With the Google algorithm updates of 2018 and 2019, I have had many site owners come to me that saw dramatic drops in traffic. Most often the dramatic drop is due to old content. Many of these sites have been churning out blog posts and articles on a regular basis for years that was leading to nice rankings and increased organic traffic. When Google hit with the update that attacked older content, some sites saw drops in traffic of 70-80%. Especially those in medical and financial fields, where Google considers your industry in the “Your Money or Your Life” or “YMYL” industries.
How Do You Identify Which Content To Freshen
So what do you do to recover? If you require the pure traffic for your business, then this is pretty critical. Local businesses may be hit less hard because often these blog posts with organic traffic don’t necessarily hit their prime patient geography. Doctor sites with rankings may see big drops in overall traffic with their blog pages, but their local traffic to their service pages is fine, so the patient count doesn’t drop. However, if you require traffic for Adsense advertising or other reasons, you need to get this corrected as soon as possible.
I made the below video to show you how to go into your Google analytics and identify the most important pages that were hit by the Google Updates. These are the pages that had large organic traffic before the fall of last year or the March update, but then it fell off significantly after. It is fairly straightforward if you know your way around Analytics, but many aren’t in there every day, so this should be a quick and easy identifier.
Google Analytics Will Tell You
First, you need to go to analytics.google.com. You need to log into the Google account that has access to your analytics. Then you simply need to dig into your Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels and choose Organic Traffic. Once you are there you will choose a second dimension, which is under Behavior and Landing Page. Once you have that displayed you will have your URL’s from your site listed in order of which have the most Organic visits in the current view.
To see which dropped the most, you will need to scroll down through to find those with large traffic in 2018 and very little traffic in 2019. Those with the biggest discrepancies should be your priorities to update with fresh content. The video will show you how it is done and get you started. Whether you have 5 or 500 pages to update and freshen up, you will at least know where to start. Many businesses are completely confused about what to do. this is your first step.
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