A bit further information from my site. I like to share and think about this so maybe others can also provide some insights. Its no good just saying "my traffic is down X%", or "why is my traffic dropping". I think we need to look at what has happened to piece together an answer. Here is something interesting I noticed and it might be a clue.
This is a snapshot of 1 page on a niche site has the following 3 months for Impressions + Rank :
Notice the rank has increased to an average Rank of 3. But my traffic has dropped more than 50%. Lets compare click through and impressions:
The impressions have dropped and my click through has increased above 16%. Lets compare Click through and Rank which should mirror each other:
And they do.
So if I am ranking better why am I not getting the impressions. Well lets look at the number of queries I ranked for between 29th April and 3rd May compared to the 4th May through to the 8th May:
Period 1 (29 Apr - 3 May): 110 queries.
Period 2 (4 May - 8 May) : 52 queries.
Hmmm Interesting ..... I checked another page
Period 1 (29 Apr - 3 May): 380 queries.
Period 2 (4 May - 8 May) : 317 queries.
Checked another page:
Period 1 (29 Apr - 3 May): 702 queries.
Period 2 (4 May - 8 May) : 549 queries.
My traffic drops mirror what I am seeing above.
Can anyone else confirm they are seeing the same things. We are losing long tail queries. Google has better targeted sites to keywords, so where in these 3 pages I was appearing on 1192 queries before I am now only appearing in 918 queries which is a decline of 23% in appearances. This has turned into about a 30% traffic loss though as I am showing higher ranked on more specific targetted queries and nor appearing on the more higher competition, higher traffic keywords.
The good news is this opens up a lot more articles to be written for the queries which I lost. The bad news is this takes time to write and post and it sucks.
Let me know if you are seeing the same.