Decreased organic traffic but increased Webmaster Tool Queries
-
We have a client who has had a significant decrease in organic traffic this last month (about 20%) but in Webmaster tools it tells me there was an increase in impressions and clicks. How can these both be accurate?
-
There can be multiple reasons why this could have happened but before I start, I personally do not trust the data by search console and the main reason is because its delayed but I don’t think it can’t be that wrong that it will challenge the data provided in Google Analytics.
Here are some of the possibilities:
- Check your analytics IP data (ignore traffic from…) There is a possibility that Analytics is ignoring some of the data as instructed whereas webmaster console is looking into every detail.
- Very nice point by Matt. Maybe analytics data is not available on every page on the website and Search Console is tracking that traffic as well.
Also, make sure that you are looking in to the full traffic data in analytics and not just the search traffic only as search console will be tracking the data from search, referral, paid and more.
I believe a quick audit should point where the problem is!
Hope this helps!
-
I can think of a few ways...
-
Did "organic" include traffic from another search engine that is now entirely gone? I ranked #1 for "domains" on Bing for a day or two. Guess what that did to my traffic? lol
-
Analytics may not be setup on all new pages. Traffic going to (for instance) blog posts that are posted to social and then picked up by Google but not yet crawled? I had a REALLY big client who had installed GA once but never followed up on all their (manually created) pages. This is why I love Wordpress and template CMS but hate everything else. You can run a Screaming Frog crawl that checks whether the GA code is on every page.
-
Was the GA code used on ANOTHER site and subsequently removed? WMT would only show you the one site. The same GA code can be posted to 10 sites. When 8 go down, your organic traffic would decrease but your WMT would stay the same.
I'm sure there are at least another 5 ways that this could happen. It would definitely require a bit more investigation but yes, both can happen at the same time.
-
-
How are you segmenting your analytics reports? It might be possible that you're excluding locations or devices? I also wouldn't trust Search Console data to be accurate. It's delayed, and only a sample of the true traffic the site is getting. Use it more for research/help on optimization rather than using it as true data for the website.
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
-
Canonical Query
If Google decides to ignore your canonical and indexes numerous versions, does that count as duplicate content? We've got a large amount of canonicals ignored by Google, so I'm just trying to gauge if it's an issue or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Search traffic down 30% this month
Our search traffic has been growing at a steady clip for the last year but is down about 30% this month. As part of a redesign, we've repurposed our home page (blog.getvero.com). Rather than serve as a feed of recent posts, it's now an email signup page. We created a new page (blog.getvero.com/posts/) to display new posts. I think this is likely the reason for the drop in search traffic but I'm frustrated that it's losing us thousands of visitors per month. A few questions: 1. How long will it take to recover from this? 2. Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery process? 3. Why are some of our best performing posts seeing less search traffic even though the URL hasn't changed? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116983020420 -
Need help with Google Webmaster Tools Errors
I have a lots of error on my Google webmaster tools under Search Appearance -> Structure Data there are two sets of items 1- "hentry" and source is "Markup: microformats.org" and error says: "Missing: author | Missing: updated" 2-"hcard" and source is "Markup: microformats.org" and error says: "Missing: fn" I am using WordPress. Can anybody tell me how to fix these errors please. Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani1 -
Webmaster Tools Content Keywords & Meta Tagging
In Webmaster tools , Content keywords give an indication of what Google thinks a site is about. This site is a health site ( online shopping - health supplements ) - but one of the terms it thinks the site is about is "Dollar" . I'm guessing this is because on every page there is Currency Selection from multiple currencies. How do I tell Google that this part of the page is nothing to do with what my site is about? Thanks for your reply in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
XML Sitemap Indexation Rate Decrease
On September 28th, 2013 I saw my indexation rate decrease on my XML sitemap that I've submitted through GWT. I've since scraped my sitemap and removed all 404, 400 errors (which only made up ~5% of the entire sitemap). Any idea why Google randomly started indexing less of my XML sitemap on that date? I updated my sitemap 2 week before that date and had an indexation rate of ~85% - no I'm below 35%. Thoughts, idea, experiences? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieWilliams0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0 -
100K Webmaster Central Not Found Links?
http://screencast.com/t/KLPVGTzM I just logged into our Webmaster Central account to find that it shows 100k links that are not found? After searching through all of them they all appear to be from our search bar, with no results? Are we doing something wrong here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0 -
Site speed - query
When you say site speed, does it mean speed of loading of each of the pages of the website or speed of home page loading. What do site speed tools measure ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050