.
Armed with this information, you can delve deeper into the data to pinpoint the specific factors that likely contributed to the decline in performance.
