If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation). The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically: Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet) Page type (product pages vs. category pages vs. blog posts vs. homepage etc.) Look at Search Console for any messages related to penalties and search for your brand name on Google. Has there been a change to the search engine results pages you care about? If you have historical Search Console data, you can look at number of branded clicks vs. unbranded clicks over time. Did a bunch of pages drop out of the index? A sudden drop in backlinks could be the reason you’re seeing a traffic drop. If it’s not obvious after doing this whether it’s a factor, then it can be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages. That’s all I’ve got — hopefully at least one of these questions will lead you to the root cause of an organic search traffic drop.
Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked at some point to investigate an organic traffic drop. I’ve investigated quite a few, so I thought I’d share some steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.
Is it just normal noise?
Before you sound the alarm and get lost down a rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you’re seeing is actually real. This involves answering two questions:
A.) Do you trust the data?
This might seem trivial, but at least a quarter of the traffic drops I’ve seen were simply due to data problems.
The best way to check on this is to sense-check other metrics that might be impacted by data problems. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you flat-out missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data problems will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.
One of the more common sources of data issues is simply missing data for a day.
B.) Is this just normal variance?
Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.
For example, you could plot your weekly SEO traffic for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation (using the STDEV function on Google Sheets or Excel makes this very easy) to figure out if a drop in weekly traffic is abnormal. You’d expect about 16% of weeks to be one standard deviation below your weekly average just by sheer luck. You could therefore set a one-standard-deviation threshold before investigating traffic drops, for example (but you should adjust this threshold to whatever is appropriate for your business). You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation).
SEO traffic is usually pretty noisy, especially on a short time frame like a week.
Let’s assume you’ve decided this is indeed a real traffic drop. Now what? I’d recommend trying to answer the eleven questions below, at least one of them will usually identify the culprit.
Questions to ask yourself when facing an organic traffic drop
1. Was there a recent Google algorithm update?
MozCast, Search Engine Land, and Moz’s algorithm history are all good resources here.
If there was an algorithm update, do you have any reason to suspect you’d be impacted? It can sometimes be difficult to understand the exact nature of a Google update, but it’s worth tracking down any information you can to make sure your site isn’t at risk of being hit.
2. Is the drop specific to any segment?
One of the more useful practices whenever you’re looking at aggregated data (such as a site’s overall search traffic) is to segment the data until you find something interesting. In this case, we’d be looking for a segment that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This is often the first step in tracking down the root cause of the issue. The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically:
- Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet)
- Page type…
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