{"id":101545,"date":"2013-06-11T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-11T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/investigating-seo-traffic-decline\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:39:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:39:56","slug":"investigating-seo-traffic-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/search-optimization\/investigating-seo-traffic-decline\/","title":{"rendered":"Investigating and Diagnosing SEO Traffic Decline"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ID-10097641\"<\/a> \u00a0 How many times have you looked at your monthly SEO reports and seen a dip in visits and thought \u201coh sh*t\u201d? If you have clients (or are a brand) in a volatile industry, then this can turn out to be a monthly regime.\u00a0 Unfortunately, diagnosing a decline in SEO traffic can be a minefield, so I\u2019m going to take you through the steps I take to \u201csuss\u201d out the problem and narrow things down a little. This blog post by no means covers every<\/b> single point or area to investigate, however, I\u2019ve tried to highlight the most important areas to check \u2013 which can easily be overlooked. Lets get stuck in!<\/p>\n

Step 1: Analyse Traffic from All Sources<\/b><\/h2>\n

Sometimes its not just organic search that\u2019s down, all traffic from all sources may be down as well.\u00a0 Taking the time to look at traffic from other sources, mainly direct* traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic etc. can show some straightforward insights.\u00a0 If there\u2019s decline across the board, it\u2019s easier to fine tune causes, which leads on to step 2\u2026<\/p>\n

Step 2: Check Google Trends<\/b><\/h2>\n

If you\u2019ve noticed a decline from other traffic sources (and even if you haven\u2019t), it\u2019s worth checking Google trends to work out if there\u2019s been a decline in the overall market YoY.\u00a0 Take your top target keywords and check them by plotting them against year on year data.\u00a0 This will tell you whether there\u2019s an overall decline in the market; please see below for an example:<\/p>\n

\"Google<\/a><\/p>\n

Tip: You can plot year to date and longer date ranges to get a better overview of trends.<\/i><\/p>\n

Step 3: Deep Dive into Analytics <\/b><\/h2>\n

This may not always be an obvious one, but checking some key areas can highlight something you may have overlooked such as:<\/p>\n

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  • Checking keywords that have lost traffic (could directly be linked to ranking losses, see step 4)<\/li>\n
  • Checking pages that have lost traffic (SEO landing pages may not be ranking well anymore or the pages may have been down due to server issues)<\/li>\n
  • Comparing YoY data to make sure keywords are being attributed to the correct pages (you can also do this with ranking data)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Step 4: Check Rankings<\/b><\/h2>\n

    This is quite an obvious one and should be done initially, however I usually find step 1 and 2 to be my starting points (and there\u2019s not always a correlation between ranking drop and traffic drop).\u00a0 If you\u2019ve noticed huge ranking drops as with step 3 and If you\u2019re a wiz with excel, you can match rankings with visits to see if the drop in rankings* have affected visits. *Don\u2019t forget to allow a caveat for universal rankings and personalized results<\/b><\/p>\n

    Step 5: Check GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) for Messages and Server Errors<\/b><\/h2>\n

    This ties quite nicely with step 9 below but I decided to separate it anyway.\u00a0 Google quite nicely sends messages about problems they\u2019ve encountered whilst crawling a site, so its worth taking a good look at every section in GWT to make sure all is well; you can then pick up with the dev. team if you notice any issues (see step 9).<\/p>\n

    Step 6: Check Marketing Campaigns for the Previous Year<\/b><\/h2>\n

    Did you forget about that huge marketing campaign the previous year that drove tons of traffic? Well find the marketing or comms calendar for the previous year and cross check with analytics to negate this as an issue (it\u2019ll usually be brand terms or specific campaign terms that stand out).<\/p>\n

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