Why does SQI change?

SQI is an indicator of the site's value for users and, as a result, for Yandex Search.

The SQI index value, even if it is high, isn't important in itself. However, its change may reflect changes in the users' interest in the site.

Therefore, we recommend that you monitor the indicator in the dynamics. If the SQI drops, you need to find the reasons, as this may indicate possible problems on the site. The following are some factors that can help you determine the reasons for a change in this indicator.

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.

To analyze your landing page:

• Use a web analytics system. For example, the following Yandex Metrica reports might be useful: Search queries, Popular, Landing pages, Page depth, Time on site, and Page load time. Session Replay helps you form hypotheses about user behavior. You can also create goals to test them.
• Using the Search queries and Keyword statistics tools, analyze the queries that users might enter to find your site in search results and check if the site's pages match those queries.
• Compare the pages with the pages of your competitors and determine the competitive advantage.

Site indexing

Make sure that your site is indexed correctly by yandex:

• The target pages are known to the robot. Check the status of the URLs and track the status of pages with Important page monitoring.

• 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. For example:

  <noindex>Текст</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 ensure this, use the Server response check tool.

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 find out what devices and browsers your site visitors use, analyze the Devices and Browsers reports in Yandex Metrica.

With Session Replay, you can see how your site pages appear on different devices and in different browsers and how visitors 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 interface versions of the site. This will help you choose the version that is most attractive for the users.