Steady decline in Google Search Console search analytics that does't match traffic source reports in Google Analytics

Question

Since the 13th April I have been noticing some strange data appearing in my Search Console analytics as seen below:

Normally, I would assume that we have been penalized or massively de-ranked for the majority of keywords - however, data is still appearing inside Google Analytics showing thousands of sessions specifically from Organic Search?

What is going on here? Im unsure as to whether I need to take action or if it is just a data anomaly that will end up being fixed down the line?

Any advice or if you've experienced something similar then please get involved!

Answer 1

Google is likely sending search traffic to a different version of your site that isn't represented in the one you have registered. There are two common ways that can happen. Lets say you have http://www.example.com/ registered in search console:

1. Google is now sending traffic to http://example.com/ (no www)
2. Google is now sending traffic to https://www.example.com/ (HTTPS)

Unless you have implemented redirect to no-www, then the HTTPS case is more likely. Google is automatically migrating the indexed version of pages over to HTTPS where both are available.

To fix this, add all four versions of your site in search console:

• http://example.com/
• http://www.example.com/
• https://example.com/
• https://www.example.com/

Then create a property set to view the stats from all four of them together.

Answer 2

Its possible that there was a change made to the website during the period where you noticed a decline.

One time we started losing thousands of clicks per day and were super surprised that this happened.

We went through every single release note for web changes made for 2 weeks prior and 2 weeks after every date traffic had gone down and discovered some changes that had been pushed without consulting the SEO team.

We also found the following:

Certain set of changes A to the website caused a small decline when they were first released, but later when a new set of changes B were released, B caused A's initial minor impact to increase dramatically leading to huge declines.

Note: It took 4 months to get our traffic back up to the same level as it was initially, during that time we made a lot of other improvements as well, leading to huge overall gains. But traffic falls fast, rises slowly.