Valerie Stimac, a travel blogger, complained on Twitter that while her site's content is ranking better than ever in Google Search, the traffic numbers from Google Search are down. She wrote "this is a classic case of Google's erosion of organic traffic: position is UP in the current period over last year, but CTR is down, impressions are down almost 50%, and clicks are down 70%!"
She shared these two charts from Google Search Console:
Here's another one. How can *increased* position cause a 41% loss in impressions, 60% drop in CTR, and 76% decrease in clicks, @searchliaison? pic.twitter.com/40vyhNjWmi
— Valerie Stimac 🚀 (@Valerie_Valise) October 30, 2020
So then Danny Sullivan from Google responded for more information and this is where it is interesting to read, so let me share these tweets:
Okay so let’s say that explains the impressions drop. Even with fewer impressions and a higher position, why would CTR drop?
— Valerie Stimac 🚀 (@Valerie_Valise) October 30, 2020
Other things to consider. You write about travel? The biggest factor in all of this is the pandemic. That’s clearly changed interests. And you could be ranking as relevant to some places but maybe there are pandemic-specific articles slightly more attractive to searchers.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 30, 2020
What’s the page?
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 30, 2020
I think this is pretty straight-forward. There's probably a drop in impressions because given the pandemic would not surprisingly reduce some travel-related queries. And a page about the best places to see the Northern Lights in Greenland is pretty travel-related, I'd say. And...
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 30, 2020
I would never recommend people just change a date to appear fresher. Either remove it and make a page into an evergreen one (with the disadvantage some people want pages with clear dates) or update the page. In your case, updating seems to make sense....
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 30, 2020
From what I can tell, the entire site only has one page about a destination that's updated about COVID, the one on Space Camp. If it were me, that's what I'd be doing to all my pages that normally got a lot of traffic, to adapt to how people are searching & looking for info.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 30, 2020
Thanks for the extensive reply, but people aren't searching "northern lights Greenland" and wondering about Covid; based on my other travel content, those are separate queries. None of the pages ranking more highly mention the pandemic at all – even the official tourism website.
— Valerie Stimac 🚀 (@Valerie_Valise) October 30, 2020
I've literally been looking at travel sites the past week. I'm not initially checking about COVID. But when I get to a page, if it doesn't help me understand, then I'm going back to do another query to find one that does.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 30, 2020
I will leave it all there... Sorry for not adding my two cents.
Good catch on that. Does me no good as a site creator, but I guess that position increase can be a vanity metric. 🙄
— Valerie Stimac 🚀 (@Valerie_Valise) November 5, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
