I have made a top position travel for last three month, and it finished yesterday. All my sites dropped from the first position in Google search rank. And my income had a significantly reduced. I just hit the $1k target with Adsense sites once and everything changed so fast. If ranking No.1 is a short time success, then it is time to think how to make a passive income site for long time.
How much traffic I lost after my site dropped to #6
I don’t know the exact time when my site dropped from #1. Just from the Google Analytics data, my site traffic had a big drop in March 17. So I guess the main reason for this big drop was because of the position changing. Of course not all of my traffic are from the main keywords, but still there were around 30% from the main keyword, 8.6% from the second keyword, 6% from the third keyword in the last 30 days before March 17. The total ratio is over 44.6% traffic are driven by top 3 keywords.
After my site ranks to #6, the average daily traffic dropped by 20%, and my average daily income dropped by 10%. You may find out the income dropped isn’t affect too much. It is because the CPC goes up at that time. If I use the same CPC, the estimate will be 25%. If we don’t consider the CTR, the estimate average daily income drop ratio is more close to average daily traffic dropped ratio.
Now let’s see what happened on traffic. The main traffic is still from my main keywords, around 23%; and there are 10% traffic from 2nd keyword and 2.7% traffic from 3nd keywords. 35.7% traffic from top 3 keywords. And here is the average daily traffic dropper ratio for top 3 keywords:
- Traffic driven by top 1 keyword dropped by 38%
- Traffic driven by top 2 Keyword dropped by 2%
- Traffic driven by top 3 keyword dropped by 64%
What can we get from the analysis?
Before changing, top 3 keywords drove 44.6% traffic. After changing, top 3 keywords drove 35.7% traffic, and traffic from top 3 keywords dropped by 34.6% and total site traffic dropped by 20%; So what happened here? The other keywords, let’s call them long tail keywords, actually increase the traffic by 14.6%; As the theory of passive income site, my site becomes more healthy than before. The main keywords are less important and long tail keywords increase the ratio to 65%; this is a good sign even though my total income is reduced. But I don’t need to join the backlink war anymore. While the problem still needs to be solved, I need to find a way to get my income back anyway. But how?
Increase the long tail traffic
There are still two ways to increase my income. One is coming back to backlink war, finding a new source to get more backlinks. But it is a no ending war. You don’t know when Google will de-index the backlink source again. If it happens, you need to face the same problem again and again. Another solution is provide more content, quality content or valuable content, which will drive long tail traffic regardless of backlinks.
