Are you logging in to check the free Webmaster Tools on a regular basis? Well you should. Google has taken what used to be a very time consuming and difficult task and made it nearly completely automated. It makes your life easier by showing you simple alerts for anything that may affect your site positively or negatively. If you recall, the Crawl Error alerts were recently launched, Google has taken it one step forward by introducing Search Query alerts.
What is a Search Query alert?
This new features of Search Query alert will show users how many impressions and clicks your best performing pages are getting over a period of time. For a typical site that receives a substantial and steady amount of traffic, the number of clicks and impressions are maintained at a steady rate and don’t usually have any drastic increase or decline.
Why do sites face drastic changes?
When a site experiences a sudden spike or drop in traffic, it could be due to a couple of reasons.
- The content is no longer in demand.
- The website or hosting is having issues that should be investigated.
- There may be a broken link.
This feature is relatively new and Google is still working on obtaining feedback to better this service. If you sign up for e-mail forwarding, Google will send them straight to your inbox so you don’t have to log into Webmaster Tools to see them.
Here’s a screenshot of what they look like:
