Why does SQI change?

Seasonal changes

SQI fluctuations may be seasonal and depend on changes in user preferences. Examples of seasonal fluctuations: selling seedlings, holiday recipes, selling and installing air conditioners.

In this case, we recommend comparing the SQI values by seasons and ignoring the drop in SQI during periods of reduced demand. It may also be useful to analyze your competitors. To study them, compare the quality indicators.

If your competitors have a comparable change in SQI, then continue to develop the site and prepare it for the new season. If your SQI dropped much more than that of your competitors, the reason for the drop may not only be due to seasonal changes for your product or service.

Poor landing page quality

Make sure that the pages that the users open from the search results help solve their task and provide additional useful information.

Example

For a children's bicycle store, sources of additional information can be:

• Specific product cards and bike series cards.
• Collections of models that meet popular demand: “tricycles from 3 to 5 years old”, “children's bicycles with a handlebar”.
• Customer reviews.
• Comparison of prices and models.
• Reviews.

To analyze your landing page:

• Use a web analytics system. For example, the following Yandex.Metrica repots might be useful: Search queries, Popular, Landing pages, Page depth, Time on site, Page load time. Session Replay helps you form hypotheses on user behavior. You can also create goals to check them.
• Analyze the queries used to find the site in the search results — use the Search queries and Keyword statistics tools — and check if the site pages correspond to them.
• Compare the pages with the pages of your competitors and determine the competitive advantage.

Indexing

Make sure that your site is indexed correctly by Yandex:

• The target pages are known to the robot. Check the URL status and track the status of the pages by Monitoring important pages.
• Important text on pages is not closed from indexing by the noindex or noscript tag. In this case, the text will not be included in the search database and the user will not find it on request. Examples:

  <noindex>Text</noindex>

• The site doesn't have duplicate pages.
• The robots.txt file doesn't contain an error. Read how to use the file and check it.
• There are no technical problems with hosting. To do this, use the Server response check.

For the Yandex robot to learn about changes on the site faster, enable page crawling with the Yandex.Metrica tag.

Content optimization

Site content optimization affects the formation of snippets. Its type largely determines if the user will go from the search results to your site.

To help the search algorithms determine the user queries that match your site correctly, use:

• The title and H1-H6 tags for headings to help the users find the information they need.
• The description meta tag to describe the site pages and help the users understand in the search results if the site answers their question.
• Semantic markup, for example, Schema.org, for the content design to display the snippet information more fully.
• The title and alt attributes for image design.
• Human-readable page URLs.

Optimization for mobile devices

Another possible reason for the SQI drop might be if the site is not optimized to be displayed on mobile devices. If the site doesn't fit on the smartphone screen and loads slowly, the users leave it.

To determine which devices and browsers your users have, use the Yandex.Metrica Devices and Browsers reports.

Session Replay allows you to see how the site pages are displayed on different devices and in different browsers and how users interact with a particular page.

Read how to optimize a site for mobile devices.

Additional tools for analysis

To learn your target audience's opinion about your site, you can use services for conducting surveys and testing, for example, Toloka and Yandex.Surveys. For example, you can use Toloka to test multiple test interface versions. This will help you choose the version that is most attractive for the users.