If you check your web stats on a regular basis you might have noticed that over the last few months there has been a drop-off in traffic to your site. The likely reason for this is that Google has recently made a number of changes to how it indexes and ranks sites for relevance to a search term, and these changes are likely to have impacted on your web traffic.
Google has recently rolled out some major changes to the way that it works (known as Google Caffeine and Google Mayday). These have had an impact on how sites rank, which in turn will impact on how much traffic you get from search engines (if your site now ranks lower for a particular search term, you’ll see less traffic from search engines, and the converse is true).
The first change is known as Google Caffeine which helps Google to index content more quickly, and get that indexed content out into the search engine results pages more quickly. Now Google can index new content (and therefore it will rank somewhere in results pages) in a couple of days rather than a week or so. It means that content can appear in search engine results pages within seconds of being crawled. What’s driven it is the need to search ‘real-time’ content such as Twitter and Facebook updates. But it’s having an impact on all websites. This is not a change to the algorithm that Google uses to assess how relevant a webpage is to a search term, it’s a change in how fast Google works. But that change is having an indirect effect on how sites rank, because it is probably favouring fresh content. You can read more about how Google is now favouring fresh content here.
The second change to the algorithms that Google uses to assess the relevance of a webpage to a search term, which impacts directly on how sites rank is known as Google Mayday. The changes are aimed specifically at giving better results for long-tail queries (i.e. quite specific search terms, usually with a larger number of words, which have a lower search frequency, as opposed to generic search terms with fewer words which are searched more frequently). This means that if you’ve got an eCommerce site, you’ll probably have noticed the impact on your product pages. These pages probably don’t have many links to them, and are quite low down in the site structure (deeper level pages). You can read more about how Google has changed how it assesses relevance for long-tail queries here.
So what can you do to improve your search engine rankings, and so increase traffic to your site?
If you want to increase traffic levels across your site rather than to specific pages then you’ll probably need to do something more substantial than this. A full Search Engine Optimisation strategy will set out your key search terms, look at what your competitors for those search terms are doing, and identify a way for you to capture traffic for those search terms in the long run. If you’d like to find out more about how SEO can help drive traffic to your website, contact Kate.