When you take a look at the chart above, what do you see?

A site that gets a lots of traffic, right?

I am an online marketer, so I need to be somewhat good at getting traffic … or so you would hope

But here is the thing, even if I am good at marketing doesn’t indicate my Google traffic keeps climbing and to the right.

Much Like you, I deal with difficulties.

I have ups and downs, I can likewise get penalized, and I have to constantly battle algorithm updates.

When you are doing SEO, nothing is ever going to be ideal and it won’t always go the way you desire.

My general traffic growth

Let’s look at my general Google traffic. Here’s my organic search traffic in January of 2018.

I had a whopping 743,744 sessions throughout that month. 550,607 of those sessions were distinct visitors.

Now if you fast forward to January 2019, my organic search traffic increased to 2,035,321 sessions. Of those sessions, 1,495,372 were unique visitors.

That’s a 173%boost in search traffic in just 12 months.

Now you may believe that it was easy for me to achieve those outcomes due to the fact that I’m a decent online marketer. But much like you, it’s a consistent battle to maintain and grow my traffic.

And in a lot of cases, it goes down.

My decrease in search traffic

Yes, you saw my search traffic from January to January, however let’s appearance 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 decreased to 1,799,837 visitors of which 1,347,775 were distinct.

That’s a 7.3?crease in search traffic.

Sure, November had one less day than October and there was a vacation in the United States in November … but my traffic is international and NeilPatel.com is currently in 10 various languages.

In other words, there are holidays all over in the world each and every single month. Plus, the United States just makes up 23%of my total traffic.

And, of course, in December it got much worse, however I expected that as that happens each year.

As you can see from the chart, the last couple of weeks are actually sluggish, but that is because of Christmas and New Years.

So, how do you understand when your traffic is dropping?

If you do not, you should start looking at your Google Analytics daily.

The one report I take a look at to ensure everything is going right is a week over week contrast.

The factor you wish to take a look at a week over week contrast is that your traffic is going to fluctuate day by day. For instance, Tuesdays are usually my greatest days and Saturdays are typically my least expensive days.

The last thing you desire to do is compare a Saturday with a Monday.

As you can see in early November, my search traffic began 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 recover. That’s when I understood something was off.

Now when you begin to see traffic drops you shouldn’t stress. The first thing you ought to do is head over to this site

It will inform you if there is a vacation somewhere around the world that could be adversely impacting your traffic.

The second thing you ought to do is have a look at Search Engine Roundtable, as they tend to cover more algorithm updates than anywhere else. They’ll even break down what individuals are experiencing and potential options.

Presuming your traffic did drop and it didn’t bounce up within a week or 2, you need to start making modifications.

The longer you wait the harder it is to recuperate your reducing 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 relates to your content. Whether it’s material on one page or content on your whole site it usually is content related.

The minute you see drops you require to login into Google Search Console and see if there are any messages.

Possibilities are, there won’t be any messages.

The next thing I want you to do is to click on “Performance.”

You must see a screen that looks something like this:

Now click on the date button above the graph. It must state “Date: Last 3 Months.”

Then click compare …

Then go into the dates you desire to compare on start versus end date. Make sure you select a 7-day period so you get the complete photo.

You ought to now see a report that looks something like this …

I desire you to unclick “Impressions.”

Then, I desire you to click “Pages” and sort by “Difference” (the arrow should be punctuating).

This will show you all of the pages that dropped in traffic. These are the pages that lost the most substantial rankings and, eventually, your drop in traffic.

Next, I desire you to click on a URL. You ought to begin from leading to bottom (you’re going to need to duplicate this process for each URL with an enormous drop).

Then click on questions and again sort by Distinction.

Now before you do anything, scroll back up and click on “Position” in the chart. This will change your table and reveal you if your rankings dropped for any of those terms.

Assuming it did drop, I want you to do a Google search for that term and look at all of the sites that rank in the top 10 and compare your material with those that are ranking on page 1.

I understand there are companies that provide software application options that break down all of the keywords your competitors utilize on their page and it tells you what you are missing out on. I invested over $60,000 doing this in 2017 and it didn’t assist increase (and even recover!) any of my rankings.

Rather, I want you to disregard all of the SEO software out there and simply put yourself in the user’s shoes.

What do you honestly believe of your competitors’ pages? Is their content much better than yours? Is their design more easy to use? Does their site load a lot faster that it develops a better experience for you?

When you put yourself in the searcher’s shoes, it will give you an idea of what you need to fix.

I understand I am making it oversimplified, but it truly boils down to doing what’s finest for the user. Most of the times, that might be adding better images or enhancing your material due to the fact that it isn’t as much as date.

It’s not about keyword stuffing or having more words than anybody else. Heck, I rank greater than my old blog site Quick Sprout for the same terms, with material that contains less words.

Simply look at the term SEO. I’m on page 1 of Google for it:

Now let’s look at my SEO guide It contains 10,244 words.

The Quick Sprout guide on SEO has 9 chapters and is a bit shy of 30,000 words.

Can you think where the Quick Sprout guide ranks?

Middle of page 2.

The point is, it’s about quality.

That’s why most websites lose their rankings. Due to the fact that other websites come out with content that is better for users. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t have as numerous backlinks or that the word count is lower. In the end, Google concentrates on user metrics.

Things like backlinks can assist boost your rankings temporarily, however if the user metrics reveal that people hate your content when you are at the top, your rankings will drop.

This can’t hold true, my material is much better and my rankings keep dropping

You may look at the actions above and think your material is much better however your rankings keep dropping. You may even talk to users and they concur and give you the very same feedback. They believe it’s much better. So what’s going on?

The chances are your rankings dropped due to the fact that of age.

Do you keep in mind how my traffic dropped from October to November? Well, in November, I worked with a few professionals to assist repair my old content.

A lot of it wasn’t obsoleted and through surveying, we found people were happy with it. However, it simply wasn’t ranking.

I had more backlinks than my competitors and much more brand name queries.

So, I started a journey where I had a few people upgrade my older material pieces. Often they just adjust a few sentences and sometimes they reworded entire paragraphs or sections.

That one thing grew my search traffic to 2,199,658 visitors over the last 31 days:

With over a billion blog sites online, Google truly has its choice of choosing who to rank. There’s too much content to rank on the web, so when picking in between 2 websites that are almost identical in SEO metrics, they are going to choose the fresh website versus one that hasn’t been updated in years.

Conclusion

No matter how good you are at SEO, you are going to see traffic drops. The key to seeing constant growth year over year is to concentrate on the process I outlined above.

I understand individuals still discuss backlinks and on-page SEO. However that is something everyone currently does and you need to be also.

To really stand apart in the crowd, you require to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and develop the best experience for them.

And a simple thing like updating your old material will normally resolve the problem and increase your traffic.

So, how often do you upgrade your old content?