If you’re like a lot of our clients, you may be perplexed by what seems like contradictory information from your website analytics. How is it that traffic to your site from the Google search engine is dropping, while leads, sales, and overall growth of your website are improving?
It’s all about Google’s Knowledge Graph
You’re not going crazy, and there is nothing remotely wrong with the analytics. What’s happened is most likely the result of something known as Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Check out our short video in which VONT president, Tom Gale, explains just what’s going on with your website. And if you’d like to learn how it affects SEO, be sure to read How the Google Knowledge Graph Impacts SEO.
Transcript for Why Google’s Knowledge Graph is Shrinking Site Traffic
If you prefer to read, here is the transcript:
We continue to get asked by people a kind of a perplexing question, which is
“Why is the traffic from the Google search engine to my website appearing to
drop off, while the leads and sales and growth of my website seem
to be improving?”
Most likely that drop-off in traffic from Google is due to something called the knowledge graph.
The knowledge graph was announced by Google in 2012, when they radically restructured the way that they store information on the web. Google’s goal is to change from just being a search engine to becoming a knowledge engine. They want to be able to answer as many of the questions you might ask in their search engine as they can without you ever having to go to an actual website.
For an example of this, just go to Google and search on ‘What is the knowledge graph?’ You’ll see the answer from Wikipedia displayed on the search engine results page with data from what they call the knowledge graph.
So why is this affecting traffic to your website by Google?
If you go into Google and search for your brand name, most likely you’ll see a panel down the right-hand side of the search engine results page that has a lot of information about your company like your business hours, the phone number of your business, the address of your business. If you think about it, a lot of people who are searching for your business are looking for that kind of information, and they no longer need to go to the website. Google is giving it right to them, so this will impact the traffic to your website, obviously, with people getting those answers without having to go to your site.
So what do you do about it?
The bad news is there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it, because it’s completely under Google’s control. The thing you can do is make sure that your Google My Business page is updated with the right phone number, the right hours, and the right address so that that information is being correctly portrayed.
The good news is that if you think about it, most of the people who never come to your website because of the knowledge graph are just looking from some very basic information. If those people are looking to buy something from you online or learn more information about your products, they’re not going to be satisfied with what they see on the knowledge graph.
So in our opinion, the knowledge graph doesn’t reduce the traffic from those most valuable visitors to your website…it’s only from those people looking for that basic information.
We think the knowledge graph is a value to the end user. It makes their web searching more efficient, and gets your information to them more quickly.
And it’s not something you need to be concerned about in terms of your overall website performance.
About VONT Performance Digital Marketing
At VONT we believe that change is the only constant in the digital world – and that excites us. When tools and environments are constantly changing, new opportunities to help our clients achieve success are constantly arising. Each new advertising technology, social platform, or design approach allows us to improve on the results we achieve for our clients.
We believe in this idea of continual fine-tuning so much that we named our company VONT, which means to achieve exponential improvement in incremental steps. It is our core belief, and the reason why we are not simply a web design company or simply a digital advertising agency, but rather a long-term, single source partner providing a comprehensive array of web development and digital marketing capabilities.
In short, we’re here so that our clients achieve success in the ever-changing digital world. If you’d like to learn more about VONT and the work we’ve done with our client partners, visit ourWork page. Or, if you have a question, contact us. We’ll get right back to you!
