What Google’s changing

Rather than rewarding content that’s overly SEO purpose-driven, Google’s new update will benefit content that’s human-first and provides a satisfying user experience. This means your financial marketing content needs to be created for people, rather than search engines.

This update should start rolling out at the beginning of September and will identify content that’s unhelpful for web users. If your site has a large amount of unhelpful content, then it will be pushed further down search engine rankings. Currently, this update will only affect English-speaking content and countries, with it being planned to expand in the coming months.

So, what does a people-first approach mean? And how can you make sure your financial marketing content isn’t penalised by Google?

How financial marketers can respond to Google’s update

While Google may be changing the algorithm of how sites can get to the top spot in search engine rankings, your content shouldn’t need to alter drastically. If your finance brand has been creating value-driven content that’s tailored to your target market (which it should be!), this content will remain beneficial, despite the changes taking place.

To ensure your finance brand remains high in search engine rankings, you need to remove all unhelpful content as this is less likely to perform well. If you’re not sure what content is deemed unhelpful, ask yourself:

• Is this content created for search engines or for people to find relevant information?
• Is this content duplicated across your site with the hopes of it performing well in search?
• Is your content adding value or repeating what others have said on a topic?
• Does your content answer people’s questions?
• Do people need to continue searching for further information after reading your content?

Key takeaways for financial marketers

At the end of the day, this algorithm change will only affect content that’s unhelpful or has only been created for SEO purposes. What your finance brand needs to do is to create content that’s tailored to your target audience and adds value. This can be achieved by:

• Presenting timely information in an easy-to-understand way
• Answering people’s search queries
• Creating content with the end-user in mind
• Creating value-driven content that includes useful data and research
• Having a purpose (content can’t just be created to hopefully rank on Google, it needs to be targeted and helpful)
• Presenting educational content that will improve user’s financial skills and knowledge

By ensuring your content has been designed to benefit end-users and written in a personable and ‘human’ way, you can maintain or improve your spot in search engine rankings. If your finance brand isn’t yet creating helpful content for people, it’s time to change your marketing content strategy.

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What is organic search traffic?

Organic search traffic is the number of visitors that visit your website through search engine results. With 90.63% of pages getting no organic traffic on Google, gaining organic traffic isn’t a given – your finance brand must have a strategy in place.

Focusing on improving your organic traffic is pertinent as it’s the only type of channel that can produce long-term results. In other words, there’s no end date to the results you can gain from organic traffic as people are always searching, unlike a paid media campaign for example.

With the average organic click through rate (CTR) for web pages on the first page of Google’s results being 32%, it pays to have a good marketing strategy. Content marketing is the best way finance brands can improve their search engine rankings and organic search traffic.

What benchmarks should finance brands be aiming for?

According to Conductor, a benchmark for finance brands’ organic traffic should be around 33%. Most finance brands aren’t hitting these benchmarks for organic traffic.

Below are the current average organic search traffic results for specific finance industries and indicate a need for improvement across the board:

• Insurance 32.8%
• Banking 27%
• Asset managers 25.9%

So how can finance brands improve their organic search traffic?

How content can drive your organic traffic

Content marketing is your finance brand’s secret weapon for improving organic traffic. This is because content marketing can strengthen your SEO strategy by providing you with the opportunity to include more keywords, gain backlinks and enable reshares of your content.

With every keyword, backlink and reshare, your content becomes more valuable and improves your position in search engine rankings, improving your ability to gain organic search traffic.

When it comes to perfecting your content marketing strategy to improve organic traffic, it’s critical your finance brand’s content matches what your target audience is searching for. The number one way to create content that drives organic traffic is by keeping the end user front of mind at all stages of content development.

Tips and tricks

Content marketing can help gain you the top spot in search engine rankings. But how can you optimise your content to ensure this happens? Here are our top tips to ensuring your finance brand creates content that improves your organic search traffic:

• Utilise longtail keywords
• Find and remove non-performing content
• Maximise your social media content and have a strong presence
• Create engaging video content
• Don’t forget about metadata
• Optimise website performance such as improving the speed of your site and useability
• Create regular blog content
• Always use internal links and try to gain backlinks

At the end of the day, organic traffic should be a priority for finance brands. By improving your organic traffic, your finance brand can generate more visitors, nurture leads and convert clients.

The post The financial marketer’s guide to organic search traffic appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Everything you need to know about Google MUM

Powered by AI technology, MUM is here to help users with complex search queries. Today, users have to provide thoughtful search queries to find the right answers. For example, a user looking into investing for the first time will have to individually search each question like ‘the difference between ETFs and a mutual fund’ and ‘the best asset manager in the UK’. In real life, a person looking into investing could ask an expert ‘what do I need to know as a first-time investor?’ and be provided with a thoughtful and illuminating response that takes every question into account. This is what Google MUM is recreating.

The entire premise is Google wants it to take less time and effort for users to get the answers they need. Using the T5 text-to-text framework, MUM is trained across 75 different languages and tasks enabling it to provide a more comprehensive understanding of information and global knowledge. To add to this, it’s also multimodal, meaning it can understand the information in images, with the aim of it being to also understand audio and videos too.

But what does this mean?

While it’s a complex technology to understand unless you’re a tech guru, there are a number of things MUM will change in regard to search engine mechanics. Now, Google will be able to provide more accurate and complex answers to your questions by identifying keywords. In the above example, Google MUM will identify the words ‘ first-time investor’ and understand the many different questions somebody like that will have and provide a pool of answers.

Secondly, MUM will have access to even more information with the ability to translate over 75 languages. This means if there’s key information about investing written in German, Google will provide this as an answer to an English-based query.

At the heart of it, Google’s new update will be able to better understand language to provide clearer results to more complex search queries.

What does this mean for your financial marketing strategy?

The good news is Google MUM won’t mean you have to suddenly reinvent your marketing strategy. However, there are some important things to note:

• There will be less reliance on written information – Which means your finance brand should expand its content strategy to include images, videos, and audio. Taking a multimodal approach to your content strategy will be vital to remain relevant and competitive.
• More competition for search engine rankings – It will be more important than ever to develop and strengthen your SEO as well as provide valuable content across your website.
• Must keep end-users at the forefront of content – As MUM is set to benefit the end-users search results, to continue to appear high on search engine rankings your content needs to be designed with them in mind. As exact responses are beginning to be scrapped in favour of users’ intent, it’s important your content reflects this shift.

At the end of the day, your finance brand will remain competitive after MUM launches if you continue to provide value-driven content. With no date in sight for MUM’s launch as of now, there’s no time like the present to begin creating exceptional, multimodal content that will give you a competitive edge in the future.

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How to keep pace with Google algorithm updates?

Ultimately, keeping pace with Google’s algorithm updates comes down to keeping an eye out for updates and being ready to devote time to the necessary changes the updates require. If you think you’re already lagging behind, here’s a history of past major algorithm updates and the kinds of changes that took place alongside their release. And for advice on how to tackle these major changes, we’ve got you covered.

Getting ready for June’s Google Page Experience update

The task at hand and the major Google algorithm update we have our eyes on is the one coming in mid-June, 2021 – the Google Page Experience update. Initially this had been announced as an update that would affect only mobile search indexing but Google have recently shifted (sensing a theme?) and announced that the Google Page Experience update will also be coming to desktop search indexing as well.

The page experience update will be an important algorithm update that will affect the search rankings of all sites on both mobile and desktop.

User Experience Signals

As the name of the update implies, Google will be looking more closely at the ‘user experience’ quality of websites and incorporating this into the ranking system. The diagram below shows what Google will be taking into account when analysing ‘user experience’ quality with the ‘Core Web Vitals’ recently added as some new criteria. Previously, Google had taken ‘user experience’ criteria such as whether a site was ‘mobile friendly’ into account, but this new update will be unifying these metrics into a more direct view on whether a site offers a positive user experience (and boosting search rankings if they do) or a negative user experience (and demoting search rankings if they don’t).

So what are Core Web Vitals?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):

This is a measure of how quickly the content elements (text, images, rich-media) load or first appear on a website. It’s measured in seconds with anything less than 2.5 seconds being considered good and anything longer than 4.0 seconds being considered poor (and in between considered needing improvement).

First Input Delay (FID): 

This measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. This basically measures a site’s responsiveness and we have all felt the frustration of a slow website and not being sure whether it has registered our clicks.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS):

This metric looks at the amount elements on a page move location as the page is being progressively loaded. Google gives an example of why this is a usability issue and shows how a user may accidentally click on the wrong button of a form as it shifts down during loading. In some circumstances, this can have serious implications if it takes a user by surprise. 

Other user Experience signals

While the measures below aren’t new they’re now being included as part of the overall ‘user experience’ ranking that will come into effect with the Google Page Experience update.

Mobile Friendly?

Having a mobile responsive website that reconfigures for optimal mobile display will still be important and mobile will still be the priority for search indexing.

HTTPS:

Having an SSL certificate implemented on a website is a basic measure that all websites should be taking. SSL certificates come in a number of configurations that range from paid versions from well-known brands such as digicert to free versions from groups like Lets Encrypt.

Safe-Browsing:

This is a check of whether the website has malware running or deceptive content. It ensures visitors to a website aren’t putting their personal information at risk.

Interstitial advertising or content:

This looks at whether the website has intrusive content on the page that implements pop-up windows or covers up content on the page. Functional elements such as logins and age verification windows don’t negatively affect this measure.

How to Check your Page Experience

1. Set up access to Google search console – This will allow you to run a Core Web Vitals report that will indicate how your site is performing and will alert if any attention is required to improve specific Core Web Vitals.
   
   
2. Use a website audit tool such as Lighthouse which has also been incorporated into the SEMrush platform as part of its toolkit. A lighthouse report provides recommendations for actions to take to improve Core Web Vitals scores
   
   
3. Install the Chrome extension for Web Vitals. This only works on desktop but it does allow an easy and real-time way to monitor webpage’s Core Web Vitals performance.
   
   

While taking steps to meet the criteria set by Google’s algorithm updates is critical, financial marketers need to realise that if the content on the website isn’t relevant and engaging for your audience, then no matter how fast it loads or how mobile-friendly your website is it won’t compete with a competitor’s website that has high quality content presented in a user-friendly manner.

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Understanding a search results page or SERP

For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus exclusively on Google given it has 87% global market share. A SERP or search engine results page is the page that shows in response to a user’s search query and is made up of a wide variety of features, some paid and some organic. There is no one search results page format, each individual search query creates its own unique SERP, with its own combination of features. We’ll take a look at the most relevant of these for financial brands.

The easiest way to get an overview of  the main features of a SERP is to break them down into 3 different categories:

1. Sponsored/paid ads

These paid search ads and ad extensions appear at the top of a search results page, usually above all organic results. They can include standard paid text ads, text ads with additional information/links or click-to-call ads. These ads look very similar to organic listings but are differentiated by a small black ‘Ad’ in bold. They’re created within Google Ads and rank according to a unique algorithm that takes into account numerous factors including the amount you are willing to pay per click, landing page performance and ad text relevancy. This algorithm is entirely separate from the algorithm that dictates organic results and one has no effect on the other. 

2. Organic search results

The ‘standard’ organic results are the main results that we see beneath the ads. These are unpaid and rank according to Google’s incredibly complex organic algorithm. Organic results can also contain a variety of additional elements such as sitelinks, search boxes, breadcrumbs and ratings; these are known as rich snippets. Most of these rich snippets rely on your site using schema markup to highlight specific content types to Google and it’s worth understanding the basics of structured data as this continues to be a key trend across Google features. 

Below is an example of an organic result that includes the main listing but has also been enhanced with rich snippets, including: breadcrumbs, a site search box and sitelinks.

In this case, the mobile version is a similar but simplified SERP but it’s vital to ensure you review both your mobile and desktop search results page as there can often be key differences to the way your listing is being shown.

3. SERP additional features

Google continues to roll out a host of new features on a regular basis, making the SERPS of increasing value and complexity, often answering a user’s question without the need to click to an additional page. These include:

• The featured snippet and people also ask

The featured snippet is an organic result that sits high on the page above other organic results, and provides an excerpt of the website Google deems to be most relevant to the specific question asked in the search query. Here we unpack the featured snippet and how to optimise for it in more depth. 

The featured snippet is often accompanied by the people also ask feature – expandable boxes that show questions related to the original search query. Similarly to the featured snippet, the boxes contain a short excerpt from sites deemed to be most relevant by Google.

• The knowledge panel

Unlike the featured snippet, the knowledge panel doesn’t show on question-related searches but is used to collate all known information about a specific entity or brand. The panel shows on the right hand side of the search results page (or near the top on mobile) and can include a wealth of information from location and reviews to social media profiles. Learn more about the knowledge panel and how to get one. 

• Top stories

This is a carousel of news stories that appear near the top of a search results page. The stories are usually time sensitive and Google relies on trusted sites, usually publishers, to populate the carousel. Traditionally, the majority of stories that appear in this carousel are delivered through Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) but this may soon no longer be the case with Google’s upcoming page experience update.

These are just some of the most important Google SERP features for finance brands to recognise and understand when looking at their brand’s visibility within search. There are many others including the Local Pack, Video Carousel, or even the X Pack. Performing well in the eyes of Google is key to being found, and with Google constantly reviewing its search results page format and functionality it’s imperative that financial marketers keep an eye on the latest changes, optimising regularly to give your brand the advantage.

The post The anatomy of a Google search results page appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Why finance brands should care about Google Knowledge Panels

A Knowledge Panel can serve multiple uses for financial brands. The panel is a vital piece of real estate for a brand name search – a key opportunity at the pointy end of the marketing funnel. We also know that zero-click searches are on the rise and users may not always click through to a landing page. Ensuring your brand’s Google Knowledge Panel is present and up-to-date contributes to an improved online presence, greater authority and consumer engagement. This Nerdwallet panel is a great example of the vast amount of information that can be included for a single brand.

Unlike the featured snippet – which appears in the main search results on the left-hand side of the page – the Knowledge Panel doesn’t aim to answer a user’s non-branded question. Rather it shows on searches for specific brands/companies; making it more of a brand marketing tool than a lead generation tool.

How can finance brands get a Knowledge Panel?

There are two types of Knowledge Panels: local and brand. The local version is connected to your Google My Business account. A physical business can create their local panel through their GMB account and add relevant details such as location and opening hours directly into their listing. While it’s not possible to guarantee that Google will show this local panel, this is a simple but critical step for any financial brand with a local address. 

A brand Knowledge Panel can’t be created; it’s shown automatically if Google feels there’s enough relevant information pertaining to your brand. You can check if your brand does have a Knowledge Panel and verify it by ‘claiming’ it at the bottom of the panel. Once verified you can ‘suggest’ edits to your panel although these aren’t guaranteed.

What can finance brands do to improve their Knowledge Panels?

All of the information that you see in the Knowledge Panel panel including both text and images are powered by Google’s Knowledge Graph. This was launched back in 2012 as a way to not only categorise entities on the internet but also understand the relationship between them. While it’s not possible to directly influence the panel, brands can have indirect influence by reviewing what information they are making available to Google and the Knowledge Graph and how easy it is to understand.

1. Take a look at what the Knowledge Graph already knows about your brand
   Use tools like Kalicube or the Knowledge Graph Search API to better understand what information about your brand is already in the Knowledge Graph.
2. Talk to your developers
   Google depends on schema markup to understand what topics your brand relates to so it’s critical that your site’s content is correctly marked up. Simple updates could include adding all of your social media channels, clear markup of your ‘organisation’ and ensuring all of your markups are regularly validated using tools like the Structured Data Testing Tool.
3. Consider Wikidata and Wikipedia
   Google heavily relies on these data sources and while not necessarily easy to gain, pages on these sites have a huge impact on your visibility with the Knowledge Graph so it’s worth investigating.

Like many of Google’s features, Knowledge Panels aren’t black and white, but they can have huge benefits for your brand’s online presence. Optimising your brand’s content for the Knowledge Graph may take some time and effort but it will not only benefit your Knowledge Panel but also your SEO visibility as a whole. At The Dubs we specialise in technical and on-page SEO, get in touch.

The post Google Knowledge Panels: what they are and how to get one appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Understanding customer search intent

When trying to capture attention online the intent of your audience in the channel where you’re speaking to them is important. On social channels people are usually in a browsing and content snacking mode, often with no predetermined objective in mind. Search on the other hand is a high intent channel where users have a pre-planned motive to find a specific piece of information which is usually either ‘informational’ (more details about a specific subject) or ‘transactional’ in nature (how to do something specific).

Given this high intent, search can be considered further down the marketing funnel than other digital channels such as social, closer to the point where leads and sales can be made.

How Google lead form extensions work

One of the key principles when planning any customer journey is to reduce the number of clicks it takes to perform any task. Each extra click required by a user is a point of potential traffic drop-off, often dramatically.

With Google lead form extensions Google has combined the ability to reach high intent search users with minimal click lead generation campaigns (at least on mobile and tablet) – a very interesting prospect for financial marketers trying to generate business leads.

Google lead form extensions are displayed below search ads on mobile and tablet devices. Search users can fill in a simple lead gen form with their contact information directly through the ad or if they’re already signed into their Google account the form will be pre-populated and can be submitted with one click without the need to even fill in the form.

This is an ideal user-journey for a user with high intent, removing the need to even have to click and go to a traditional landing page with a form that has to be manually filled in and submitted.

An added bonus is that the Google lead form extension makes the search ad appear larger in size, making it more prominent than regular search ads.

Implementing Google lead form extensions

There are some requirements to be able to use Google lead form extensions however most finance brands should be eligible:

• A good history of policy compliance
• A Google Ads account in an eligible vertical or sub-vertical. Sensitive verticals or sub-verticals (for example, sexual content) aren’t eligible for lead forms
• A privacy policy for your business. When you create a lead form extension in Google Ads you need to provide a link to your privacy policy. The privacy policy appears at the end of the lead form
• They are still quite a new format so they may also not be rolled out in all geographic regions yet

Implementing Google lead form extensions is a simple process. Within the Google Ads editor select ‘Leads’ as the goal and ‘Search’ as the campaign type. Go to ‘Ads and extensions’ and complete the simple setup process.

For best practice, although up to 10 question fields can be populated in the form only those fields that can extract data from a Google signed-in account will be able to be pre-populated and may force users to manually enter information into some fields. Whenever possible, restricting the fields required to just name and email will ensure that all users will be able to have that information pre-populated and allow a simple 1 click submit user journey.

The leads themselves can be downloaded as leads via a CSV file or can be hooked up to a CRM system allowing for more sophisticated segmentation and targeted communication.

Although these ads are restricted to mobile and tablet, that’s how the majority of users are already accessing the internet, so it makes sense that finance brands wanting to generate leads should look seriously at Google’s native lead generation ads which are specifically optimised for mobile usage.

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Google E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor

It’s important to understand that while the E-A-T guidelines are part of Google’s quality guidelines, they aren’t actively included in Google’s algorithm. So what’s the difference? 

In contrast to Google’s ranking algorithm, Google’s quality guidelines are human-reviewed and manually updated. They rely on manual quality analysis of webpages and represent what Google is ideally looking for. The ranking algorithm is composed of hundreds (if not thousands) of ranking factors that combine together to define the SERPs. While some SEO experts are divided, not being a ranking factor isn’t a reason in our eyes to write E-A-T off. 

Why financial services should care about E-A-T

Brands and websites across the financial industry are what is known as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) sites. These are sites that could potentially affect a person’s legal, financial or health status and as a result are deemed by Google to be of higher risk than other sites. As a result, only sites that demonstrate high Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are likely to rank. 

Although E-A-T isn’t officially a ranking factor, the steps financial brands could take to ensure they are optimising towards E-A-T align well with algorithmic ranking factors, particularly with Google’s ongoing focus on the user’s search intent. As the search engine continues to tweak its algorithm towards improving user experience, there has been a resurgence in discussion around the value of Google E-A-T with it featuring on numerous 2021 SEO trends lists, including our own. 

How to optimise for E-A-T?

Google E-A-T is a set of guidelines that should be front of mind when producing any kind of financial content – it’s unlikely that a finance site will rank for any key terms if it can’t demonstrate Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Here are some practical tips that can help:

• Write impartial, clear content backed up by identified experts and clear sources.
• Avoid combining sales and information. Pages that aim to provide information or advice should focus on doing this rather than pushing to a conversion. Try to avoid actively pushing to your product on the same page.
• Avoid ‘persuading’ your reader that your product is the answer to all of their problems – try to ensure your content is always unbiased particularly on informational pages.

Google’s E-A-T guidelines may not be a defined ranking factor but they remain immensely important for finance marketers looking to ensure their content ranks today and in the future as ranking factors evolve. User experience and search intent are at the forefront of Google’s plans; finance brands with high E-A-T scores that can demonstrate they truly understand what their potential consumers are looking for could find themselves ahead of the competition.

At The Dubs we’re abreast of the latest in best-practice SEO and can create content that will ensure your finance brand gets found. Get in touch. 

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

The post Should finance brands be paying attention to Google E-A-T? appeared first on Financial Marketer.

While the report’s findings will be a highly informative read when published in April 2021, it’s not the subject of this article. Right now it prompts the question – how do you know if you’re making the finance content your audience wants and actually needs, as opposed to the content you think they want or can just simply get your hands on?

Identifying the content your audience wants

You can solve this issue with a content and search audit to verify where you’re meeting the content needs of your audience and where you have gaps as this is where the growth opportunities lie.

Likewise it will inform if you’ve overestimated the demand for certain content topics or formats and are wasting budget by over indexing this content. If you’ve noticed a drop in your search traffic be it gradual or sudden, there are steps you can take to diagnose what’s causing it. 

A good content and search audit will realign your content with your audience’s needs which drives audience growth and the effectiveness of your content.  

“We grapple with this issue on an ongoing basis. Our publication The Financial Marketer (which you are kindly reading now!) needs to deliver content best practices and cutting-edge techniques to finance marketers globally to help them stay at the top of their professional game,” says The Dubs head of content, Ale Middleton. 

“This means the topics and themes of interest to our audience changes regularly and we need to respond as it happens.” 

How to run a content and search audit

To undertake a content and search audit does require some rigour and work but it’s quite straightforward and achievable to deliver and you’ll reap the benefits in spades.

The Dubs social media director, Andrew Frith says any of the good search engine analytical tools like SEMrush, AHREFs, Moz Pro or Google Search Console are extremely useful in providing the data to understand your content program’s relevance to your audience.

“We use SEMrush Organic Research tool to understand our SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings and traffic volumes,” says Frith. 

“This will tell you if you’re creating content for a very small audience – which can be ok if it’s a valuable niche – or if you’re missing ranking for search terms that are much more popular with your target audience.”.

With this information you can do a few things:

1. Scale back creating content that only delivers minimal search traffic results.
2. Create more content for more popular search topics that generate a greater volume of relevant audience traffic to your content hub.This helps plug the gaps and makes your content program more useful to your audience.
3. Retrofit your existing content where needed to include these more popular search terms. This is like a car engine tune up for your content to better optimise it for search results.

The other SEMrush tool we use is the Keyword Magic Tool. This allows us to explore and discover other popular search terms on key topics or learn how to better capitalise on existing articles we’ve published.

Lastly, we use a content and search audit to benchmark our content program against our key competitors.

This way we can see where we have content gaps we need to plug compared to our competitors and ensure we match the relevance of our content to the needs of the audiences whose attention we’re competing for. 

At The Dubs SEO best practice is at the core of everything we do, get in touch. 

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

The post How to create finance content your audience wants appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Given this intent, website page session times for organic search traffic are generally longer than other sources of traffic (including advertising, social traffic, email traffic and referral traffic), making them the exact type of website visitor brands are hoping to attract – one that’s interested in and engaged with their content and therefore their brand.

However, ranking well on search engines is no easy task. It requires strategic planning and research, creative content execution as well as a vigilant approach to maintaining high technical website standards. This all takes time, money and expertise.

When you’ve done all that hard work and finally managed to get good and consistent page one search results, it’s heartbreaking to see that traffic suddenly drop off or even slowly decline over time.

Here’s what to do when your organic search traffic takes a hit.

Triaging spikes and trends in organic search traffic

When analysing any data there are really just two things we’re looking for – ‘spikes’ and ‘trends’ – and a drop in organic search traffic can be either.

Firstly, to diagnose a drop we need tools to actually see what’s happening. Google Analytics and Google Search Console (which used to be called Google Webmaster tools) allow us to see in a myriad of ways how traffic is arriving, behaving and exiting a website. Another very powerful tool is the SEMRush platform which can slice and dice website traffic data in a number of ways and provides deep insights into the technical health of a website as well as content performance (there are other platforms similar to SEMRush as well such as Ahrefs, Moz and Alexa). 

If a sudden drop in traffic occurs it’s not necessary to go into full panic mode quite yet. Small or moderate spikes in organic search traffic are quite common and will in most cases return to normal in a short period of time. There are many factors determining SEO rankings which makes it difficult to pin down the exact cause of a temporary drop. The recommended action when a sharp decline is first detected is to wait a few days or even a week or so to see if it corrects itself. At this stage there’s no point in pulling everything apart and putting resources into action unnecessarily.

However, when the traffic graph looks like this there’s certainly cause for concern.

Barring some major technical problem on the server itself (e.g the website is down), a major traffic drop like this means either a Google penalty has happened for a number of reasons or there’s been a Google algorithm update the website has ended up on the wrong side of.

This is why having it’s important to have Google Search console set up as this is where Google will send a notification if the website has incurred a penalty. 

How to avoid Google penalties

Google penalties come in a range of guises and some of these include:

• Cloaking redirects
• Cloaking images
• Hidden text 
• Keyword stuffing
• Spammy structured markup
• Unnatural links to and from your site 
• Hacked site

Most of these penalties will only apply if the website has been employing some dubious if not outright nefarious means to rig the website for attracting traffic. For most brands this shouldn’t be an issue, but if you’re employing 3rd parties who claim they can dramatically increase your website traffic make sure they’re a reputable business so you don’t fall afoul of one of these penalties. If you do, Google will require you to explain the cause of the problem, resolve it and put in a request for reconsideration – for a business that relies on organic search traffic this is a disaster.

The impact of Google algorithm updates

Google frequently updates the search algorithms that determine how websites and content are ranked. While some of these updates are incremental and go unnoticed, some are major updates that can have serious impacts on your organic search traffic. It’s important to keep up to date with upcoming major updates and be prepared in advance of major changes so you can take action with your website content BEFORE not AFTER the major algorithm changes have taken place. 

A good example of this was in July 2019 when ‘mobile-first indexing’ was introduced as a Google algorithm update. This was a major change and caught a lot of brands napping as most websites up until this point were SEO optimised for desktop and may not have even had a mobile-responsive version of the website in place. Those that weren’t prepared saw massive drops in search traffic as a result. And be forewarned now, there’s a big algorithm change coming in May 2021 that will be focused on ‘user experience’.

SEMRush allows you to see when Google updates have happened and understand how organic traffic spikes may be related to them. Knowing which Google algorithm update may have caused a drop in search traffic allows you to then take actions to correct it.

The slow trend down

Even if you adhere to all the best technical Google practices and abide by all the rules you can still find your organic search traffic slowly trending down over time.

Getting great organic search engine rankings isn’t a one-time set-and-forget practice. It needs to be part of everyday business practice and there needs to be a robust content strategy and program in place to support it. If organic search traffic is slowly declining over time this usually means the competition has caught up and is outperforming your website and content.

If you’re confident your technical practices are in place and up to date then the cause of the decline is the website content itself.

This is where a platform such as SEMRush can help by allowing you to deep dive into how your content is performing in terms of its ranking, keywords/phrases being indexed, traffic being driven to the website and how all of that compares to your competitors as well. 

This research provides invaluable insight into the gaps and opportunities that when targeted with quality, relevant content will see the reverse of your traffic decline. 

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

At The Dubs we employ SEO best-practice to ensure your content gets found. Get in touch.

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